City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia and the Making of Modern NY

Wednesday, September 25, 2013, 6:30-8 PM

Elebash Recital Hall

RESERVATIONS ARE REQUIRED.

For more information, call 212-817-8471.

In City of Ambition, historian Mason Williams examines the relationship between two of the most remarkable political leaders of the twentieth century—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia—as they rose in counterpoint through the ranks of New York politics before taking power at the depths of the Great Depression. It is a study of how government came to play an extraordinarily broad role in a quintessentially market-oriented city—of how a robust public sphere, embodied physically in La Guardia Airport, the Triborough Bridge, Robert Moses’s parks and playground projects, and thousands of smaller structures, was forged—and of how a new vision of urban governance reshaped the city’s political culture.

Presented by Gotham Center for New York City History 

This event is part of the GC Public Program’s initiative “Cultural Capital: The Promise and Price of New York’s Creative Economy.”