JOHN LINDSAY’S TEN PLAGUES

COVER STORY

IN Central Park the leaves turned brown and gold in the tangy weather that makes lyricists write of “autumn in New York.” On Fifth Avenue an unending parade of shoppers canvassed the world’s most elegant bazaar. The Broadway marquees touted yet another hectic season. From the Battery to The Bronx, the thud of dynamite and the roar of drills accompanied probably the greatest construction boom in the history of cities. No other metropolis in the world offered its inhabitants greater hope of material success or a wider variety of cultural rewards. Yet for all its dynamism and glamour, New York City, day by day, little by little, was sliding toward chaos. “The question now,” said its handsome young Mayor, John Lindsay, “is whether we can continue to survive as a city.”

Many New Yorkers shared that somber view. The city’s plight, of course, was not one of physical survival—though some cynics argued that New York’s complex ills could only be cured if the metropolis were razed and rebuilt. Its breakdown this fall was one of spirit and nerve, a malaise that affected the tacit assumptions of trust and interdependence without which no organism so vast and disparate can possibly function. In what most responsible citizens concede to be one of the ugliest situations in memory, strikes and the threat of strikes pitted not only union against employer—the city—but, worse, black against white, Jew against Gentile, middle class against poor.

In front of City Hall, 2,000 picketing policemen yelled “Blue power!” and carried signs exhorting “Dump Lindsay” and “We Want Daley.” Hundreds more paraded in front of 20 of the city’s 79 precinct stations. Until their union ended the practice at week’s end, as many as 3,000 men, one-fifth of the force scheduled for duty, reported “sick” each day with a fictitious strain of Asian flu. Cops on duty watched benignly as motorists left their cars in bus stops and no-parking zones. Minor complaints were simply ignored, and traffic became badly snarled. Possibly worst of all was the damage done to the conception of law and order, as “New York’s Finest” sneered at laws they were sworn to enforce.

Firemen refused housekeeping duties, such as checking fire hydrants and inspecting buildings, and the head of the firemen’s union warned that the slowdown “could escalate into a full-scale strike” that would leave alarms unanswered and homes in danger.

The least dangerous breakdown in public services was the most serious. For the third time since September, the majority of the city’s 58,000 teachers defied state law to go out on strike, and more than a million students were denied the vital right of education. Teachers marched outside their schools, and children watched as picketers traded insults and obscenities with nonstrikers and parents. With picket lines drawn in front of the schools where many people vote, there was fear that even the election might be disrupted.

There were attempts to provide at least a smattering of learning. The Daily News published hints on how parents could teach their children at home (“Have your young Charles Dickens write a short story”). The Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney offered art classes to any student who showed up at the door. With the consent of officialdom, parents and nonstriking teachers staged “legal breakins” at schools that had been sealed off by janitors, who changed or jammed the locks; as many as 97,000 pupils a day succeeded in entering classrooms. Some parents camped in the schools so that their children could not be locked out again. What began as a labor dispute grew from day to day into a more fundamental quarrel of the teachers’ union, politics, race and culture, tearing at the five boroughs of what had always been regarded as the most liberal, tolerant and cosmopolitan city in America. “If it were just a labor dispute,” said an aide to the Mayor, “that would be one thing. But there’s far more at stake. New York could be the greatest tinderbox in the world.”

A Charmproof City

Only three months ago a prime candidate for the Republican vice-presidential nomination, John Vliet Lindsay, 46, the 103rd Mayor of New York and the holder of the second toughest political post in the U.S., was faced with the distinct prospect of political repudiation. The city’s 2,000,000 Jews, once a cornerstone of his constituency, had turned cool and often hostile. Jeers greeted his name at synagogues; “hate mail” came into his office. City Hall became a fortress against an angry city, and Lindsay spent more and more time at Gracie Mansion, the city’s elegant mayoral residence overlooking the East River. Only a short time ago, it had looked as if Lindsay could charm the whole city, which is about as charmproof as any in the world; now the whole community seemed to have turned against him. Says one City Hall acquaintance: “The birds have started circling around, as they watch the animal falter.”

