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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Games Referenced

Chinatown (Karsten Hartwig, Alea)

Cross Bronx Expressway (Non-Breaking Space, GMT Games)

N.Y. Chase (Projekt Team III, Ravensburger)

Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? (Volko Ruhnke, GMT Games)

King of New York (Richard Garfield, IELLO)

The Broadway Game (Ernie Parmentier, Tactical Studies Rules)

Further Reading

For a concise introduction, especially focused on local politics, see Lankevich, George J.: New York City. A Short History, New York University Press, New York City, NY/London 1998.

If you want a treatment which is both more in-depth and more journalistic (and lavishly illustrated) and don’t mind its history practically ending around 1970, see the book version of the 17-hour PBS documentary from 1999: Burns, Ric/Sanders, James/Ades, Lisa: New York. An Illustrated History, Knopf, New York City, NY 2001.

The magisterial biography of Robert Moses is Caro, Robert A.: The Power Broker. Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Knopf, New York City, NY 1974.

Back to the history of New York City! We have begun with the city’s origin before the founding of the United States and left off in the 1880s in the last post – when New York was undeniably the economic and cultural center of the United States. Today, we are covering New York in its most iconic form as a moloch of steel, concrete, and millions of people. A chronological narrative will not help us here. Instead, we adopt a thematic approach and look the economy, construction, infrastructure, and culture which made New York from the late 19^th to the mid-20^th century the model city of high modernity.

If you want to read more posts like this – for example, the next instalment in the New York series – I strongly recommend you subscribe to the blog: All new posts in your inbox right when they go live!

Economy: Transformation

New York had been America’s most dynamic hub for trade and manufacturing for decades. Yet the city’s riches had been shared unequally, just like the risks in producing them. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, New York’s working class grew more assertive and found more political support to improve their lives: For example, the three Tenement House Acts of 1867, 1879, and 1901 mandated such luxuries as windows in every apartment and toilets in every building.

The 1909/1910 textile worker strikes led to improved pay and shorter hours. Just one year later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan burned down and 146 garment workers died – many of them unable to escape through the staircase because management kept the doors locked during shifts. The fire catastrophe led to a public outcry against such practices and New York state introduced better workplace and fire safety regulations.

The garment workers were in some ways emblematic for the New York working class – most of them were young immigrants (especially Jewish and Italian). In another, they represented a shift – almost all of them were women, and their struggle for better working conditions mirrored the force of the American women’s movement in the political arena.

In one way, however, they represented New York’s present, but not its future: The industrialization of the 19^th century had turned New York into the largest manufacturing hub of the world. Yet manufacturing, the physical production of goods, ran out of steam when the improved productivity provided most people in the United States with most of their basic needs. Eager customers were thus not to be taken for granted anymore. Instead, they had to be wooed and their desires – for items of whose existence they had recently been still ignorant – awakened. New York became a hotbed for the growing advertisement industry (with which Madison Avenue is synonymous until today) as well as for shopping (here, Fifth Avenue is the symbolic street). Our age of trends, shopping as a leisure activity, and overconsumption cannot be imagined without New York.

In the 19^th century, foreign capital had funded the expansion into the American West, but now the capital flows reversed: American capital was instrumental in financing the Allies’ Great War effort. At the end of the Great War, America was for the first time a net creditor nation. Its role in the international financial system expanded after the war as American loans enabled defeated Germany to pay its reparations to the Allies (who, in turn, paid off their American war loans). At the same time as New York took London’s place as the premier finance hub in the world, America at large withdrew from the world under a renewed isolationism and the xenophobia which came with the Red Scare after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Political upheaval did not stop the investment craze of the 1920s: When a bomb exploded in Wall Street in 1920 and killed 30 people, stock trading resumed normally the next day – much in contrast to 1920 Wall Street (Perepau Llistosella, Looping Games), where the bombing marks the end of the game (and players hope to have made all their profits by then).

The New York-based financial system was robust enough to withstand such external shocks, but it collapsed under its own contradictions: The stock market boom of the 1920 led to ever more capital pouring into the New York Stock Exchange (at the expense of all other forms of investments, for example the American overseas loans on which the global financial system was now based). The spectacular gains fueled a debt-based speculation bubble which burst in October 1929. The inadequate response by central banks which did nothing to combat the contraction of the monetary supply led to an extended, global economic crisis – the Great Depression.

