New York in History and Board Games, #4

23. August 2026 um 17:42

Welcome back New York in history and board games! We’ve seen the city’s humble beginnings, its rise to America’s first city, and its glory days as the epitome of the modern metropolis. Today, we wrap up by covering the city’s crisis and nadir in the second half of the 20^th century as well as the New York of our time – as always, with board games. Let’s go!

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The Crisis of Modernity

New York had replaced London as the financial center of the world after the Great War. In the following years, the city complemented its financial with cultural heft, helped by an influx of refugees from Nazi tyranny in Europe. With Paris under German occupation, New York became the art capital of the world, a primacy the city would not relinquish after the war.

Where money and art met, power would follow: When the newly founded United Nations needed a headquarters, New York was the obvious choice. The UN building, a sleek colossus of glass and steel, embodied the new age. Symbolically, New York was the capital of the world now.

New York’s glory moment as the epitome of modernity was not to last – by a good deal because modernity undermined itself. New York’s transformation from manufacturing to services had made the city richer and provided well-paying white-collar jobs for the old and new middle classes, but it also meant that demand for unskilled laborers dried up. At the same time, both domestic and foreign migration to New York increased: Black Americans from the South arrived as well as Puerto Ricans in large numbers. When the federal limits on immigration from non-European countries were lifted in the 1960s, many Latin Americans and Asians followed. The migration of ethnic minorities to New York City was complemented by the white flight to the suburbs. Since 1990s, New York is a majority-minority city – that is, a majority of New Yorkers belong to an ethnic minority.

*Chinatown* at the end of a game with many developed businesses. Photo taken by BoardGameGeek user EndersGame, used with permission.

As in many American cities, the individual ethnicities typically cluster in separate neighborhoods. Manhattan’s Chinatown, first a center of Chinese immigration in the mid-1800s, grew after 1965 and became a vibrant part of Lower Manhattan. Today, it is also popular with tourists and New Yorkers from other neighborhoods, especially for its varied food. A small part of Manhattan’s Chinatown between Canal Street and Worth Street forms the map for Chinatown (Karsten Hartwig, Alea), a game about negotiation and business development.

New York’s demographic changes posed economic challenges. The new immigrants often didn’t have the skills required for the service and knowledge economy, and the skilled middle classes emigrating to the counties around New York also paid their taxes there. Sometimes, their employers left the city as well, now that they could find the workforce further from the center (and would pay lower taxes than in New York), and even if they didn’t, the threat alone was usually enough to receive a tax rebate from municipal administration.

The tragedy of this decentralization which sapped the economic strength of New York is that the city helped to bring it on itself. The subways of the early 20^th century had decentralized the city, but they had also brought quality of life. The transport policy which the city in the person of Robert Moses (remember him from last time?) enacted had all of the decentralization and none of the quality of life. To summarize it in two words: Road Rage.

Moses led a crusade against public transport. The subways remained, but all the elevated trains and trolleys which had serviced every corner of New York in the first half of the 20^th century were phased out by 1957. This development was not limited to Moses: The Pennsylvania Railroad demolished Penn Station, the heart of New York’s long-distance rail system and an architectural landmark of the old New York. Instead of rails, expressways cut through New York, attracting an ever larger avalanche of cars for which they never had enough lanes.

The expressways exemplified Moses’s astounding powers: He had the authority to appropriate land for their construction, evict the inhabitants and destroy their buildings. The expressways cut through neighborhoods or dispersed them completely. The construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway required relocating 60,000 people and pierced the heart of the South Bronx, even though a less destructive path for it could have been built just one block further south – but Moses preferred the optimal trajectory of the road, regardless of the human cost.

Box cover of *Cross Bronx Expressway*. What looks more vibrant, the building standing in the demolition or the graffito on it? Image ©GMT Games.

The tension between city development and human cost is the central theme of Cross Bronx Expressway (Non-Breaking Space, GMT Game). Three players – the city, the local communities, and private enterprise – want to shape the South Bronx according to their vision, but if they play too selfishly, neglecting the overall state of the neighborhood (or the needs of the other players), incarceration and bankruptcy ruin the South Bronx and everyone loses. There are many city-building games, but barely any with a vision as bold as Cross-Bronx Expressway.

The people of the South Bronx were poor in economic and cultural capital. Any resistance to the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway was bound to be shrugged off as the complaints of people who didn’t know any better about the requirements of modern city planning. The same could not be said about the Manhattanites. When Moses planned for the Lower Manhattan Expressway to cut through the island, demolishing dozens of residential blocks and disposing of Washington Square Park altogether, resistance formed. Jane Jacobs, an assistant editor at the magazine Architectural Forum, both organized the community on the ground and published the bible of anti-Moses urban planning: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, an argument for putting the needs of residents first.

