New York City is dead. Oh my God. New York City is dead! I don’t even know what happened... I was just running into the store for one quick thing! New York was asleep in the backseat, wagging his tail. I didn’t want to wake him up. I came out and the window was all fogged up and his tongue was lolling... Jesus fucking Christ....
Yes, folks, the city is dead. I recently returned to New York, inhabiting its festering corpse and feasting on the necrotic tissue like a maggot. The city is a smoldering ruin. It has fallen like Jericho. It is Bedlam, home only to the wretched and deranged. Towering office buildings, the sites of history’s most glorious financial crimes, stand silent save for the sparrows and starlings flying into them. People who identify as landlords, who generously allow city residents to rent their properties, struggle to service the debt on their AirBNBs. Our streets, once home to the world’s finest parking spots, run red with lingonberry frosé.
The belief that New York City is dead found its latest mouthpiece in a guy named James Altucher, who looks like if you ran Malcolm Gladwell through a photocopier several times. Altucher is a serial entrepreneur, meaning he starts unsuccessful businesses over and over again. (Not like Will Keith Kellogg, the cereal entrepreneur.) He owns Stand Up NY, a comedy club on the Upper West Side where I’ve performed. If you’ve ever been to a Manhattan comedy club and wondered why you were forced to pay $41 for two beers, ask James.
Altucher declared New York dead in a blog post which quickly sent shockwaves through the blogosphere. You gotta love the sheer 2009-ness of that. In it, he says the things which brought him to New York (business, culture, food) are gone, so he bought a house in South Florida sight unseen and moved there. Ah, yes, South Florida. Well-known for its wonderful business, culture, and food. He notes that Broadway will be dark for the rest of the year, and asks if “performers, writers, producers, investors, lenders, stagehands, landlords, etc [can] wait a year.” Won’t somebody please think of the investors, lenders, and landlords? You can read the post for yourself, but it’s on LinkedIn, so be careful to not fall for a Forex scam while you’re there.
Jerry Seinfeld wrote a scathing response to Altucher in the New York Times. Jerry said that when he’s driving his Porsche around Southampton on a clear day, he can sometimes see the skyline poking through, and guess what? The Big Apple looks as good as ever. Jerry, who famously owns an entire building in Manhattan to store his cars, told Altucher to act like a real New Yorker: Go outside. Put on an Elmo costume. Piss in it. Take a photo with a child. Say something obscene in the child’s ear. Shake the child’s mother down for money. Then, only then, do you get to complain about this city.
As I see it, New York is not dead. But it is in danger.
Let's roll the clock back to 1975. The city is suffering. New York’s white middle-class was fleeing in the city from the droves. They said they were sick of city life, what with the constant grand pianos falling on them and air vents lifting up their hoop skirts. They wanted the quiet calm of suburbia, they said. They were off to Long Island, a mystical Shangri-La where Jews and Italians could finally live in harmony. Thomas Pynchon described the paradise of mid-century Long Island best in V. (Pardon the long quote, but this is one of my favorite paragraphs ever written.)
“Only the brave escape. Come Sunday nights, with golfing done, the Negro maids, having rectified the disorder of last night's party, off to visit with relatives in Lawrence, and Ed Sullivan still hours away, the blood of this kingdom exit from their enormous homes, enter their automobiles and proceed to the business districts. There to divert themselves among seemingly endless vistas of butterfly shrimp and egg foo yung; Orientals bow, and smile, and flutter through summer's twilight, and in their voices are the birds of summer. And with night's fall comes a brief promenade in the street: the torso of the father solid and sure in its J. Press suit; the eyes of the daughters secret behind sunglasses rimmed in rhinestones. And as the jaguar has given its name to the mother's car, so has it given its skin-pattern to the slacks which compass her sleek hips. Who could escape? Who could want to? Rachel wanted. Profane, having repaired roads around the Five Towns, could understand why.”
Of course, the mass exodus to Long Island represented White Flight at its most insidious. The picket fences and station wagons of suburban life were not just symbols of status, but of a world in which redlining and school segregation could persist until today. This migration represented the collapse of New York City’s tax base. By 1975, the city was reporting an annual budget deficit of $600 million, but more careful accounting put it closer to $2.2 billion. Austerity measures were attempted, but failed due to strong labor organization. An attempt to fire more than 8000 workers actually removed only 436. A “hiring freeze” resulted in 13,000 new city workers. Rock bottom came in April of 1975, when seven major banks refused to underwrite a crucial bond issue. New York was completely broke.