Unemployment and poverty plagued New York much like the rest of the world in the 1930s. The city bounced back through ambitious public works initiated by the energetic new mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (many of them funded by New Deal funds in a cross-party cooperation between the Republican LaGuardia and the Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt). Still, New York’s economy only recovered when demand for manufactured goods skyrocketed because of World War II: The industrial giant rose one last time. One example of New York’s awesome productive capacity may suffice: From 1941 to 1945, the New York Navy Yard built more warships than all of Japan combined. The United States won World War II because of their industrial productivity, and New York was the beating heart of it.

Construction: Upwards

New York had always grown. From the 1880s on, the city grew in a heretofore barely used dimension – upwards. The twin innovations of the elevator and steel frame construction allowed for building heights which had been considered impractical, if not impossible, before. While New York was not the pioneer of these technologies – that merit belongs to Chicago – they were accepted in Manhattan on a scale not known before. Ever more “skyscrapers”, as the tall buildings were soon to be known, sprang up between the Hudson and the East River, giving the city a characteristic look from far away. New York’s skyline has been continually changing, but since then, it has always been dominated by skyscrapers – as has been the image of the city in the public imagination.

Board games are no exception. No theme is as prevalent in games about New York as the construction of skyscrapers. Some are specific, like Flatiron (Isra C./Shei S., Ludonova) which has players build the eponymous Flatiron Building together, but many could be set in any city with tall buildings – but as they are about tall buildings, their designers and publishers think they fit best for a New York setting: Manhattan (Karl-Heinz Koch, Fagus) is a variant of Acquire (Sid Sackson, Avalon Hill) to which the third dimension is added. New York City (Stefan Feld, Queen Games) is a remake of Rialto (Stefan Feld, TMG) – just that the struggle for majorities in Venetian districts of the original, fought with councilmembers, has been replaced by a struggle for majorities in New York boroughs, fought with – you guessed it – skyscrapers.

The skyscrapers got ever taller: The first steel frame buildings in the 1880s and 1890s were well below 100 meters. In 1909, the Singer Building (187m) was the first structure in New York to exceed the height of Europe’s church spires – the first time that the world’s tallest building stood in New York. The city would retain that honor until the 1970s with a succession of ever taller skyscrapers.

The most iconic one was the Empire State Building whose construction was begun in October 1929 – just weeks before the stock market crash. It became the most visible sign of the economic crisis: Even five years after its completion in 1931, half of the Empire State Building’s office space remained empty. Like the rest of New York, it recovered by the 1940s. It would remain the world’s tallest building until it was overtaken by another New York icon in 1973 – the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Infrastructure: Transport and Leisure

New York did not only grow vertically. Originally, the city had been confined to Manhattan Island and gradually expanded into what became the Bronx. In 1898, New York merged with its neighbor Brooklyn (itself America’s third-largest city at the time) as well Queens county and Staten Island to become a massive metropolis of more than three million inhabitants.

This sprawling moloch, however, was initially still centered on Manhattan, as most people worked there and thus couldn’t live too far away: In 1900, more than half of New Yorkers lived in Manhattan. That changed with the construction of the New York subway from 1900 on. New York was late to embark on such a project (London had started in the 1860s), but it was undertaken with the characteristic boldness of the city and soon became the largest in the world.

Thus, the geography of the city changed: New Yorkers could work in Manhattan, but commute every day from one of the other boroughs. As land there was a lot cheaper, a residential construction boom set in, and by the 1920s, Brooklyn had become the most populous borough of New York.

The growth of the city required its transport and leisure infrastructure to keep up. One man would become synonymous with it from the 1920s on: Robert Moses, starting out on the Long Island State Park Commission in 1924, became responsible for all kinds of parks, beaches, roads, bridges, and tunnels for both the state and the city of New York over the next decades.

These projects shaped the face of New York: The parks, both in the center and on the outskirts, provided very real benefits in one of the largest, most densely settled cities in the world. And the transport projects took inspiration from the new trend of motorized individual transport – and reinforced it.

Large-scale engineering projects like these go beyond the mere technical aspects. Moses’s creations were shaped by his ideas about how society should look like. For example, already his very first project – Jones Beach State Park on Long Island – outlined his ideal: It provided New Yorkers with a beautifully designed leisure park on the seashore. They arrived there after a pleasurable drive on the new parkways through lush greenery – by car, as no train or subway station was built in Jones Beach, and the bridges crossing the parkway were too low for buses to pass through. This lack of public transport meant that Jones Beach was exclusively accessible for the middle classes.

