Quotes from Thomas Dyja

The movement from Industry to Information would prove to be the fundamental economic shift of the next four decades, and it was hardly some secret conspiracy even then. Going forward, as Daniel Bell had explained, knowledge would replace labor, services would replace goods, and a new knowledge-based power class would emerge that would increase the role of women in the economy.

For the first time in twenty-five years there was no Person of Color on the Board of Estimate, whatever traditional roles they'd had in City government erased. Squeezed by growing immigration, the breakdown of old political networks, a changing economy and soon, waves of drugs, crime, and disease, New York's African Americans would be forced over the next thirty-five years into new cultural and social strategies that would in turn change the world.

In theory, bad economic times should pull prices down, but the glut of global petrodollars kept pushing inflation up while high unemployment held wages down, giving birth to Stagflation. Lindsay raised taxes to make up for sliding revenues, but it wasn't enough, and here's where the nosedive began. State funds and property taxes come to the City twice a year, so to maintain cash flow it has to regularly borrow hundreds of millions of dollars.

As early as June of 1981, Brighton Beach was known as Little Odessa, with a quarter of its businesses owned by Soviet Jews.

Identity is above all else the product of shared experience, so Hip Hop let the boroughs develop new identities with their own styles and stars, all connected by subways bombed by artists like Lee Quiñones, Dondi, and Zephyr.

One thing he'd learned in ten years on the New York Stage was this: don't make friends with the man who plays Hamlet; make friends with the man who pays Hamlet.

We no longer have the luxury of dogma, assumptions, and unexamined opinions about New York, not from any side of the many divides that separate us in this city. A fourth evolution of New York is clearly imminent; economics, public health, and social justice demand it.

To Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois, Bigger Thomas was more stereotype than sociology; to White Chicago, he just inspired fear. The deepest impact of Wright's success, though, was that he'd achieved it without the Rosenwald Fund, the NAACP, or any of the other institutional sources that usually supported black artists.

Wall Street," said a sadder but wiser Henry Blodget, "is its own world… what matters most is your place in that world, not what the rest of the world thinks of you.

New York, to Whyte, needed to produce more than just money; it needed to produce social capital. Even as New York careened, he celebrated its street life—"Characters are flourishing," he wrote. "It is the work of a great city to be tolerant of them, and New York is.

Profound as its intellectual and artistic interactions had been, the Chicago Black Renaissance never dented the city's consciousness the way the Harlem Renaissance created a mythic Black New York.

Between the lines, though, was concern about the age, quality, and training of his cops, something Bratton had once tweaked Kelly for. Despite "taking the handcuffs off," the commissioner raised the minimum age for the NYPD to 22 along with higher physical standards and two years of college. He let go of 148 probational cops in 1994, more than the last three years combined, and banned the chokehold.

Protest is good; involvement is better; doing both is the best.

This work ahead will require leaders who put the good of the city above all else. The greatest failures of Dinkins and de Blasio were their failures of leadership, not of policy. They let the city go adrift, but worse, they made everyone who lived in it feel adrift.