City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York
City of Ambition is a brilliant history of the New Deal and its role in the making of modern New York City. The story of a remarkable collaboration between Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia, this is a case study in creative political leadership in the midst of a devastating depression. Roosevelt and La Guardia were an odd couple: patrician president and immigrant mayor, fireside chat and tabloid cartoon, pragmatic Democrat and reform Republican. But together, as leaders of America’s two largest governments in the depths of the Great Depression, they fashioned a route to recovery for the nation and the master plan for a great city.
Roosevelt and his “Brain Trust”—shrewd, energetic advisors such as Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins—sought to fight the Depression by channeling federal resources through America’s cities and counties. La Guardia had replaced Tammany Hall cronies with policy experts, such as the imperious Robert Moses, who were committed to a strong public sector. The two leaders worked closely together. La Guardia had a direct line of communication with FDR and his staff, often visiting Washington carrying piles of blueprints. Roosevelt relied on the mayor as his link to the nation’s cities and their needs. The combination was potent. La Guardia’s Gotham became a laboratory for New Deal reform. Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed city initiatives into major programs such as the Works Progress Administration, which changed the physical face of the United States. Together they built parks, bridges, and schools; put the unemployed to work; and strengthened the Progressive vision of government as serving the public purpose.
Thousands of fans heading for Yankee Stadium pass the sign “Bronx Terminal Market 1935,” its letterforms cast in a sturdy concrete facade suggesting their era. The market was the site of one of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s triumphs--over government inefficiency and organized crime—and serves as one of the smaller symbols of his role as city shaper.
I thought of that market while reading City of Ambition, a study of La Guardia’s relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt and thus of the New Deal. City of Ambition is important reading for anyone interested in the design of cities and particularly how plans and visions are translated to physical and social reality—or not. The Bronx Market, whose days since La Guardia have been less happy, is proof of how much New York is still the city of Roosevelt’s New Deal—still the city La Guardia and FDR built. Bridges, highways, parks, schools, and more were constructed as economic stimulus measures. They are what we today call infrastructure; they are also extensions of the market, in its ancient sense of the agora, the common, public space.
So, as the author writes, “The book is also a study of how government came to play an extraordinarily broad role in a quintessentially market-oriented city.” The Federal government accounted for about a third of New York’s budget at the high point of the New Deal. The story is a useful corrective for the naïve policy wonk: it tells of political club houses, ethnic resentments and crime, organized and semi-organized. Aside from intermittent stiffening into academic jargon, the narrative is engaging.
La Guardia summed up New York’s variety: his parents were an Italian and a Jew, he was born in Greenwich Village and raised in Arizona. He was a progressive Republican. He managed to charm even FDR and the two crossed party lines in mutual support. He was also folk hero, part neighborhood grocer, part favorite uncle, the “little flower” who read the Sunday newspaper comics on the radio to children when a newspaper strike prevented their delivery. Such acts were given physical form in parks and pools and schools, many of them still in use in the city today.
The book comes at an appropriate time, when Federal stimulus is under discussion again, and also when Bill De Blasio, another activist candidate with a short article in his name and a melting-pot background, appears set to move into City Hall.
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Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister
Now is Better
By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023
Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
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Love Letter to a Garden by Debbie Millman
Love Letter to a Garden
By Debbie Millman
Contributions by Roxane Gay
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: April 15, 2025
From the award-winning artist, designer, and the host of the podcast Design Matters, Debbie Millman, this book tells the visual story of falling in love with gardening—and the philosophies that work conjures. Spread throughout are simple recipes using the garden’s ingredients from Millman’s wife, best-selling author Roxane Gay.
Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Milton Glaser: POP
By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023
This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.
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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)
By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023
This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.
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