The Three Faces of New York

In 1956, the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit research agency, asked the Harvard School of Public Administration to conduct an economic and demographic survey of the New York metropolitan region—a 7,000-square-mile, 22-county complex that, with its core, inner ring, and outer ring radiating forty miles out from the Empire State Building, and a population of sixteen million persons, forms the largest urban aggregate in the United States—and to project these economic and demographic trends as far as 1985.

The fruits of the three-year study have been recorded in nine books (one of which has yet to be published) , and they constitute the most exhaustive analysis of the region (or of any detailed area of the United State) since the original nine-volume New York Regional Plan studies, which were concluded three decades ago. A single volume, Metropolis 1985, by Raymond Vernon, the director of the survey, interprets the results of the more detailed researches.

Mr. Vernon and most of his associates are economists (with the exception of the historian Oscar Handlin, who did the volume on “The Newcomers,” and the political scientist Robert Wood, who is writing the study of local government). They see the growth of cities largely as a function of changes in market patterns, and these, in turn, as a function of resource location, transportation costs, and labor supply. Sociological nuances—such as the thought that New York triumphed over Philadelphia in the early nineteenth-century race for commercial supremacy (the physical port advantages of each were about equal) because the freewheeling traders found the fluid ways of New York more congenial than the already rigidified class structure of Philadelphia; or that the distinctive tempo of New York life in the first decades of the twentieth century reflected the emergence of a fast-moving and new type of manufacturing enterprise, with easy access, high turnover rate, and sudden rises and falls in wealth; or that the remarkable efflorescence of corporate building in New York in the nineteen-fifties was due to prestige rather than to economic need—all are awkwardly suggested, rather than elaborated and explored. Yet no picture of an urban civilization can be complete without such sociological considerations, for, just as good will is often an intangible yet real element in the assets of a business firm, so do status structure, cultural environment, and entertainment resources become inextricable components of the character of a city.