Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

Abstract

In recent years historians have reexamined the urban renewal period of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (for example, Eric Avila and Mark Rose, “Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal,” Journal of Urban History, March 2009). Samuel Zipp's Manhattan Projects is a significant and welcome contribution to this scholarship. Zipp's rich, detailed, and well-documented historical analysis takes readers through the urban political struggles of four monumental New York City projects: the construction of the United Nations (UN) headquarters, the Stuyvesant Town housing project, the Lincoln Center performing arts complex, and East Harlem's conglomerate of high-rise, public-housing projects. The book also contextualizes those developments by arguing that Cold War debates were critical to understanding the significance and meaning of the urban renewal period. For Zipp, an assistant professor of history at Brown University, urban renewal was much more than America's attempt to rebuild the urban core. It was also a palpable national strategy to show the world that American-style capitalism could achieve growth and great wealth while simultaneously alleviating slums and blight, creating opportunity for all. However, as Zipp reveals, urban renewal never reached its lofty social and economic goals. Rather than distributing prosperity more evenly, urban-renewal built entertainment and residential playgrounds for the rich by destroying diverse ethnic neighborhoods and institutionalizing America's second ghettos.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.