Manhattan projects

Moving beyond the usual good-versus-evil story that pits master-planner Robert Moses against the plucky neighborhood advocate Jane Jacobs, Samuel Zipp sheds new light on the rise and fall of New York's urban renewal in the decades after World War II. 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. -- Publisher description.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.