From the Fiscal Crisis to the Affordability Crisis Drop Dead City Directed by RohatynMichaelYostPeterA Redbank Production with Pangloss Films, 2024

Reviewed by: Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics by Kim Phillips-Fein Brian D. Goldstein (bio) Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. By Kim Phillips-Fein. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. Pp. 416. $32.00 cloth; $22.00 paper; $9.99 ebook) In Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, Kim Phillips-Fein opens the lid on one of the iconic moments in the postwar history of the American city: New York City's near default in 1975. The city approached bankruptcy as a series of massive debt obligations came due. President Gerald Ford, quite famously, refused to provide the funding that the city needed, a moment encapsulated in the famous New York Daily News headline of October 1975: "Ford to City: Drop Dead." As the common story goes, the city borrowed profligately for decades to fund social programs it could not afford, bankruptcy was not an option, and restructuring the city in the aftermath was inevitable. New York had no choice but to slash its famed social safety net, which included free college tuition, neighborhood hospitals, and affordable subway fares. It could not have been any other way. [End Page 648] Yet the great contribution of Phillips-Fein's book is to argue that, in fact, none of the history as it unfolded was inevitable. Austerity, she writes, was "a political choice" (p. 10). And the path to austerity was never black and white. The city borrowed extensively, sometimes using problematic accounting measures, but banks played their part by buying debt eagerly. Ford put his foot down in refusing to provide financial aid during the most fraught months of the crisis not just to teach a financial lesson, but also because he saw an opportunity to impose a free market political ideology that would burnish his conservative credentials. And experts—those who guided harsh cuts through new entities like the Municipal Assistance Corporation and the Emergency Financial Control Board—were not objective technocrats. They were frequently members of the city's banking and business elite, unelected, and eager to ensure that financial institutions received the money they were owed before social obligations were met. As bankruptcy approached, those who stood to profit from it ideologically or financially used it to create crisis conditions. These, in turn, became justification for a fundamental restructuring of the supportive role the city had played for its citizens. "Over time," Phillips-Fein writes, "the fear of bankruptcy took on a life of its own" (p. 67). This context meant that other approaches—like declaring bankruptcy and making more balanced and equitable cuts—became seemingly impossible, though in fact they never were. In explaining this, Phillips-Fein gives dimension to actors often flattened in accounts of the crisis, showing that figures like Mayor Abraham Beame and President Ford often had choices. Everyday New Yorkers, those most affected on a daily basis by cuts to schools, police, garbage pickup, health care, and fire stations, did not roll over in the face of austerity. Rather, they actively pushed back against a city that shifted away from its ambition to lift up the middle and working classes. Such efforts—Adam Veneski and the People's Firehouse, student and faculty efforts to save Hostos Community College of the City University of New York—are some of the most compelling in the book. Even more such stories would have been welcome, for they provide clear evidence of [End Page 649] the multiple visions at play in this history. Yet the lack of equal representation of such voices is surely evidence of the degree to which elites dominated in determining what sacrifices would be made. Though a New York story, the way in which these events unfolded had national and even international reverberations, as Phillips-Fein argues. New York City emerged a different city after this but so did cities in general. The generosity of America's biggest metropolis came to be cast as irresponsible, making it less likely that other urban centers would follow in its path. Instead, a new vision of the role of municipal government took hold, one...

In Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York, Hillary Miller chronicles how 1970s theatre mediated New York City’s fiscal crises. Each chapter traces one site of New York City theatre: La Mama E.T.C., TKTS, Urban Arts Corps, Everyman Street Theatre, Lincoln Center’s Repertory Theater, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

