This was a decade of instability and flux. As the city went through one of its most accelerated transformations (compare a New York movie from 1960 with one from 1970), there were strikes, demonstrations, riots, protests and even a campus seizure. As neighborhoods were threatened by developers, as buildings were razed and replaced with monstrosities--leading to the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission--it seemed that the soul of the city was at stake. This was played out most dramatically in the battle between the Power Broker, Robert Moses, and the urban writer and activist, Jane Jacobs, who in this decade published her groundbreaking work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and led the campaign against the Master Builder's crosstown expressways, preventing Manhattan from suffering the same fate as the Bronx and helping to topple Moses from power after more than forty years.
ALSO DURING THIS DECADE:
1960--The new headquarters for Chase Manhattan Bank, with its open plazas facing both Pine and Nassau Streets, is completed, kicking off the building boom in Lower Manhattan. (The World Trade Center is proposed this same year.)
1960--Ebbets Field in Brooklyn is demolished.
1961--Inspired by the Seagram and Chase Manhattan Bank Buildings, new zoning laws are passed enouraging public amenities such as plazas and arcades in exchange for taller buildings without setbacks.
1962--Philharmonic Hall, now Avery Fisher Music Hall, becomes the first completed building at Lincoln Center.
1963--A bad year for our train stations. Pennsylvania Station, one of the grandest in the world, is demolished. (Its famous eagles are unceremonially dumped in the Meadowlands.) Meanwhile, the Pan Am Building, one of the city's ugliest skyscrapers (i.e., the architecture of Brutalism) opens above Grand Central Terminal.
1964--The 1964 World's Fair opens in Flushing Meadows.
1964--The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the United States, connects Staten Island and Brooklyn.
1965--The Landmarks Preservation Commission is established.
1965--New immigration laws open up the city for immigrants from Asia, Greece, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
1963--Malcolm X is assassinated while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in Upper Manhattan.
1966--Ground is broken for the World Trade Center.
1966--Subway and bus fare is increased from ten to twenty cents.
1968--Protesting a number of issues--ranging from the university's construction of a private gym in a public park to the university's ties to the war effort in Vietnam--Columbia students take over their campus and occupy several buildings for a week.
1969--The Stonewall Rebellion, three nights of confrontation with the police in Greenwich Village, gives birth to the modern movement for gay civil rights.
Sources: The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger; New York: An Illustrated History by Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades; The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson; Blue Guide New York by Carol von Pressentin Wright, Stuart Miller, and Sharon Seitz; Inside the Apple by Michelle and James Nevius.
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