As Moses’s vision of the modern city as a sprawling, motorized metropolis lost its shine, his hold over the city weakened. The planned expressways through Lower and Midtown Manhattan were never built. By 1968, Robert Moses had been removed from the last of his many municipal and state posts. Yet as infrastructure spending has dried up since the late 1960s, contemporary New York is still very much Moses’s creation.

Debt and Crime

Above, I noted the two losing conditions for Cross Bronx Expressway: Debt (both municipal and on the community level) and crime (or, rather incarceration levels among the population). That’s the historical outcome – the New York’s crisis in the last third of the 20^th century.

The debt crisis had two origins: On the one hand, New York’s tax base was eroded by the suburbanization described above. On the other, the city’s budget massively expanded in the mid-20^th century. By the late 1960s, it was the second-largest public budget of the United States, right after the federal budget. New York City attempted to provide what state and federal governments would not – chiefly free higher education and the best, most comprehensive health care in the nation. That promise rested precariously on federal support. When federal spending on municipal programs was sharply cut in the early 1970s, New York’s financial structure came crashing down. By 1975, the city was practically bankrupt. The state legislature created oversight bodies which rendered the mayor unable to do anything but implement radical spending cuts. In the end, a federal loan saved the city from defaulting.

There’s a lot of potential for speculation why Ravensburger remade *Scotland Yard*, a game set in London, into *N.Y. Chase*, set in New York, in 1999. Still riding that wave of New York as a high-crime city? New York being sufficiently safe again to be appropriate for a family game? I guess it was just that New York oozed “cool metropolis”. Image ©Ravensburger.

The cuts to municipal expenditure ended the New York’s experiment as an all-providing city. They also made New Yorkers poorer, sicker, and less safe. In the 1980s, drugs, AIDS, and crime rocked the city. The crime epidemic ebbed off in the 1980s, in parallel to the nation-wide development. The exact reasons are still debated.

The city’s debt remained high through the 1990s – Democratic mayor David Dinkins expanded spending again, while Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani cut taxes. The newly dynamic economy, however, made more than up for that. New York seemed to have a bright future ahead.

The 21^st Century

Instead, New York suffered calamity at the dawn of the new century: On September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorists hijacked four planes in the Eastern United States. One crashed, one hit the Pentagon. The other two were piloted into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The impact, fire, and collapse of the towers killed almost 2,800 people in New York – the largest terrorist attack in history.

Mayor Giuliani’s energetic, but measured response rallied the city (and briefly made him America’s most popular politician) as an immense wave of national and international solidarity flowed to New York. While the immediate damage was soon taken care of and plans for new buildings to replace the old World Trade Center were made, the shadow of the 9/11 attacks continues to hang over New York: The dust from the collapsing buildings contained asbestos, heavy metals, and toxic chemicals. Until now, around 7,000 additional lives have been claimed by the attacks, especially among the firefighters and the volunteers who helped search for survivors (and often found corpses) and clear the rubble.

A heavily armed man walks into uncertainty… symptomatic for the war on terror. Image ©Rodger B. MacGowan.

The attacks did not only change New York, but also the world. The US government, aided by many of its allies around the world, embarked on a global “war on terror” in response, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

Today, New York remains a city of many facets. It is still the center of global capitalism as well as a hotbed for anti-capitalist activism (like the Occupy Wall Street protests) – and its new mayor Zohran Mamdani is a socialist.

Forget that Mamdani dude, mutated T-Rex is the new ruler of New York! From *King of New York.*

New York remains not only an economic, but also a cultural center, the place where aspiring young artists of all fields go to make it big – photographers, musicians, monsters… Yes, monsters. King of New York (Richard Garfield, IELLO) is a remake of King of Tokyo with a twist: A good deal of the victory points come from your monster becoming a superstar and enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame.

After decades as a homebrew game, wargame publisher TSR acquired the rights to publish a commercial version of *The Broadway Game* to enter the family gaming market. Image ©TSR.

Sometimes, culture and economy go together: The Broadway Game (Ernie Parmentier, Tactical Studies Rules), eagerly played by generations of actors, directors, and playwrights, started out as a Monopoly variant.

Most of all, however, New York always changes. The city reinvents itself permanently. To many Americans, it seems foreign because of that – and to many foreigners, quintessentially American.