City of Fortune
Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York
by Mason B. Williams
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Pub Date Jun 23 2026 | Archive Date May 31 2026
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Description
A powerful history of New York’s transformation from a city of middle-class aspiration to one of entrenched inequality.
Postwar New York City famously expired in a tableau of burning Bronx tenements, subway graffiti, crushing debt, and the tabloid headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The city reemerged from the ashes to reach new heights, whether in stock averages or the gleaming pencil towers punctuating midtown. But at ground level the city’s basic institutions—its housing, its schools, its public safety—were cracking. The city was rebuilt on a foundation of deep inequality.
This elegant history traces the making of contemporary New York over the half-century from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s to the Covid-19 pandemic. With finance and real estate driving growth, affordable housing became scarce, charter schools absorbed resources, stop-and-frisk became routine policing. Black and Brown New Yorkers bore the brunt of the city’s new modes of inequality.
About the Author: Mason B. Williams is the author of City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York, an Editors’ Choice of the New York Times Book Review. He teaches at Williams College.
Advance Praise
"For readers interested in understanding why contemporary New York City is so stratified and hierarchical, City of Fortune is essential. Researched with exceptional precision and grace, and beautifully written, the book offers not only a history of New York?Mason B. Williams tells the story of the remaking of the entire United States in the late twentieth century. This is a remarkable accomplishment." -Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City
"In City of Fortune, Mason B. Williams revisits and revises the political history of New York City since the 1970s by directing our attention to the ways in which a persistent deprivation affects every New Yorker?rich, middle class, and poor." -David Nasaw, author of The Wounded Generation
"Across every page of City of Fortune rages a battle for the soul of contemporary New York City. Mason B. Williams offers an urgent and unsparing portrait of a metropolis that failed to learn the lessons of its 1970s collapse, and instead traded one crisis for another." -Bench Ansfield, author of Born in Flames
"Anyone who wants to understand what has happened to New York City over the last fifty years must read City of Fortune, a vivid, penetrating, and richly textured account of the political battles that shaped the city’s schools, housing, and policing." -Elizabeth Blackmar, coauthor of The Park and the People
"A lucid and penetrating analysis of the interwoven forces that transformed policy approaches to the inequalities of New York City." -John Mollenkopf, author of A Phoenix in the Ashes
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780393292855 |
| PRICE | $38.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 400 |
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