ancient cities

560 New York City, New York
New York: global city? Dual city?
Source: Steven K. Martin.
estate interests in New York were mighty proponents
of change. The seductions offered by their
deals, the jobs, iconic buildings, increased tax revenue,
were hard to resist. They were also silent
enemies of sentimental attachments to the smaller
scale of an older New York. Thus, in the public
sphere, Robert Moses, the great constructor of
parks, highways, and bridges, was also the proponent
of a scheme to extend Fifth Avenue south
through Washington Square.
A Global City
The New York that struggled over local real estate
developments was not a global city as that term
began to be understood in the 1980s. But since the
days of John Jacob Astor, there was a subclass of
globalized wealthy men in New York who were
only occasionally engaged with local issues. The
great industrialists and financiers of the Gilded
Age had even weaker local ties. Their ventures
were international in scope, tying New York financial
institutions to financial markets in London
and Hamburg. Urbanists have argued that great
cities in the global economy tend, in part, to “disconnect
from their region.” That process has long
been visible in the development of New York,
which made a failed bid for independence from
New York State in 1860.
If the horizons of the very rich were steadily
detaching themselves from the city and its daily
preoccupations, in a different way, the city’s swirling
immigrant and ethnic population retained
memories and loyalties to the old world, whether
to Ireland or Poland or Sicily, which could sometimes
find its way into the street-level concerns of
employment, politics, and culture. It was a city of
deeply divided identities and loyalties.
The global city as described by Saskia Sassen in
1991 and others, and the widening horizons of
transnationalism, seemed to point toward a future
for New York City, or, specifically, for Wall Street,