An even more striking example is Riverside Park in Manhattan along the Hudson River. Around a third of the park is in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Harlem, two thirds in the predominantly White Morningside Heights and the Upper West Side. These southern two thirds were liberally sprinkled with dozens and dozens of playgrounds, the third in Harlem only received one – and here, the iron lattice at the toilets was “decorated” with little ape sculptures.

As you can see, Robert Moses was not quite a nice guy. We’ll see more of him in the next post in this series!

Culture: Roaring Twenties

America’s new, more assertive role in the world after World War I also increased global interest in the country’s cultural output. American literature developed a new confidence, and American jazz became the hottest new music around the world. New York as America’s cultural center both attracted established artists (like the jazz musicians Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong who both made the city their home in 1923) and produced its own original creations (like the Harlem Renaissance, which marked the first time that a movement of Black American writers and visual artists left their imprint on the wider American cultural consciousness).

One of the institutions of the 1920s New York cultural scene has gotten its own board game: 1923 Cotton Club (Pau Carles, Looping Games). The historical Cotton Club was founded in Harlem in 1923 and soon became the venue to see many of the finest jazz musicians – an attraction not only for regular New Yorkers, but also for the celebrities of the time. That, in turn, made the club even more attractive… well, not for everyone. While the performers on stage were Black, the club would not admit Black patrons (except for the rare Black celebrity). That is not explicitly addressed by the board game, but attentive players will notice that the almost all of the artists which can perform at the players’ clubs are Black, almost all of the celebrities which may attend the club (and are the chief source of points) are White – as are the gangsters.

“Gangsters?” you may ask. “In a game about running a nightclub?” Yes, as we are in the age of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. This fleeting episode (1920 to 1933), and the massive expansion of organized crime which came with it, is almost as irresistible to board game designers as the construction of skyscrapers. Sometimes, it is only the corollary to another activity (like in 1923 Cotton Club).

At other occasions, it takes center stage: Speakeasy (Vital Lacerda, Eagle-Gryphon Games) is all about building a crime empire in Manhattan based on the distribution of illegal alcohol. Frankly, there is a mafia game set in New York for all kinds of gaming tastes: Speakeasy caters to heavy euro gamer, The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire (Eric M. Lang, CMON) to those who love miniatures.

Blood Feud in New York (Kyle Weinandy, Eagle-Gryphon Games) is for combat-oriented gamers, and Nutty Business (Alain Rivollet, Studio H) for those who don’t want to take their game so seriously: Gangs of squirrels try to dominate the nut-smuggling business in Central Park, 1925.

Of course, all these mafia games could be set elsewhere. After all, alcohol was prohibited everywhere in the United States. New York, however, is irresistible as the biggest city, where presumably also the biggest crimes are committed. It is no coincidence that both Superman and Batman, those heroes of the Golden Age of Comics, fight their mastermind criminal enemies in fictionalized versions of New York (Metropolis and Gotham, respectively). Apropos: Age of Comics: The Golden Years (Giacomo Cimini/Sónia Gonçalves, Lirius Games) allows players to run a comic book publisher, develop ideas, print, and sell comic books… and of course, they do so in New York.  

New York’s status as leading America in culture and crime will feature in our next (and last) instalment of this series. Watch this space!

Games Referenced

Fifth Avenue (Wilko Manz, Ravensburger)

1920 Wall Street (Perepau Llistosella, Looping Games)

Flatiron (Isra C./Shei S., Ludonova)

Manhattan (Karl-Heinz Koch, Fagus)

Acquire (Sid Sackson, Avalon Hill)

New York City (Stefan Feld, Queen Games)

Rialto (Stefan Feld, TMG)

Ticket to Ride: New York (Alan R. Moon, Days of Wonder)

1923 Cotton Club (Pau Carles, Looping Games)

Speakeasy (Vital Lacerda, Eagle-Gryphon Games)

The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire (Eric M. Lang, CMON)

Blood Feud in New York (Kyle Weinandy, Eagle-Gryphon Games)

Nutty Business (Alain Rivollet, Studio H)

Age of Comics: The Golden Years (Giacomo Cimini/Sónia Gonçalves, Lirius Games)

Further Reading

For a concise introduction, especially focused on local politics, see Lankevich, George J.: New York City. A Short History, New York University Press, New York City, NY/London 1998.

If you want a treatment which is both more in-depth and more journalistic (and lavishly illustrated) and don’t mind its history practically ending around 1970, see the book version of the 17-hour PBS documentary from 1999: Burns, Ric/Sanders, James/Ades, Lisa: New York. An Illustrated History, Knopf, New York City, NY 2001.