NY & LA

Back recently from a work-related trip to NYC, that NY vs LA thing started to get to me. Seems e'rebody's got something to say or write on it! Here's a review of a book with some interesting facts and findings about both cities......New Angeles anyone?......


REVIEW: David Halle, New York & Los Angeles: Politics, Society, and Culture: A Comparative View, University of Chicago Press, 2003

by Mariana Mogilevich


At opposite sides of the continent sit the United States' two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, paired beacons of urban America. New York is the modern city par excellence. Now that the modern age is over, Los Angeles embodies the future of the city, for better or worse. Shallow/deep, tall/sprawling, the dichotomy is so ingrained in our conception of both places it's hardly necessary to say more, though the universal acceptance of these pairings shows to what extent the two cities derive their identities from one another. Like any good opposition, each extreme bears within it some elements of the other. In the end, it would almost seem natural for the NY-LA dialectic to resolve itself in the formation of a new ur-city-New Angeles? So, how different are New York and Los Angeles, really? Does one represent the future of the American city more than the other? Are the myths that define them firmly based in reality? There is only one way to find out, and NY & LA does so in the most intense application of the compare and contrast approach the world has ever seen. This ambitious tome seeks to find the truth behind our perceptions of both cities by the numbers. Twenty-three contributors submitted every imaginable aspect of the cities to statistical analysis. As insane as this approach may seem, it successfully achieves a comprehensive view of NY and LA, with no shortage of surprising findings. The results will become ever more encyclopedic with the release of a companion CD with additional statistics and updates (which will also be available online). This total picture takes into account immigration statistics and patterns of residential segregation. It goes on to look at crime rates, welfare reform, public education, and city governance. The book even looks at the cities' respective art worlds (conclusion: they're growing more alike). It isn't exhaustive-clearly it couldn't be-but the book's breadth is nonetheless impressive. The book's depth often matches its ambitious breadth. Social science statistics can be flimsy-while essential, they can be manipulated to demonstrate just about anything. As befits an academic volume, NY & LA is packed with charts, tables, and graphs of all kinds, far more than the casual reader will care to examine. But within many of the articles lie more novel approaches to tricky questions. In a discussion of the fact and fiction of crime in NY and LA, the authors examine local fears of gang violence by going to the newspapers. The word "gang" appeared all over the LA Times in the 1990s, used even to explain crime stories with no proof of gang involvement. In The New York Times, on the other hand, "gang" was used as a verb during the same period of time, illustrating a local view of crime as random, ad hoc-far removed from Los Angeles' obsession with organized gangs of violent youths. Interestingly, analysis of crime statistics shows that teenage homicide victims and suspects in both cities are (and were throughout the '90s) at comparable levels, suggesting that although our impressions of the city's relative criminal patterns differ widely, the realities do not. The two cities faced similar challenges, but LA was ill-equipped to deal with them. With less oversight of and, consequently, less confidence in the LAPD, lawlessness ruled the day, in the papers if not on the streets. Is Los Angeles, with the Rodney King riots, the capital of social unrest? Compare riots of the post-war era in both cities-really compare-and you will find far more unrest in the recent history of the New York area. Immigration naturally looms large over this book. Recent attitudes towards crime, welfare, and education in each city have largely evolved in reaction to the pressures of a rapidly changing urban population. And immigrants will continue to play an enormous role in shaping each city. Los Angeles has been far more hostile to its newcomers under the perception that they are "threatening" in their homogeneity and illegal status, while New York City continues to be far more welcoming, in policy and practice, to immigrants from all over the world. But in this case too, the cities are becoming more alike: tolerance in LA is growing along with the political clout of immigrants, while in NY, traditional patterns of immigrant settlement are changing in a very West-Coast fashion as more newcomers settle directly in suburban areas. NY & LA looks closely at new Latino and Asian populations, not with the usual nativist biases, but as a new instance of an age-old tradition of immigration and acculturation. The book insists on the importance of looking "correctly" at the U.S. Latino population-to understand that a majority of Latinos also consider themselves white, and to recognize that our reluctance to see them as such repeats an earlier refusal to see European "ethnics" as white. It is once again a question of taking a fresh look at an issue we think we know all too well, only to learn that we've not been seeing clearly. Our perceptions of cities are shaped over time, and over time our memory makes selections. In this case, the facts clear up some longstanding confusion. Which city is more segregated? It's New York-we just don't realize it because everyone rides the subway together. And think New York's centralization is antithetical to Los Angeles' sprawl? Actually, New York City has barely recovered its population since the exodus of the 1970s and '80s-only by 2000 did the city center regain and then surpass its 1970 population. Visions of Manhattan's wealth and glamour aside, all the money turns out to go home with commuters, just like in LA. The authors show that the sprawling "LA-ification of the New York metropolis is far advanced," but also insist that a dense, walkable "New York-ification of Los Angeles' inner core has been underway for some time," (a claim recently bolstered by Frank Gehry's much feted addition to downtown). Considering that both phenomena have their good points and bad, the book's conclusions are simultaneously scary and exciting-and a clue to the possible synthesized American metropolis of the future.