Far more than the career of John Lindsay—or even the stability of the nation’s largest city—was at stake. The same forces of race and poverty, fear and instability that transfix New York now are present in scores of other U.S. cities, large and small. New York contains all the elements that are directing the course of the 1968 election cam paign. New Yorkers’ concern with the quality of life, with impersonal or unresponsive organizations, with law and order—all these are national issues. Historically, New York is a pattern setter. If it should prove ungovernable or explode in bitterness, no other city could feel secure in a time of increasing racial and ethnic polarization.

The rest of the nation can only hope that some patterns at least will not cross the Hudson. The sad truth is that for most of its millions, New York is an increasingly unfavorable habitat. Within the past two to three years, rents on noncontrolled apartments have risen as much as 100%—with hikes of 40% and 50% common. Still, 800,000 units, a quarter of the city’s dwellings, are listed as substandard. Replacing them would be a task equal to rebuilding two-thirds of blitz-shattered London, and several of the impoverished ghettos are as big as medium-sized cities. Traffic is scarcely better; every day 3,500,000 people crowd into nine square miles of Manhattan south of Central Park, the equivalent of transporting every man, woman and child in Connecticut into Bridgeport and out again each day. From the visible evidence, the sanitation strike might still be on, and blowing papers and scattered heaps of filth testify to perhaps the most unkempt city on the North American continent.

Lines at the Lunchcarts

Even the construction boom has brought its toll in dirt, noise, and the destruction of treasured landmarks and favorite spots. The good small restaurants that were the city’s pride are being torn down, to be replaced by 15-minute-service counters in skyscraper basements. In the Wall Street area, where building activity and crowding are most intense, lines form in front of hot-dog carts at lunchtime, and a sign in a Broad Street bookstore reads: “Please-no browsing from 12 to 2.” Says Architect Percival Goodman: “Size can mean healthy growth or cancer. In New York, it’s become cancer.”

New York has always had its detractors, and out-of-towners often find odd comfort and perverse joy in discussing its faults and inconveniences. But many people who once loved the city are now regretfully finding their passion growing cold. “There’s a morale factor that’s missing,” says Marion Javits, wife of the New York Senator, “that magic and loveliness I used to adore. More than ever, the people are not lovely, or gentle, or likely to say ‘excuse me.’ It’s as though New York no longer feels loved.” While New Yorkers may feel a throb for their city, they do not tend to it or cherish it, as the citizens of some other cities do theirs.

There is little overt civic pride. Even Big Business is either too big, fragmented or uninterested to offer the kind of leadership it exerts in cities like Pittsburgh and Atlanta. Extraordinarily kind on occasion, New Yorkers in the mass can be the rudest, surliest, nastiest citizens of America and, with the possible exception of Paris, the world.

Pathological Bureaucracy

After chronicling the wonders of New York for English audiences for 30 years, Journalist Alistair Cooke is embarrassed to say that he no longer likes being in and about the city. “Now my apartment is a haven, a sanctuary against the city. New York is not manageable for the ordinary citizen living in it.” He adds: “It’s all right there in the last two volumes of Gibbon. All this opulence and comfort have led to sophistry. We’re now hopelessly confused between privileges and rights. Nobody feels an obligation to the city any more. The only obligation is to one’s family. The breakdown in society comes when people can’t recognize any public obligations beyond their family.” The electric excitement of New York—which no other city in the country can match or even approach—is still there. By comparison, almost everyplace else is Oshkosh.

For the city’s minorities, it is not a question of dullness or excitement, but survival in the urban jungle. Properly dissatisfied with the inferior education that most of their children were receiving, the city’s Negroes long ago began pressing for local control of schools in black neighborhoods. With encouragement from Lindsay, the Central School Board last year grudgingly met them part way, offering black communities limited autonomy in three experimental districts. If the districts succeeded, the prospect was that the entire school system—a “pathological bureaucracy” in the words of New York University Professor David Rogers—would in time be decentralized so that parents all over the city would have a greater say in their children’s future.

It was a bold, exciting educational venture, and a sensible scheme to bring government to the people, particularly to the blacks who felt victimized by an impacted, intransigent white bureaucracy. In practice, however, it met a multitude of small problems and one gigantic roadblock: the United Federation of Teachers, the nation’s largest union local (55,000 members). After years of struggling for power, the union felt endangered. Not only would decentralization break up the school system, many teachers reasoned, it would also break up the union, which would have to negotiate with 33 local school boards. To many teachers and indeed to many members of other unions, the Negroes’ demand for community control—and the city’s limited compliance—was nothing less than union busting.

