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Kevin Baker

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The Fall of a Great American City: New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence Kindle Edition

by Kevin Baker (Author), James Howard Kunstler (Foreword) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 9 ratings

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The Fall of a Great American City is the story of what is happening today in New York City and in many other cities across America. It is about how the crisis of affluence is now driving out everything we love most about cities: small shops, decent restaurants, public space, street life, affordable apartments, responsive government, beauty, idiosyncrasy, each other. This is the story of how we came to lose so much—how the places we love most were turned over to land bankers, billionaires, the worst people in the world, and criminal landlords—and how we can - and must - begin to take them back.

Co-published with Harper's Magazine, where an earlier version of this essay was originally published in 2018.

As New York City approaches the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. By unremarkable I don’t just mean periodic, slump-in-the-art-world, all-the-bands-suck, cinema-is-dead boring. I mean flatlining. No longer a significant cultural entity but a blank white screen of mere existence. I mean The-World’s-Largest-Gated-Community-with-a-few-cupcake-shops. For the first-time in our history, creative-youngpeople- will-no-longer want-to-come-here boring. Even, New-York-is-over boring. Or worse, New York is like everywhere else. Unremarkable. This is not some new phenomenon, but a cancer that’s been metastasizing on the city for decades now. Even worse, it’s not something that anyone wants, except the landlords, and not even all of them. What’s happening to New York now—what’s already happened to most of Manhattan, its core, and what is happening in every American city of means, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Seattle, you name it—is something that almost nobody wants, but everybody gets. As such, the current urban crisis exemplifies our wider crisis: an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.

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About the Author

Kevin Baker was born in August 1958, in Englewood, New Jersey, and grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts, a small town on the North Shore. He graduated from Columbia University in New York City in 1980, and since then has earned his living as a writer and editor.

His first novel, Sometimes You See It Coming, based loosely on the life of Ty Cobb, but set in the modern day, was published in hardcover by Crown in 1993 and in paperback by Harper Paperbacks in the spring of 2003. Dreamland, part of Baker’s New York‚ City of Fire trilogy was published by HarperCollins in 1999, and in paperback the following year. Paradise Alley was published by HarperCollins in 2002, and the third and final volume of the trilogy, Strivers Row, which was published in February, 2006.

Kevin was the chief historical researcher on Harold Evans’ best–selling history, The American Century, published by Knopf in 1999. He wrote the monthly “In the News” column for American Heritage magazine from 1998-2007, and has been published in the New York Times, the New Republic, Politico.com, New York magazine, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and Harper’s magazine, among other publications.

He is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow for nonfiction. Baker is married and lives in New York City.

James Howard Kunstler wrote The Geography of Nowhere, “Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.” Home From Nowhere was a continuation of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies.

His next book in the series, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, published by Simon & Schuster / Free Press, is a look a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, an inquiry into what makes them great (or miserable), and in particular what America is going to do with it’s mutilated cities.

This was followed by The Long Emergency, published in 2005 about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other “converging catastrophes of the 21st Century.”

Mr. Kunstler is also the author of twelve novels and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues.

Mr. Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the State University of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine.

He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA , the APA., and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

He lives in Washington County, upstate New York.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07THCLRJS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ City Point Press (October 8, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 8, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 14255 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 178 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1947951149

Best Sellers Rank: #1,274,352 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #535 in Urban Sociology
- #646 in Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- #805 in Real Estate Investments (Kindle Store)

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Kevin Baker

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Kevin Baker (born 1958) is an American novelist, historian, and journalist. He was born in Englewood, New Jersey, and grew up in New Jersey and Rockport, Massachusetts.

He has been a professional writer since the age of 13, working originally for the Gloucester Daily Times, Gloucester, Mass., as a stringer covering covering school-boy sports. He had to learn to type to keep the job. He graduated from Columbia University, where he majored in political science, in 1980.

Baker is the author of the forthcoming novel, The Big Crowd (Houghton Mifflin, 2013), a work of historical fiction about political corruption and one of the most infamous mob murders in New York City history. He is also the co-author of the forthcoming Reggie Jackson memoir, Becoming Mr. October, due out in October, 2013, from Doubleday.

Baker's "City of Fire" trilogy, published by HarperCollins , consisted of the following historical novels: Dreamland (1999); the bestselling Paradise Alley (2002); and Strivers Row (2006)--all concerning critical moments in the history of New York and America. Paradise Alley was the winner of the 2003 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction, and the American Book Award.

Other works include a contemporary baseball novel called Sometimes You See it Coming (1993, Crown), and the graphic novel, Luna Park, illustrated by Danijel Zezelj (DC Comics, 2009). Baker was chief historical researcher on Harold Evans's illustrated history of the United States, The American Century. He is also the author of America, The Story of Us (Melcher, 2010), the companion book to the History Channel series of the same name, and wrote the new final chapter for the reissue of Baseball, the companion book to Ken Burns' 10-part film, "Baseball," which has aired on public television.

Baker resides in New York, where he is a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine. He was formerly a columnist for American Heritage magazine and the New York Observer, and is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Military History, and many other periodicals. Baker has appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and The Colbert Report, and is a member of the board of the Society of American Historians, and the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.