Lessons from "Drop Dead City"

What a glorious documentary about New York City's past has to tell us about our future.

I believe that Drop Dead City, which opened this weekend at the Independent Film Center in the Village, will come to be viewed as the single best chronicle, in any medium, of New York City’s fiscal crisis. It manages to be both a vivid recounting of how the city narrowly averted disaster and, at the same time, a love letter to the New York of that low moment. Filmmakers Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn have been laboring away on the film for a decade, and what they have produced is an extraordinary gift to New Yorkers.

Two aspects of the film make it a treasure. The first is its collection of candid recollections and untold stories from so many key players from the crisis. This was just in time: by my count, seven of the interviewees – Howard Rubenstein, Jay Goldin, David Dinkins, Dick Ravitch, Ira Millstein, Fred Ohrenstein, and Gabe Pressman – have passed away since they sat down to share their insights for the project.

In addition, Yost and Rohatyn, and their archival producer, Frauke Levin, executed a staggering excavation of contemporary footage, both of official proceedings that unfolded and of life in 1975’s New York. In a talk moderated by Ginia Bellafante after the showing of the film last night at the IFC Center, Yost and Rohatyn recalled going through rolls and rolls of film from news organizations and the Getty archive that contained unindexed and, probably, never-before-looked-at footage. (Interestingly, much of it came from the BBC, which explains why the best documentary I have seen on this topic prior to Drop Dead City was in fact, a BBC production, Nightmare in the City that Never Sleeps, which aired just a few times in the U.S., and which I have tried and failed on a few occasions to get a copy of.)

That footage shows a city that seems a distant cousin of the one we inhabit today. Its denizens were, as writer Thomas Beller said in the talk after the film, “almost a different species.” Different clothes, different haircuts, a far more pronounced and widely squawked New York accent, and even, Beller noted, “twentieth century teeth.” It was then, as it is today, a city with serious fault lines and divisions. But it was a time when New York’s working class was a dominant political force; when the cultural, economic, and geographic proximity between that working class and the managerial class a few rungs up the ladder was far closer than it is today; and when the city’s moneyed class was less stratospherically wealthy, less numerous, and less able — pre-globalization and pre-digital age — to move their money and their interests elsewhere. The result was a far greater sense of interdependency and shared interest in the city’s survival.

I couldn’t help but look to the past captured by the documentary for lessons about New York’s future (beyond, of course, the obvious: the importance of competent operational and fiscal management). Through that lens, I was struck by three parts of the DNA of the city in that era that have virtually vanished, and which I hope the next mayor can reclaim.

1. An expansive, liberal vision for what New York City could be. The fiscal crisis reached its nadir in 1975, but a full decade earlier, John Lindsay was running for mayor to lead a city in turmoil.¹ Lindsay’s campaign message (expressed here in excerpts from his inaugural address) was not merely a promise to respond to and manage the significant problems of the day, but to deliver a city government far more actively involved and engaged in providing for the health, wellbeing, prosperity, and joy of its people. New Yorkers were excited by that vision and voted him in with high hopes. Of course, the verdict of history is that Lindsay managed to do none of this — or at least none of it very effectively — while setting the city on a course to bankruptcy. The result was the synonymity, since then, of a liberal urban agenda with fiscal doom, and the perceived mutual exclusivity of any such agenda from competent governance. But what might the verdict of history have been had Lindsay, and Robert Wagner before him, simply been better managers, with plans to pay for the things they wanted to do, and the discipline to execute well? Capacious urban liberalism, in retrospect, died with Lindsay and the fiscal crisis — no mayor since has won on a truly ambitious vision for restoring and expanding the physical and social infrastructure of the city. We are poorer, in all kinds of ways, as a result.

2. Active pride in, and attention to, the diversity of New York. David Dinkins famously and proudly noted that the city was less a melting pot than a “gorgeous mosaic.” While Drop Dead City leaves the racial and tribal tensions of 1975 on the cutting room floor, it shows us everyday New Yorkers and an array of leaders who, whatever their shortcomings, professed pride in that mosaic, and who also seemed to recognize that it was fragile and needed tending to. If liberalism died with Lindsay, that embrace of diversity disappeared with Dinkins, perhaps due to its associations with some of the most difficult moments of his mayoralty. But without a leader extolling and tending to the strength inherent in our differences, common understandings and bonds across the mosaic erode, and our social fabric frays.

3. A business community that is broad-mindedly engaged in the welfare of the city. The story that Drop Dead City tells in the main — that of government, business, and labor coming together to save the City from financial ruin — is a well-worn legend, and the film, appropriately, pokes some holes in the hagiography, from the difficulty of getting Al Shanker on board² to the argument, more fully explored in Kim Fein’s Fear City, that bankers, in effect, staged a coup and imposed austerity on City government. It is also true that the financial sector, in particular, had an existential stake in the financial solvency of the City that has gone the way of the telex. But there was, undoubtedly, a deep sense of responsibility to New York on the part of a wide array of business leaders, some of whom — notably Felix Rohatyn and Dick Ravitch — were public servants who emerged as heroes and demonstrated a real sense of compassion and a broader view of the bottom line. It is hard to see who are, or could be, the Ravitches and Rohatyns of today. Mike Bloomberg, of course, filled this void, and then some, for twelve years. He managed to revive the confidence of the business community in city government and, to some extent, its supportive engagement in civic affairs. Bloomberg (the individual, the company, and the foundation) continues to be a massive New York City philanthropist, but the former mayor has generally and understandably withdrawn from the arena. In the twelve years since, the business community has grown more and more distant from the civic life of the city. I do not think that any one interest group should be driving policy, but neither is it healthy for New York’s biggest generators of economic output and employment to be on the city’s sidelines or in our peanut gallery. They will not stay there forever.

One aspect of Drop Dead City that was eerily parallel to the current moment was its chronicle of confrontation between Democrats in New York and a Republican administration in Washington that was prepared to see the city fail, led by a president who famously (though not literally) told us to “Drop Dead.” Today we face a regime in Washington that is not only willing to see the city fail but will, I believe, set about to make that happen. What turned the tide with Gerald Ford in 1975 was a willingness by New York leaders to unify and fight, and in a different fashion, we must do the same today. (More on this in a future piece.)

The current mayoral administration has been such a managerial mess that much of this year’s campaign conversation has centered, appropriately, on restoring public confidence in City government. I have written before about why that is critical, also, if we are to cede no further electoral ground to Trump here in New York. But it is testament to how withered our view of City government has become — not just over the last four years but over the last fifty — that competence alone would seem like a quantum leap forward. This is a beggarly portion.

A competence that is also capable of thinking in big and compassionate ways, of restoring pride in diversity as one of our city’s great assets, and in rebuilding the faith and investment of business leaders in New York’s future — that is what the world’s greatest city truly deserves.

1. I should note two things here. First, my mother was press secretary to Mary Lindsay, and I grew up in a household where John Lindsay did, and could do, no wrong. Second, I do not believe the name “John Lindsay” was uttered in Drop Dead City, and, other than a single shot of the Lindsays at Mayor Beame’s inauguration, the Lindsay mayoralty was not discussed; to the extent the film identified any party responsible for the city’s profligacy, it was Nelson Rockefeller. This struck me as a significant omission, at least.

2. One of the most remarkable bits of the film is an interview with Queens Democratic Leader Matthew Troy, on his way into Grace Mansion the morning of the City’s impending bankruptcy. Troy, a large man, more or less suggests that he is prepared to physically beat Shanker until he agrees to use pension funds to buy City bonds.