Contending Aspirations

Complicating the situation still more were the contending aspirations and fears of New York’s ethnic groups, whose volatility has been underestimated in recent years. Just as the Irish had claimed the Police Department and the Italians the Sanitation Department, so the Jews now have the school system; two-thirds of the city’s teachers are Jewish. If Negro teachers and Negro supervisors took over in decentralized districts, they would almost certainly displace many white teachers and upset a delicate ethnic balance.

Though it must have realized the implications of the experiment, the Central Board, incredibly enough, never told the three experimental boards precisely what powers they had. Thus, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn felt that it was well within its rights in transferring 19 professionals last spring for supposed “sabotage.” Union President Albert Shanker, 40, angrily called his teachers out of the area in protest, and the district hobbled along with a handful of nonstriking teachers and bewildered volunteer helpers for the rest of the academic year. The Negro community vowed that none of the 350 strikers would ever be readmitted. Equally enraged, the teachers felt that their jobs were being sacrificed on the altar of Black Power. It was one of those clas sic situations in which neither side was wholly wrong, nor wholly right.

A Matter of Accountability

A shrewd, ruthless, single-minded leader, Shanker demanded that all the union teachers be let back into Ocean Hill when classes opened last month. He struck to win his point, then struck again when returning teachers were harassed by the black community. Dissatisfied, he said, with the city’s guarantees for their safety, he struck yet a third time a fortnight ago. Nothing would end the impasse, he vowed, but the dismissal of the Ocean Hill board and Rhody McCoy, the local administrator—in other words, an effective end to the troublesome decentralization experiment. “This strike is not going to be broken,” Shanker said last week. “We’re going to win.” Replied McCoy: “We don’t intend to capitulate.”

Almost ignored were 1,100,000 students, who are not only losing classroom time but possibly suffering serious psychological damage from the conflict. “The children sense that the order of society is very fragile and unstable,” said Dr. Bertram Slaff, a psychiatrist at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital. “I am deeply frightened about the implications of all this, and of such acts as teachers showing hatred of one another.” The children most in need of schooling are the most affected, noted Harry Beilin, a professor of education and psychology at the City University of New York. He said: “The long-term effect of the strike is an undermining of the ability to respect authority.” For those in high school, particularly students who hope to go to college, a protracted strike could be catastrophic.

Ironically, the area least affected by the strike is Rhody McCoy’s eight-school Ocean Hill-Brownsville district. Recruit ed during the summer from all parts of the country, McCoy’s temporary teachers form one of the brainiest public school staffs in the country. Eager, dedicated and inventive, with a heavy emphasis on the Ivy League—”I’m a bum,” quips one principal, “but all my teachers wear Brooks Brothers suits”—they come early and stay late, refusing to bow to the stale pedagogic commands that emanate from 110 Livingston Street, the Board of Education’s central office in Brooklyn. Many have attended law school, and regular teachers complain bitterly that they are in Ocean Hill only to escape the draft.

The people are overjoyed to have them, whatever their reasons for coming. “It has to work,” says Mrs. Lolita Chandler, veteran teacher of P.S. 178. “It will work. In spite of everything that people are doing to crush this beautiful thing. We have been floating around in this sea of negativism for too long. People don’t have the courage to face the fact that the status quo just hasn’t worked. Instead, they get themselves frightened by such ideas as Black Power and militancy. It’s not that at all. It is just a simple matter of accountability.”

The district’s mistrust of many veteran teachers is often unfair, if understandable. The menacing atmosphere of most slum schools is enough to cow even the most devoted teacher, who in any case is seldom equipped professionally to deal with the specialized problems of the deprived child—let alone the disturbed or disruptive student who is too often rejected as “uneducable.”

Need for Upheaval

Many Negro students would probably be better off not even attending the typical New York school. A splendid tool in assimilating and liberating past generations of immigrants, the city school today seems incapable of helping the ghetto children. Each year they fall farther behind. In one Manhattan school, 47% of the second grade are below the national reading norm; in the third grade, 52% of the children were behind, while 72% of the fourth grade lagged. The notion is often advanced that black parents do not care. The experience of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, as well as simple observation, says differently. Few can forget a demonstration last year in an East Harlem school where an elderly black woman, tears streaming down her face, cradled the head of her nine-year-old grandson and lamented, as if chanting a dirge: “He don’t read! He don’t read! He don’t read!”

