My previous post detailed the Twentieth Century Fund’s relationship with New York City issues and its first task force on New York City’s economic troubles in the 1970s, the Task Force on Prospects and Priorities of New York City.
Despite being widely distributed and well-received in the press, the task force’s report ...A Nice Place to Live did little to influence the continuing decline of the city’s economic health. Correspondence in the Prospects and Priorities of New York City files dated after 1974 shows that interest in the task force’s report did not wane immediately after publication. Letters to the fund through 1975 and 1976 contain queries and suggestions for reconvening the task force, or updating the report, to speak specifically to the looming threat of the city’s bankruptcy. In the Fall 1978 Report to the Trustees, the staff conceded that ...A Nice Place to Live did not predict the imminent risk of default and bankruptcy, as it concentrated so narrowly on discrete problems. However, throughout the mid to late 1970s, other research institutes, such as the Urban Institute and the Community Council of Greater New York, had taken on projects to study the city’s financial collapse and propose solutions to lead to its budgetary stability. As the immediate, critical issues received attention, long-range planning for the future of the New York and its citizens was neglected. Therefore, TCF’s next task force would concentrate on development objectives for the city well beyond the 1977 mayoral election, into the 1980s.
In the 21st century, the Century Foundation continues its work on both domestic and international policy issues, and matters affecting New York City remain in its purview. Prior to last fall’s mayoral election, the Blog of the Century presented a series of posts that outlined priorities for the new mayor. While the city faces nowhere near the scale of crisis that Abe Beame and Ed Koch encountered in the 1970s, a resurgence of many of the same critical issues are present in 2014—the cost of maintaining the public sector, increasing job opportunities, and bolstering the population of young technical workers in New York City. In this way, the Century Foundation’s previous project files are not only useful for contextualizing our present-day issues, but also for providing primary sources that can enhance our understanding of these historical events. And further study of the 1970s fiscal crisis will be aided by accounts of the period from key players—notably, Richard Ravitch’s memoir So Much To Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises, published in April, explores in part the era and his many contributions to New York City, a prime reason his voice was sought for the 1973 Task Force on the Priorities and Prospects of New York City.
While I’ve selected here a subject and time period that I find interesting, the Century Foundation records boast files on hundreds of projects that document the progressive response to and policy solutions for many major political, social, and economic issues that affected our country in the 20th century. In addition to NYPL’s collection description, you can learn more about the fund’s history at the Century Foundation’s excellent timeline of their organizational history, Archives of the Century. We invite you to read more about the records, and email or visit our reading room to speak to an archivist about the collection.
The first and last images in this post are from DOCUMERICA, an Enrivonmental Protection Agency photography project that ran throughout the 1970s. The entire DOCUMERICA series is available from the National Archives and on Flickr.