I entered college in September of 1975, a working class kid from Queens whose father, Hyman Isaac, was an unemployed linotype operator (I wonder how many of our younger readers even know what that is; it's a typesetter, a trade that no longer exists), and whose mother, Sylvia Isaac, was an office secretary. I thus enrolled at Queens College, the neighborhood school, part of the City University of New York which, in 1975, offered free tuition to all New York City high school graduates. A month later, on October 30, the New York Daily News carried one of the most famous newspaper headlines of the century: “Ford to the City: Drop Dead.” The Ford in question was Gerald Ford, the unelected President of the United States who had acceded to the office from the House of Representatives when first the Vice-President (Spiro Agnew) and then the President (Richard Nixon) resigned amid scandal and disgrace. And his “drop dead” to “the city”—New York City—was a strong declaration that the US government would not bail New York out of the severe fiscal crisis in which it was mired. That same autumn, the State of New York passed the New York State Financial Emergency Act of The City of New York, placing the city in receivership, under the fiscal control of a state-appointed Emergency Financial Control Board: EFCB. That acronym, and a second with which it was conjoined—MAC, or “Big MAC,” the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the bond authority led by Felix Rohatyn that became the veritable executive office of the city—is indelibly stamped on the psyches of all who lived in and around New York in those years. For me, a teenage college student, the most palpable effect of all of this was the abolition of tuition-free higher education in New York City in 1976—a sour note during that year's bicentennial celebration of American freedom.

the Political Economy, Austrian Cultural Forum New York City January 24-April 22, 2012 Visitors to It's the Political Economy, Stupid could easily have missed the video to Burn (2010) by Dread Scott, displayed in the entryway to the gallery. This would have been an unfortunate oversight, as Scott's thoroughly engaging work, with its ironic yet compelling take on the financial crisis, sets the tone for the show. In the video, Scott wanders around Vail Street on a sunny day when hankers, traders, and tourists crowd the streets. He carries a tin bucket and banknotes are pinned to his shirt. Scott intones the short phrase Money to burn over and over as he takes one bill after another and sets on fire, dropping the burning notes into the can to disintegrate completely. Some onlookers seem horrified, others bewildered, still others tentatively accept Scott's invitation to take part in the perlinance by offering their own money to burn. As the camera pans the scene, the viewer becomes aware of a group of policemen gathering in the background, clearly debating what to make of the unusual event unibiding. After a kw moments, the policemen approach Scott and after some discussion issue him a citation for disorderly conduct and stop the performance. As Scott wanders away, still chanting his refrain, a smattering of applause rises from the crowd. Though only about three-and-a-half minutes in length, the video captures several themes that reemerged in work by the other artists in the exhibition, including the cultural value of money in our society and the constraints and rules surrounding its acquisition and exchange or use. Scott describes his work as exploring a taboo, the willful physical destruction of currency, and states that it was the ultimate act of destruction of value--this money was not exchanged for anything. (1) Throughout the rest of the show an international group of artists including Danny Begg, Linda Bilda, Julia Christensen, Ycvgeniy Elks, flo6x8, Melanie Gilligan, Jan Peter Hammer, Alicia Herrero, Institute for Wishful Thinking, Olga Kopenkina, Alexandra Lerman, Oliver Ressler, and Isa Rosenberger reflected upon the financial crisis and its fallout in varied ways, but all engaged ideas of value and values: political, social, and economic. The exhibition, curated by Ressler and Gregory Sholette, featured a substantial number of video works, but some of the works in more traditional media carried particular impact. Bilda's wall mural, The Future and End of the Golden World (2011), provided a lyrical counterpart to some of the show's heavier images with its cartoon-like, yet somehow elegant, figures swooping along the gallery's white walls. The text incorporated into the work, however, encouraged viewers to reflect on the ways in which words do not always mean what they seem, depending on the intention of the speaker. One area of painted text warned When thought, speech and actions are disjointed corruption arises, reminding the viewer to be attentive to how people and institutions can create illusions of wealth and success that crumble when the truth behind them is revealed. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It seemed appropriate that viewers could move from Bilda's statement about corruption to Post-Fordist Variations (2011) by the collective Institute for Wishful Thinking. In this mixed-media work, the group ties an infamous 1973 New Tbrk Daily News headline, Ford to City: Drop Dead, to the current financial crisis. During an earlier fiscal crisis, in 1975, the United States government refused to grant a bailout to a nearly bankrupt New York City unless the city implemented austerity measures that would cut social service programs: 2 The references to bailouts and austerity measures bear an uncanny resemblance to terms connected to the post-2008 financial crisis in both the U.S. and Europe, and the work invokes the recurring nature of crisis and failure in capitalist societies. …