How can teachers’ rights be protected as the system is decentralized? It should be possible to work out intermediate stages between completely local and completely central control, thus combining both teachers’ and communities’ rights. But few, including the teachers, seemed interested in such a solution.

Though Shanker’s originally stated desire to protect teachers’ rights seemed reasonable enough—the Ocean Hill Board had indeed treated union teach ers arbitrarily—Shanker appears now to want something entirely different. “Teachers have been castrated,” he told TIME Reporter Peter Babcox. “Until now, teachers’ organizations have played around with piddling little things. There is need for upheaval, for revolutionary change. Innovation in education is not enough. You have to have power.” Reasonable speculation was that Shanker, ambitious for both his own and his teachers’ future, might want not only to lead all the teachers in the U.S., but to head a union that would embrace all white-collar workers and professionals as well.

Nor was he scrupulous about the means. He has been a devoted advocate of Negro rights in the past. Now he appears bent on exploiting the anti-Semitism which undoubtedly exists among Negroes in Ocean Hill in order to rouse the city’s Jewish population against decentralization. His propaganda campaign against decentralization has cost the already strapped U.F.T. $200.-000. The union distributed handbills repeating some of the most scurrilous anti-white and anti-Semitic statements to come from the black community, “Cut out, stay out, stay off, shut up. get off our backs,” reads one, “or your relatives in the Middle East will find themselves giving benefits to raise money to help you get out from the terrible weight of an enraged black community.” On TV, Shanker said that his union was trying to prevent “a Nazi takeover of the schools.”

The charge was absurd and mischievous, but it got a wide audience. Disturbed by evidence of anti-Semitism among Negroes that came with the ghetto riots—when Jewish shops were selectively burned—many Jews felt outrage at both Rhody McCoy and Lindsay, who had championed decentralization. The city’s atmosphere, said Lindsay in a citywide TV address, “has in the last week degenerated into intolerable racial and religious tension.” William Booth, chairman of the city’s Human Rights Commission, was even more specific: “Every day this strike goes on, things are getting worse. You can sense there is much more antiwhite feeling among blacks and much more anti-black feeling among whites.”

Magnet for the Poor

If the problems of New York can be compared only to the ten plagues of Egypt, as Lindsay once claimed in jest, the autumn of 1968 is clearly the time of all ten. There are more than a few who blame Lindsay himself for spreading the plague. Said Dominick Peluso, executive assistant to Frank O’Connor, Democratic City Council president and an archfoe of the Republican Mayor: “Lindsay has taken New York from a city in crisis to a city in chaos.” The summary is typical, though hardly just; Lindsay’s record is one of remarkable success and serious shortcomings against overpowering odds.

During the three years of the Lindsay administration, welfare rolls have risen by 40%, to a point where almost 1,000,000 people (1 out of 8 New Yorkers) are on relief. Some city officials would accept Richard Nixon’s argument that welfare payments across the country should be standardized, on the theory that New York City, with the highest payments in the country, is a magnet for the poor of other states and communities. The city’s budget since 1965 has risen 40% to almost 56 billion, more than any state—including the state of New York—spends in a year. Real estate taxes have gone up 260 per $100 (but the assessed valuation has risen more than $2 billion), and for the first time the city has levied an income tax. Strike has followed strike, and New Yorkers can only speculate on what essential service will be cut off next. Many of the promising young men who joined Lindsay at City Hall left after the first year.

He has labored heroically to communicate with the blacks in the ghettos. The city has had no major racial upheaval since 1964. Yet many white New Yorkers feel neglected as a result. In huge areas of The Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, thousands feel that Lindsay is interested only in the black and Spanish-speaking slums. Says Democratic Councilman Robert Low, a possible candidate for Mayor in 1969: “He has concentrated his attention on slum areas and raising standards for minority groups, without making the middle class feel he offers compensating programs for them.” Partially as a result, the white exodus to the suburbs goes on, and the disaffection grows. In a secret poll early in October, 42% rated Lindsay’s mayoral record as “poor.”

They All Sneeze

Certainly, much is beyond Lindsay’s or any Mayor’s control. He is not only opposed on many issues by the Democratic City Council; the state legislature as well has a degree of control over city policies that is perhaps without parallel elsewhere in the U.S. The spectacular hike in welfare rolls is a direct result of heavy black migration from the South and a longtime influx of Puerto Ricans. Much of the budget, including welfare, is mandated by law. Inflation causes union to vie against union in looking to the city treasury.

