City of Ambition - November 2013 review

Mason B. Williams

By Mason B. Williams
W. W. Norton (May 2013)
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Reviewer: Book Board member Phil Patton (New York Times)

City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York, by Mason B. Williams, 2013 (W. W. Norton)

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, is set to move into City Hall.

The newly inaugurated Governor Roosevelt greets his predecessor, Al Smith. Reprinted from City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York by Mason B. Williams. Copyright © 2013 by Mason B. Williams. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Major La Guardia poses with the airplane designer Gianni Caproni in Milan shortly before returning from service, 1918. Reprinted from City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York by Mason B. Williams. Copyright © 2013 by Mason B. Williams. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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