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The Fall of a Great American City

“Those things that we do not value, that we do not actively protect, fade away and die.”

Journalist and author Kevin Baker believes that “New York City is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable…Even worse, it’s not something that anyone wants, except for the landlords.” His important book: The Fall of a Great American City, New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence, is a polemic about how life in New York is rapidly changing—and not for the better. How most of us are being priced out of living here while almost everything that made the urban experience extraordinary—theaters, shops, restaurants, and every sort of affordable public amenity—is disappearing.

After ruminating on how commercial rents are surpassing what sales growth could ever support; how landlords will keep a storefront vacant or take a temporary “pop-up” rather than drop rents; how local mom and pops are being lost to branch banks (“…a carpet and a machine”); and how, for many of us, rents far outpace wages, Baker arrives at the conclusion that, “The trouble lies not with the inexorable fact that cities change, but in our failure to deal with that change.”

So if we decide we do not want to become a sterile city of empty glass towers, how do we, as citizens, fix this?

Written by a resident of the Upper West Side for nearly half-a-century, this is the story of what is happening to us, and what we must fight to save. Come be part of the conversation!

Books will be available for sale and signing.

Kevin Baker is a novelist, historian, and journalist. He is a columnist and contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, and is currently working on a documentary being produced by Ken Burns’ Florentine Films. He was a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow in non-fiction and has published in the New York Times, New York magazine, and the Washington Post, among other publications. His published works include the New York historical novels, Dreamland, Paradise Alley, Strivers Row, and The Big Crowd.











When: Tue., Mar. 3, 2020 at 6:30 pm - 7:45 pm
Where: Macaulay Honors College
35 W. 67th St.
212-729-2900
Price: $5
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“Those things that we do not value, that we do not actively protect, fade away and die.”

Journalist and author Kevin Baker believes that “New York City is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable…Even worse, it’s not something that anyone wants, except for the landlords.” His important book: The Fall of a Great American City, New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence, is a polemic about how life in New York is rapidly changing—and not for the better. How most of us are being priced out of living here while almost everything that made the urban experience extraordinary—theaters, shops, restaurants, and every sort of affordable public amenity—is disappearing.

After ruminating on how commercial rents are surpassing what sales growth could ever support; how landlords will keep a storefront vacant or take a temporary “pop-up” rather than drop rents; how local mom and pops are being lost to branch banks (“…a carpet and a machine”); and how, for many of us, rents far outpace wages, Baker arrives at the conclusion that, “The trouble lies not with the inexorable fact that cities change, but in our failure to deal with that change.”

So if we decide we do not want to become a sterile city of empty glass towers, how do we, as citizens, fix this?

Written by a resident of the Upper West Side for nearly half-a-century, this is the story of what is happening to us, and what we must fight to save. Come be part of the conversation!

Books will be available for sale and signing.

Kevin Baker is a novelist, historian, and journalist. He is a columnist and contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, and is currently working on a documentary being produced by Ken Burns’ Florentine Films. He was a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow in non-fiction and has published in the New York Times, New York magazine, and the Washington Post, among other publications. His published works include the New York historical novels, Dreamland, Paradise Alley, Strivers Row, and The Big Crowd.

Buy tickets/get more info now