“When one takes snuff,” says Negotiator Theodore Kheel, “the others all sneeze.” The growth of militant civil service unions, a cause of both strikes and higher budgets, is a nationwide phenomenon —and was actually encouraged by Lindsay’s Democratic predecessor, Robert Wagner, son of the author of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. Wagner’s cozy policy was to play along with the unions and give them most of what they wanted, thus piling up huge due-bills without much thought of the future. Still, Wagner (now U.S. Ambassador to Spain) was an extremely skillful negotiator. Another Mayor with some of Wagner’s talents might have prevented the series of strikes, whatever else might have gone wrong with the city.

Asserting Principle

Lindsay’s big initial mistake was his inept, melodramatic handling of the transit strike during his first days in office. A pattern of hostility between city employees and the Mayor’s office was set and has lasted to this day. Basically, the problem is one of attitude. In the face of threats from the “power brokers,” Lindsay asserts principle; labor leaders call it inflexibility and priggishness. “It’s this upper-white-class Protestant ethic that gives him a feeling of moral superiority,” says Martin Morgenstern, head of the Social Service Employes Union. “He’s like the white knight come to save us all.” Lindsay gives the impression of looking upon organized labor as a Democratic anachronism, arteriosclerotic in an era of social change, anti-integrationist in a city with a large nonwhite minority, complacent and irresponsible. That he is often right makes little difference to union leaders. In the school dispute, he is widely accused of posturing and of angering all sides with categorical statements.

“John is overwhelmed by the force of public opinion,” notes one man close to both sides. “He expresses himself very well, and the next morning the New York Times approves. But in the process he’s humiliated the other guy.

He doesn’t understand or he doesn’t choose to understand what are the requirements of union leadership. The thing a union leader wants above all else is to look good to his membership. John has repeatedly made these guys look bad, and now they hate his guts.”

Similar matters of pride were at stake in the police and firemen’s dispute. The police turned down an exceedingly generous contract—which, despite their cries for Daley, would give them a base pay level of $10,750 a year, considerably more than the Chicago cops, and a 14.6% boost over two years—not because it was too little, but because the firemen would be getting as much. The policemen protested that they should receive more because of the greater hazards of the job. Renewing an old status rivalry, the firemen declared that they would accept not a penny less. The garbagemen, by contrast, have accepted their contract. Some other city unions urged the Mayor to hold tight, saying they would have to reopen their contracts if the police received an added sweetener. And 40,000 more public service employees threatened to strike for equal treatment when their contracts expire in December.

Restoring Grace

In cutting through other tangles that choke his city, Lindsay has done better than just about anyone else could have. Not always appreciated in New York—or in Nelson Rockefeller’s Albany—he is generally regarded in Washington offices that handle urban programs as the best big-city mayor in the country.

One of his biggest accomplishments has been to restore some measure of grace to a city not noted for its civility, and to slow, if only by a fraction, the numerous forces that make New York an increasingly unlivable city. Under Lindsay, the parks have been made into attractive recreational centers, with cafes and musicales and bicycling on roadways that are closed to cars on weekends and holidays. Air pollution has been cut slightly, and the level of design in civic architecture has been raised. Plans are being pushed through for a great network of new subways, and the grandiose, frequently destructive schemes of the expressway builders have, for the most part, been restrained from running great swaths of concrete through residential areas.

Fragile Link

The city government has been reorganized to follow the simpler federal outline, and advanced techniques of systems analysis are being applied to bureaucratic procedures that had not changed by more than a jot in a century. Still in dire need of money, the city’s budget has been brought in line with income. Thanks to Wagner’s custom of floating long-term loans to pay current operating expenses, New York had “rainy day” reserves of less than $155,000 when Lindsay took office; the fund is now $88 million, and the city’s credit is improving. One of Lindsay’s less heralded accomplishments is the tapping of the federal till with new programs and aggressive lobbying. Since he took office, federal outlays to the city have jumped more than threefold, to $892 million a year. Yet city residents still pay out far more than the city receives, $16 billion a year, or roughly 10% of all income taxes paid the Federal Government. (They similarly pay more to the state than they receive, getting back 430 on the dollar.)

