Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Close To the Edge : New York’s Encounter with Violent Crime, 1965–1995
Location
Mason B. Williams, Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and The New School and author of City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York, will examine how New York City’s communities and governments responded to rapidly rising urban crime from the 1960s into the 1990s.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, New York City became dramatically more dangerous—homicide rates rose to four times the historic norm. To many New Yorkers, rising urban violence seemed to mark a fundamental change in the nature of their city; for many more, it disrupted everyday urban life. This talk, drawn from Williams’s current research, will examine how New Yorkers struggled to respond to this social phenomenon, and why they ultimately adopted a policy of mass incarceration which produced its own far-reaching effects—some of which remain with us today, even now that New York’s age of violence has ended.