In a book praised by Times Literary Supplement as "richly detailed and thoughtfully written" and by Wall Street Journal as "compelling," Samuel Zipp sheds new light on the rise and fall of urban renewal in the decades after World War II. Focusing on four iconic "Manhattan projects"--the United Nations building, Stuyvesant Town, Lincoln Center, and the great swaths of public housing in East Harlem--Zipp unearths a host of forgotten stories and characters that flesh out the conventional history of urban renewal. He shows how boosters hoped to make Manhattan the capital of modernity and a symbol of American power, but even as the builders executed their plans, a chorus of critics revealed the dark side of those visions, attacking urban renewal for perpetuating deindustrialization, racial segregation, and class division, for uprooting thousands, and for implanting a new, alienating cityscape. Urban renewal was not merely a failed planning ideal, Zipp concludes, but also a crucial phase in the transformation of New York into a world city, but one mired in urban crisis. The book won Honorable Mention for the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians.
Industry Reviews
"Samuel Zipp's Manhattan Projects is a significant and welcome contribution to this scholarship...[A] rich, detailed, and well-documented historical analysis."--Journal of American History
"Samuel Zipp's gracefully-written Manhattan Projects offers detailed, well-illustrated case studies of famous urban renewal schemes to make a larger point about urban planning in modern America."--Contemporary Sociology
"Zipp's rigorous, thoughtful, and careful argument is a guide out of the intellectual dead end represented by the conventional narrative of urban renewal. He both reframes much of our existing knowledge of the subject and then adds to it with details that directly and indirectly cast the planning history of twentieth-century New York in a fresh and convincing light. This is a masterpiece of research, synthesis, and persuasion."--Timothy Mennel, Journal of
Urban History
"Zipp offers a fresh perspective on this dispiriting tale. Unlike many of his scholarly predecessors, who regarded the anti-urban agenda of policy makers as a given (why else would they have so destroyed our cities?), Mr. Zipp tells his story from the point of view of policy makers who loved cities and who thought they were making a 'benevolent intervention'...compelling...[An] absorbing account."--Wall Street Journal
"Giving projects built by Robert Moses and the New York City Housing Authority their due, Professor Zipp argues that urban renewal cannot be measured merely by the number of structures that were bulldozed or built. Rather, he makes a convincing case that the policy also transformed 'the terms by which cities were understood' and recast debates over 'the impacts of modernism, progress, public and private power, and cold war ideology on culture, politics and
social life.'"--New York Times
"In prose that balances academic rigor and storytelling Mr. Zipp makes his case with a compelling re-creation of the postwar historical moment Manhattan Projects takes long strides toward rescuing urban renewal from today's regnant discourse, which brushstrokes the monolithic towers that are now our visual touchstones for poverty are understood as the work of hubris at best and, at worst, anti-poor and anti-urban."--New York Observer
"Compelling...challenge[s] readers to rethink what are fast becoming standard misconceptions of New York City's history."--Next American City
"Intense and meticulously detailed."--New York Journal of Books
"Lucidly written and intricately argued."--The Berkshire Eagle
"Beyond his capacity for detailed research, Zipp's greatest talent as an historian may be his ability to pursue the various threads of his arguments to their conclusions, leaving the door open to the many ironies that have typified New York's conflicted history."--New York History
"Richly detailed and thoughtfully written."--Times Literary Supplement
"Thoroughly researched and enlivened by an array of source materials. Highly recommended."--CHOICE
