ancient cities

ooted in free trade, open markets, the waning of
governmental regulation, an explosion of new circuits
of information, and vast capital flows across
the globe. Then, in 2008, these global financial
institutions nearly collapsed. The proud investment
banks of Wall Street were found to be
drowning in an ocean of “toxic debt” and went
bankrupt, were taken over, or were nationalized.
The job losses in New York City for 2009 were
estimated to approach 200,000.
The city’s resilience, warmly praised in the
Russell Sage Foundation’s 2005 research on the
impact of 9/11, suggests that New York can again
draw on an increasingly impressive entrepreneurialism
in the city’s immigrant communities. But the
sharp polarization of the “dual city,” analyzed in
a 1991 volume of that name edited by John H.
Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, confirmed the
basic portrait of a deeply fragmented city drawn
by Tom Wolfe in 1987’s Bonfire of the Vanities.
The dream of a globalized city, a place of limitless
aspiration, power and wealth, is not dead, but it
lies broken, in tatters.
Eric Homberger
See also Global City; New York World’s Fair, 1939–
1940; Parks; Urban Health; World Trade Center
(9/11)
Further Readings
Beveridge, Charles and David Schuyler, eds. 1997. The
Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Vol. 3, Creating
Central Park. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brace, Charles Loring. 1872. The Dangerous Classes of
New York, and Twenty Years’ Work among Them.
New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck.
Chernick, Howard, ed. 2005. Resilient City: The
Economic Impact of 9/11. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Citizens’ Association of New York. 1865. Report of the
Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens’
Association of New York upon the Sanitary Condition
of the City. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
Griscom, John H. 1845. Sanitary Condition of the
Laboring Population of New York. New York:
Harper & Brothers.
Hone, Philip. 1927. The Diary of Philip Hone
1828–1851. Edited by Allan Nevins. 2 vols. New
York: Dodd, Mead and Co.
New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940
561
Mollenkopf, John H. and Manuel Castells, eds. 1991.
Dual City: Restructuring New York. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation.
Riis, Jacob. [1890] 1971. How the Other Half Lives:
Studies among the Tenements of New York. New
York: Dover Press.
Rosenzweig, Roy and Elizabeth Blackmar. 1992. The
Park and the People: A History of Central Park.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London,
Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ne w yo r k wo r l d ’s Fa i r,
1939–1940
The 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair was one
of the largest world fairs of all time. Its cultural
legacy has massively contributed in shaping the
mass culture of post–World War II America and
the world.
Opening a decade after the stock market crash of
1929 and the following economic depression, the
New York fair was launched with the aim of uplifting
the spirit of Americans while at the same time
promoting a financial upturn by stimulating a culture
of collective consumption through the display
of new technologies and new consumer products.
Massive sponsorships came from the big corporations
of the time (Eastman Kodak and AT&T,
among others) and especially from the automobile
industry, with General Motors and Ford in the
front line. The emphasis on consumerism and on
new technologies helped develop a new type of
average American consumer.
The fair covered more than 1,216 acres in what
once had been a wasteland in the Flushing Meadows
area of Queens, also the location of the 1964–1965
New York World’s Fair. Its main theme was “The
World of Tomorrow,” a utopian future of highspeed
mobility, optimism, individual freedom, and
mass consumption. Yet, by the time the fair
reopened in 1940, World War II had already
begun, and its second season was characterized by
a much less optimistic climate.
The fair provided a prominent stage for experimentation
in architecture, planning, and industrial
design. If the celebration of the machine age was
its underlying context, its main stylistic vocabulary