RECENT HISTORY
Earlier this month I spent some time at the Gotham History Festival, which ended up focusing a lot on recent history in the city since it was still less than a month after the WTC attacks. I've gone through my notebook and plucked out a few of the most interesting comments. My apologies that they aren't coherently woven, but there are a few good morsels to chew on. These remarks came during a sessions called New York City: 1945 to 9/11/2001 And Beyond and New York City Journalism Since 1960.

Leo Bogart, who writes about communications issues, noted that when the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was sentenced, it wasn't reported in a big way that his initial goal was to make the two Trade Center towers crash into each other. Plus, they planned to blow up the Holland Tunnel.

The Daily News' Pete Hamill responded with a mea culpa for the media with the very logical resources argument that the newsrooms can only focus on a few big stories at once. And he pointed out that sometimes the wrong ones get picked. Hamill said the media didn't pay much attention to the Swissair crash in Nova Scotia in September 1998 because the media was preoccupied with Monicagate. (A story that originally shorted the Pope's historic trip to Cuba, he noted.) When Clinton bombed bin Laden in August 1998, the media thought it was a "Wag the Dog" story. However, the Swissair flight crashed right after bin Laden's camps were bombed. "We don't know if it's connected, but we didn't spend a lot of time with it either," Hamill said.

New York Times reporter Somini Sengupta sounded as if she was setting up a joke: "How many American flags does a Yemeni shopkeeper have to put on his window?" But the rhetorical question was actually in context to hyphenated-Americans feeling they need to adamantly prove their patriotism to fend off attacks from those who never understood the "melting pot" ideal.

Hamill, in discussing journalists' duty to keep all sides honest, rather than turn into flag-wavers, made reference to Bush's excellent Sept. 20 speech to Congress: "We liked your speech Mr. President. However, it's not our job to salute. Our job is to make sure it's accurate." And he quoted the late Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson: "The enemy isn't liberalism, the enemy isn't conservatism, the enemy is bullshit."

Joshua Freeman, a history professor at the City University of New York's College and Graduate Center, noted that in the days following Sept. 11, New York changed its image of who is a hero. No longer is it a useless celebrity, but rather the firefighters and cops. "Until Sept. 11 … blue-collar workers disappeared from the conscience of New York." He said that until the end of WWII, New York was a working-class city with loads of manufacturing jobs, even in what is now the financial district. He said that it was during the city's financial crisis in the 1970's that the power shifted away from the working classes.

Bob Fitch, metropolitan studies at NYU, talked about the evolution of downtown. After Grand Central Station and Penn Station opened in midtown, there was no major construction downtown for 50 years, he said. It was later, when Nelson Rockefeller was governor and his brother was running the downtown business association, when subsidies finally headed that way.

Fitch said the city reached its peak employment in 1969, with 3.9 million jobs. Rosemary Scanlon, the former deputy comptroller of NYC, said that as a result of the 1975 fiscal crisis, the city lost jobs, real estate prices dropped and 1 million people moved away.

Marshall Berman, a CUNY political science professor, noted that the rebuilding of the fire and police departments "will bring about the long-awaited racial integration of those departments." This remark, by the way, didn't come across as callous, since he was also noting the rush of support for the departments now, and said that those guys will need help "when the crowds go away."

» YOU GONNA DRINK THAT?
- posted by Amy @ 10/27/2001 11:31:00 AM