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, and stop-and-frisk became routine policing. Black and Brown New Yorkers bore the brunt of the city's new modes of inequality.