On the contrary, the administration’s policies on media and urban planning were “richly interrelated.” The link between the preservation of the city and its representation was not an accident, McLain Clutter argues in his book Imaginary Apparatus: New York City and its Mediated Representation, published by Park Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. “For the first time,” the mayor later observed, “our parks and museums, our streets and courthouses, our libraries and monuments, all these things that make New York unique, have been made available to film people.” And film people would make them available to the millions who watched movies and television shows set in the city, forever changing the way the world saw New York, and engendering millions of long-distance attachments that would, before long, be manifest in record numbers of tourists.

With it, Lindsay created the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, which would show New York to the world. His Urban Design Group spearheaded the protection of Little Italy, TriBeCa, and the South Street Seaport.īut perhaps Lindsay’s most lasting contribution to New York’s built environment was his Executive Order Number 10, issued fifty years ago this spring. John Lindsay, the mayor who took office in 1966, oversaw the application of those changes and brought to City Hall a personal appreciation for the city’s historic fabric. The emphasis on preservation and continuity was formalized here in the 1961 Zoning Resolution and the 1965 Landmarks Law. The stocks of both multi-family housing and office buildings are now older, on average, than at any point in the twentieth century.

“Let the cities perish,” the housing reformer Carol Aronovici wrote in 1932, “so that we may have great and beautiful cities.”įor a number of reasons, including population decline, historic preservation, government policy, and the declining rate of progress in engineering, that churning process has long since stopped in New York. Building lifespans grew shorter, not longer, with technical advances, economic pressure, and changing tastes. For most of its history, the American city has been in a state of ceaseless, mounting flux.

Suburban Gentleman by John Lindsey