New York State stepped in to rescue the city by establishing the Municipal Assistance Corporation. The MAC consisted of nine private citizens, mostly bankers, tasked with issuing bonds and making the city solvent. (How long until we see a novelty MAGA hat that says “Make NYC Solvent Again”?) The State later assumed complete financial control over the municipal government. The MAC peddled $2 billion in bonds at nearly double the going interest rate. Taxes from the sale of those bonds went directly to the state government as collateral for their ongoing assistance to the city. 40% of city pensions were invested in MAC bonds, despite objections from pension fund managers that it was a violation of their fiduciary responsibilities. Federal aid was proffered in the form of high-interest short-term loans. However, the Ford administration feared other municipalities would soon come to the federal government for help. So, they required such severe austerity measures that no other city would ever want to get the kind of “help” New York got. Mass layoffs were carried out, subway fares were increased, social services were cut, and tuition was charged at city colleges, leading to a summer of labor unrest. But, ultimately, the city was able to continue issuing bonds and eventually achieved a balanced budget.
The MAC dissolved itself 33 years later, when the city was financially healthy again. They vacated the offices, paid severance to their last three employees, and held a farewell press conference recalling MAC’s successes. Wait, when exactly was that? Ah yes, September 2008, a time of memorably robust fiscal health for municipal and state governments.
MAC represented a cataclysmic turning point in the history of New York. By handing the right to issue bonds over to private banks, two things were decided: 1. Debt issuance is the primary mode of power in New York City government, and 2. The banks have that power. MAC handed control of the world’s greatest city to unelected, profit-motivated arch-capitalists. And as history shows, once power is handed away, it’s never given back.
You know the rest of the story. In the ‘80s, crack reigned. The city reached a disastrous low point, with soaring crime rates and declining everything else. It was so bad that every issue in New York must be debated on the basis of “Do you want it to be like the ‘80s again?” for the rest of time. The city experienced nightmare wealth stratification, with a Bonfire of the Vanities gilded class ruling from the air. This primordial ooze of unchecked capitalism, scaffolded by massive government subsidization, farted out Donald Trump. Onward and upward, until capital found its ultimate foothold in the city government by electing Mike Bloomberg. And the city is back, baby! The empty storefronts are filled, with a Duane Reade, CVS, Chase Bank, and CitiBank on every block. The bustle of growing open-air heroin markets are drowned out by helicopters shuttling Saudi and Russian investors to their empty $20 million investment penthouses. And from the East River to the Hudson, from the Rockaways to City Island, there is not a single big soda to be found.
The same factors in this story are still happening now. Another mass exodus to the suburbs is upon us. These emigrants are motivated not just by a desire for outdoor space and the ability to work from home, but fear that New York is going down the shitter, as Altucher admits. Projected budget shortfalls are disastrous, with a declining tax base, lower transit ridership, and fewer traffic tickets generating revenue. The city projects a 40% cut in subway service if there is no federal assistance. Of course, if that federal money ever comes, the strings attached by the Trump administration will make the Ford administration’s look downright magnanimous.
New York State will continue to exercise increased control over New York City. Prior to MAC, the city held some leverage over the state as its primary source of tax revenue. In 1965, as budgetary issues were already bubbling up, Mayor Lindsay proposed to Governor Rockefeller that the state-run MTA absorb the city-run NYCTA, beginning the cessation of control. By 1975, the State assumed complete control over the City, with power consolidated as it often does in a moment of crisis. We see that play out now in the “fights” between Mayor DeBlasio, the world’s tallest man to have a Napoleon complex, and Governor Cuomo, somehow a mid-50s womanizer despite presumably smelling like Aqua Velva and veal pizzaiola.
DeBlasio seems to defer to Cuomo (or police unions) on every issue, perhaps because he wishes he could just go pump iron at the Park Slope YMCA or because everyone hates him and he hates himself. This leaves leathery Andrew Cuomo in charge. This is the man who was encouraged to run for president and made the whole country come out as Cuomosexual while leaving 40,000 people to die in nursing homes. Over the course of this pandemic, Cuomo has declared that he can’t raise taxes because his friends in the Hamptons said so, chastised people for eating wings instead of real dinner, and now threatens to put 4000 cops in NYC restaurants, presumably to enforce table manners.
In all honesty, I hate Cuomo. This city survived a deadly pandemic. It fought through with no guidance, no infrastructure, and a pitiful, embarrassing, insultingly small amount of government help. The one thing James Altucher got right is that bars and restaurants do make New York great. It’s one of the hardest places for a restaurant to survive in good times. And now, with constantly changing rules, mandatory early closures, and capped amounts of customers, Cuomo has the gall to yell at people for trying to eke out a living. Sure, we need these rules to fight off the virus. But for the governor, son of another governor, to bitch at business owners for trying to survive amid government failure after government failure is just too much. Blaming individuals for the virus’s spread is the epitome of our “cage match” American capitalism; if success is always your doing, then death must be your fault. What other conclusion is there than that he hates New Yorkers? If Cuomo only wanted to be governor to yell at people, he should have just been one of the cops he loves so much. If New York really is dead, Cuomo is the world’s most prominent necrophiliac the way he keeps fucking it.
But New York is not dead. And it won’t die. However, the same leeching bankers and selfish politicians who have tried to kill the city before are back. They’re circling like vultures, hoping it will drop dead so they can feast on the body. It’s up to New York to outlive them.