City Of Fortune – Mason B Williams

Schools that failed to do so could pay the penalty: In 1995, the integrated P.S. 154 in Flushing, Queens, lost $70,000 in federal magnet funding because its demographics— 35 percent Asian, 35 percent Black, 20 percent Latino, and 10 percent white —reflected the makeup of the surrounding community.19 Having gained access to outstanding new public schools, affluent parents were determined to keep it. In 1995, the superintendent of District 3 announced a plan to move one of two gifted-and-talented programs housed in P.S.

9 on West 84th Street to P.S. 166, a predominantly Black and Latino school on West 89th Street, which could be more easily renovated to make the program handicap-accessible. Hundreds of P.S. 9 parents held a candlelight vigil to protest the plan, accusing the district of seeking to sacrifice their high-performing school in order to aid P.S. 166. “In a city where so many things don’t work, why tear up a school that is working?” asked one parent, an assistant managing editor at Fortune magazine.

Even after the District 3 school board affirmed the plan, the parents continued to hold out: “I don’t know if it will be a quiet behind-the-scenes fight or a loud, legal fight,” one parent mused. “But we will fight.” In January 1998, the district found that there were now enough gifted students to justify retaining the existing program at P.S.

9 while opening a new one at P.S. 166.20 For one group of parents on the Upper East Side, even the expanding menu of magnet, gifted-and-talented, and other screened programs was insufficient. The group, many of whose children attended the predominantly white neighborhood elementary school P.S. 6, worried that the traditional high schools in District 2 were inadequate in quality and that the various screened programs did not offer an appropriate alternative, since the admissions formula adopted in the late 1980s sought to balance high-, average-, and low-performing students.

They therefore began to lobby for a new neighborhood high school. “Despite paying the highest tax rates in New York City,” the Partnership for an Upper East Side High School argued, “we don’t have a school that will prepare our children to go to the superior colleges they are qualified to attend.”21 In June 2001, the Board of Education, together with Manhattan borough president C.

Virginia Fields and Representative Carolyn Maloney, announced its intention to establish a new seven-hundred-student district high school on East 76th Street, pairing the announcement with a pledge of enhanced funding for the predominantly Black and Latino Life Sciences Secondary School.

Shortly after noon on December 31, 1974, New York governor-elect Hugh Carey emerged from his apartment building in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Robert Caro’s recently published biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, under his arm. He and eleven of his twelve children, together with assorted spouses, friends, aides, reporters, and a pet Labrador named Jet, crowded onto a chartered Silver Eagle bus, bound for Albany, where Carey was to be inaugurated as the Empire State’s fifty-first governor.

Carey had lost his wife to cancer that spring, and he had kept the family together through the campaign. As the bus wound out of Brooklyn and up First Avenue, the Carey kids reminisced about other trips they had taken that year—Winnebago rides to state and county fairs, fire engines in small town parades, puddle-jumping in the tiny chartered planes they nervously dubbed “toothpaste tubes.”

The bus skirted the South Bronx before leaving the city behind and traveling the 150-some miles that separated New York’s great metropolis from its seat of power.1 For Carey, the occasion marked the unexpected culmination of a distinguished career. Raised by middle-class parents in the Irish enclaves of interwar Brooklyn, he had graduated from St. John’s University with tuition help from Franklin Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration and, after a spell in the army during which he helped liberate the Nordhausen concentration camp, finished first in his class at St. John’s Law School.

In 1960, he won election to Congress, a Kennedy Democrat who helped enact Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation. Honest and exceptionally smart but sometimes easy to underestimate—“an outwardly genial Irish pol who did not wear his emotions or his intelligence on his sleeve,” one of his great admirers wrote—he pulled a surprise victory in the 1974 Democratic primary, then swept into office on the post-Watergate tide. Except for Averell Harriman’s single term, Republicans had held the Governor’s Mansion since 1943.

Now the party of Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, and Herbert Lehman would return to power. The band at Carey’s election-night victory party had struck up FDR’s 1932 campaign anthem, “Happy Days Are Here Again.”2 By the time of his inauguration, the spirit of jubilation had faded in the face of daunting challenges. Both the City of New York and the Urban Development Corporation, a state-backed public authority, were approaching bankruptcy.

“I had the champagne,” former governor Nelson Rockefeller told him; “you have the hang-over.”3 A week after his swearing-in, Carey strode to the front of the Assembly Chamber to deliver his first State of the State speech, his solemn countenance foreshadowing what was to follow. “Sudden storms have swept across our economy and all of American life, shattering our hopes and our illusions of comfort; and the storms do not abate,” he said.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 0f5f47cf2c099f41
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 19,166,437 bytes (18.279 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 370
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 688.68 minutes
• Total Words: 137,736
• Total Characters: 874,212
• Average Words per Page: 372.26
• Average Characters per Page: 2362.74

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