The police department has been humanized; Gordon Thisner, a Berkeley criminologist, told the President’s commission on violence last week that New York’s force was the most sophisticated department in the country in its response to civil disorders and unrest. Most important of all is Lindsay’s unique rapport with the Negroes and Puerto Ricans, a fragile yet invaluable link that the Mayor readily admits could vanish in a single night of riot and looting.

The question that is always asked about New York can be asked about any other metropolis in the U.S. today: Is it governable? Under its present antique structure, the answer is quickly becoming obvious: it is not.

Plugging People In

In part, the problem is one of technology. City lines are meaningless when a commuter, on his everyday ride to work, passes through a dozen corporate boundaries from home to office. Neither are there limits to the problems technology has created; traffic jams and noise, air and water pollution do not stop at the city line. In part, the problem is one of insensitive institutions. A city welfare department may have been well equipped to han dle the demands of a quarter-century ago, but almost all are handicapped by today’s huge caseloads.

The villain generally is size. Most local governments are either too small to deal with the big problems, or too big to take care of the small. In New York and other major cities, the difficulty is one of reaching down. “The city is designed to shrink people,” says Leonard Fein, associate director of the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Affairs, “so one doesn’t feel plugged in, connected, part of a family. So at least then, let’s resurrect the neighborhood, the community within the city. That’s what decentralization is all about. It’s not about schools. It’s about neighborhood and plugging people in. I think John Lindsay knows that. I think Albert Shanker does not.”

Plugging people in is the goal of modern planners and urban thinkers, just as building grand boulevards and sweeping plazas was the dream a century ago. Most urban thinkers envisage a graduated form of government. A large, regional body would do such things as policing the environment, building expressways, and providing police. Smaller organizations would provide services such as recreation and education.

Thomas J. Kent Jr., a Berkeley planner, says that “the radical experiment that began in the U.S. 50 years ago in local self-government has run out in the biggest cities.” No doubt with some exaggeration, he holds that all cities with populations of a million or more are “too large to be manageable as democratic self-governments.” A somewhat similar theme was sounded by Leonardo da Vinci. To relieve the congestion and bring order to the bedlam of 16th century Milan, he told its Duke, the community would have to be broken down into ten cities of 30,000 people each.

How big should local units be? Leonardo’s figure is perhaps as good as any, but others have been mentioned. Jane Jacobs, an astute urban gadfly (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), says New York should be divided into units of 100,000. A recent Royal Commission recommended reorganizing London into boroughs of about 200,000 (London already has limited decentralization). Author Lewis Mumford, one of the foremost students of the city, is more flexible. A “humanly lovable city,” he says, “must range somewhere between 30,000 and 300,000 people.”

Bigger and Tougher

In some respects, modern society will require even more centralization than now exists; in some respects, to make it bearable as well as workable, it will require more decentralization. Achieving a balance between these two needs is perhaps the most important and difficult problem for the near future, reaching far beyond schools or other services to the heart of government. No American city has yet achieved the balance. New York has hardly given it a try. Describing his own organization’s key role in helping to finance the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment, Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy acknowledged last week that “the problem was bigger and tougher” than his planners had thought. “If we had to do it over again, we would be in it earlier to get to know people better and make them more responsive.”

Since the founding of such cities as Eridu and Kish in the valleys of Mesopotamia 5,500 years ago, the city has been the nerve and growth center of civilization. Despite their seemingly insoluble problems, cities are more than ever the creative heart of American society. Indeed, the city and its compounded quandaries—from the problem of race to the issue of law and order—dominate almost all social and political debate in the country today. Ultimately, no city can solve the problems alone, for they belong to the whole society.

Cities are immensely vulnerable; their technology is fragile and their massed populations are interdependent. Yet they also possess a stubborn, stunning and almost blind will to endure. New York did not dissolve in chaos last week. It will probably not fall apart this week or next, or the week after that. With luck, it will never break down entirely. Nonetheless, a nation that prides itself on pragmatism and problem-solving can afford only at its peril to ignore the immense—and immensely complex—challenge of making its cities habitable, enjoyable and governable. Mumford told a Senate committee last year, “Unless human needs and human interactions and human responses are the first consideration, the city, in any valid sense, cannot be said to exist. As Sophocles long ago said: The city is people.’ “