A Beautiful Ruin: The Rebirth of New York City Before Financialization—Wild Actions, Cultural Rebellions, and Radical Organizing in Abandoned Space, 1956–89
by Stephen Zacks
Inventory Press, Spring 2027
A Beautiful Ruin is a lively story spanning decades of pivotal moments in the transformation of the mid-to-late twentieth-century city seen through the eyes of its New York protagonists. Among its fundamental revelations, it draws extensively from documents and materials in the Rockefeller family archives to show how David and Nelson Rockefeller fired Robert Moses after their rise to power in the late fifties. Why is it not common knowledge who became the real “power brokers” of the post-New Deal era? For all of the well-deserved fame of Robert Caro’s depiction of Moses in The Power Broker, Moses was not the defining figure of twentieth-century urbanism. The new power brokers of the epoch were the bankers and neoconservative ideologues who wrote the tax laws and planning guidelines for their own benefit after the New Deal ended. They replaced the social welfare state with a new theology of capitalism—market fundamentalism—which decreed that short-term profit-making and public-private development would be the way of the future—and virtually the only way. This too belongs to the cultural history of the city: a major transformation in economic thinking that would overtake the society and become a new norm.
Yet despite the overwhelming influence of bankers and neoconservative economists, other forces mediated their power. Private capital could not function without favorable public policy, but policy could be organized and controlled. When their best top-down plans failed, they required the ferment of cultural experimentation to save them. Delving deeply into the stories of artists and activists who reshaped downtown New York and invented new ways of living and working in the city, A Beautiful Ruin weaves together David Rockefeller’s role in the planning of Lower Manhattan and the rise of modern banking with uncanny actions of avant-garde figures who intervened in public spaces, revived industrial ruins, and breathed new life into the city. Their adventurous and often illegal activities infiltrated lofts and commercial storefronts, bleeding out onto the sidewalk and enlivening the streets. A panoply of institutions now taken for granted, such as Artists Space, MoMA P.S.1, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Dia Art Foundation, ABC No Rio, and Storefront for Art and Architecture, are monuments to these movements.
A Beautiful Ruin challenges the consensus view that has emerged in evaluating the role of culture in the history of the contemporary city. At first ignored and initially treated dismissively by planners, later coopted by policymakers who encouraged “creative capital” as a tool of development, arts and culture became pigeonholed and reductively associated with a process of so-called “gentrification.” Yet careful observation of changing cultural practices in mid-to-late twentieth-century New York reveals how visual artists, filmmakers, performance artists, theaters, designers, and architects functioned as a counter-power to banking and market-fundamentalist policy, transforming urbanism in the US in substantial and meaningful ways. Ultimately, the downtown avant-garde represented one of the last anti-commercial challenges to consumer society during an epoch in which neoconservative economic theory would reshape the very idea of personhood in the contemporary world. But the artists, almost inevitably, also became a part of the professional class for whom the new city was being designed, planned, and banked.
Through interviews with pivotal figures, newspaper sources, scholarly work, and archival materials, an extensive cultural history of the mid-to-late twentieth-century city—the first of such an expansive scope—comes alive in short, entertaining narratives illustrated by hundreds of provocative, colorful images created by some of the greatest artists and photographers of the era.
most anticipated new nonfiction of 2027
highly acclaimed work of nonfiction
new architecture criticism
major new history of New York City
overturns conventional, received wisdom about history of New York City
new retelling of the birth of the contemporary city
new classic of urban history
new view of the role of neoclassical economics in the cultural history of the 20th century
radical history of New York City and American urbanism
hopeful new history that anticipates the renewal of social democratic policymaking for the future
major new figure in cultural history
influenced by Michel Foucault, Lucy Sante, McKenzie Wark, Dick Hebdige, Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Berman, David Harvey
student of James E. Miller, Christopher Hitchens, and Elzbieta Matynia at the New School for Social Research; Kenneth W. Harrow and Harry Atwood Reed at Michigan State University; and Tracey Jean Boisseau, Kirk Hoppe, and David Watson of Cranbrook and the Fifth Estate
Challenges Robert Caro's history of Robert Moses as standard-bearer of modern urban history
