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This chapter examines the history of the Columbia Broadcasting System's (CBS) deal for the renovation of the Yankee Stadium during the 1970s. New York Yankees President Michael Burke made known his concerns about the condition of the stadium to New York City Mayor John Lindsay. These concerns included inadequate parking and traffic congestion. In mid-1972, Lindsay had devised a plan for the city to purchase the stadium, renovate it to address Burke's concerns and lease it to the Yankees.

This chapter assesses the roles played by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and New York City mayor John Lindsay, as well as William Ronan, in transforming the transportation system. Ronan, Rockefeller, and Lindsay all realized that improving public transportation was critical to strengthening the economy of the city and the region. They were also well aware of the benefits of a Second Avenue subway, since all three of them lived on the Upper East Side. After Lindsay failed to reorganize the transportation agencies, Rockefeller and Ronan developed their own grand vision for the region's transportation network, and in December of 1966, Ronan stepped down from his post as secretary to begin implementing their plan. At the beginning of the state's 1967 legislative session, Rockefeller and Ronan announced their two-pronged approach. First, they proposed integrating the New York City Transit Authority and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA) into the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority (MCTA). In addition, Rockefeller and Ronan would seek voter approval to borrow $2.5 billion that would be dedicated for roadway and public transportation improvements across the state. In 1967, the governor and Ronan obtained the support they needed to transform the transportation network, a feat that Lindsay had not been able to accomplish.

The 1960s saw Jews and Catholics in New York City converge in their position on race relations. Both groups began the decade as strong supporters of integration but eventually turned into skeptics of its social value. There was a possibility that the city's Irish, Italian, and Jewish voters might forge a united electoral block and form a cross-ethnic backlash constituency. This did not happen, however. There was neither substantial defection by Jewish Democrats nor a sudden, fundamental political turn by Irish and Italian voters. This chapter examines the role played by race in New York's 1969 mayoral race that pitted John Lindsay, John Marchi, Mario Procaccino, Robert Wagner Jr., Herman Badillo, and novelist Norman Mailer. More specifically, it analyzed the trends in voting by Jews and Catholics during the elections.

This chapter details the beginning of the construction of the Second Avenue subway. In October of 1972, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor John Lindsay presided over the Second Avenue subway's groundbreaking ceremony at Second Avenue and 103rd Street. However, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) chair, William Ronan, was dishonest about both the timeline and the funding of the construction. While Ronan raised false expectations about the city's contribution, the governor misled people about the federal government's contribution. By 1973, the financial health of both the MTA and the city had become so dire that not only was the Second Avenue subway's future in jeopardy, but so was Ronan's entire expansion program. Meanwhile, New York City Comptroller Abe Beame was elected New York City's new mayor. After telling David Yunich—Ronan's successor at the MTA—that he planned to reallocate funds that had been designated for the Second Avenue subway, Beame set up a transportation policy committee consisting of his deputy mayors and senior officials. Beame's six-year transit construction program would not include any more funds for the Second Avenue subway.

This chapter focuses on John Lindsay’s appointment of Robert O. Lowery to serve as the FDNY’s Fire Commissioner during the onset of one of the most tumultuous periods in the department’s history, “the War Years.” Within the department itself, the first half of “the War years were characterized by a highly racialized, contentious, internal struggle for institutional control that escalated throughout John Lindsay’s and Robert Lowery’s two terms in office. Efforts to reform departmental race relations, increase minority access and representation, and maintain fire protection levels were complicated by budget problems, escalating racial, political, and cultural conflicts; rising workloads; labor militancy; and white backlash.

This chapter describes events between 1964 and 1965. These include local civil rights activism and awareness of the southern movement in New York City; the registration of black voters in Brooklyn; Andy Cooper’s support for the candidacy of Republican John V. Lindsay as mayor; passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965; and Lindsay’s election victory.

This chapter is the first of three that explore the cultural logic of official efforts to make sense of the riots. It tells the story of the presidentially appointed Kerner Commission and its nearly failed effort to produce a unanimous report out of the melee of data and narrative it collected. It tracks the fraught cultural production of rioting by a federal commission committed, in Great Society style, to the inclusion of community knowledge and desires in its assessment of the violence. It pays particular attention to commission members’ field trips to Newark and the tension that developed between the commission and Mayor Addonizio, who came to represent for the commission the sort of recalcitrant local power structure that community action was designed to disrupt.

Written by Gretchen H. Gerzina, this chapter examines research into the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle and probes the resurgence of interest in her story as the subject of film and television projects. Born to an African woman, Maria Belle, and British naval officer Sir John Lindsay, Gerzina describes how Dido’s legal status has often been misunderstood and misrepresented, yet modern research has made it clear that she was never a slave and was born free in London. As the grand niece of William Murray, the first earl of Mansfield, Dido spent much of her life comfortably as part of his household at Kenwood House in London before marrying a white Frenchman. During her years at Kenwood House, she was the subject of a double portrait with her cousin Elizabeth Murray that Gerzina explains has played a large role in sparking the modern imagination about what her life was like as a mixed-race member of elite British society.

This chapter explores how, entering the 1970s, following John Lindsay's reelection, the Liberal Party remained influential. Politicians still beat their paths to the party's door to appeal for its support, and in 1974 the Liberals helped elect a governor. And the party still endorsed a progressive program. But at other times, the Liberal Party seemed a hollow shell, held together by the constant machinations of its de facto leader, vice chair Alex Rose. Moreover, the party seemed like nothing but the kind of political machine that it professed to despise, and Rose seemed like nothing but an old-fashioned boss. And there were times that even Rose's supposed political genius could not carry the Liberals to electoral victory. Nevertheless, when Rose died at the end of 1976, the party lost both its connection to its ideological origins and its chief political asset.

In 1965, when John Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City, “the ungovernable city” was spiraling economically, and crime rates were on the rise. That same year, only two major films were shot on location in New York. Just two years later, in 1967, forty-two features were shot in the city, for one straightforward reason: the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. One actor embodied the New Hollywood vision of the city: Al Pacino. This chapter engages with Pacino’s films of this era—spanning from Panic in Needle Park to Cruising, with Dog Day Afternoon as centerpiece—to examine how New York City, which came to symbolize all that was wrong with the American city in the troubled 1970s.

This chapter tells the story of Bill vanden Heuvel's work with the New York City prison system. Following riots in the Tombs detention center and a rash of suicides in late 1970, Mayor John Lindsay asked vanden Heuvel to serve as Chair of the Board of Correction, a post he held for three years. During that time, he made numerous proposals to improve conditions in the New York City prison system, developing novel approaches to health care, education, training and living conditions. His legal training gave him an eye for spotting inequities in bail and sentencing procedures, and he worked closely with advocates both inside and outside the prisons to create a system that could be remedial as well as punitive. The chapter includes his speech at a service of concern after deadly riots broke out at Attica State Prison in September 1971. His ideas for improving media coverage of the prisons are presented in his article "The Press and the Prisons," first published in June 1972.

This chapter considers how films produced in New York City played to an emergent anti-urban political culture. With crime and disorder as the feature antagonist in the New York film cycle of the late 1960s and the 1970s, the vigilante became a vital counterpoint to the perceived incompetence of municipal police departments. Escaping the dying city also served as a powerful motif in the period’s films. The motion picture industry brings the homegrown narrative of New York to a national audience.