Free The Battle for Gotham by Roberta Brandes Gratz

full “general assignment” reporter, byline and all, loving the daily routine of being sent all over the city on whatever news story was unfolding. Murders, press conferences, “daily close-ups” (features on personalities in the news—authors, bank presidents, actors, philanthropists, and so on), and everyday mundane assignments consumed most of my time. But the full luxury of picking issues to write about came after several years of being a reporter.
    The ’60s art scene, very much a new “scene”—auctions, museum openings, artist personalities—was another reporting focus. Art auctions were now making big news on a regular basis. I had grown up in a household where art was a daily interest. The Whitney Museum, the quintessential institution of the Village and then still on Eighth Street, was a favorite place for my mother, my sister, and me to visit. The Whitney moved uptown in 1954. Young, not yet well-known artists were my parents’ friends, including Mark Rothko and his wife, Mel, who lived in our apartment house, and Milton Avery, whose daughter, March, was my sister’s classmate and friend. My mother sold art by her friends, then still unknown, to her decorating clients.
    And then, in May 1965, I married Donald Gratz, a metal manufacturer peripherally in the art and architecture business. Architecture was a new world for me, and I learned from him. My interest in art and architecture expanded, and I applied it to the reporting assignments I requested.
    At the same time, I reported on housing, urban renewal, and community battles for survival, on small successes and large failures, on historic preservation and neighborhood revitalization. I saw government policies repeat the mistakes of the past because vested interests, misguided analyses, and wrongheaded plans stood in the way of appropriate urban change. And I saw neighborhoods rebuild themselves despite government-created impediments. What I learned about the dynamic of cities I learned first in the neighborhoods of New York and from the people who fought to save and renew their turf. Residents and business owners in any place, the essential users, instinctively know what is needed and not needed to keep their community healthy or to make it better.
    I covered the fight to build low-income housing in middle-income neighborhoods and wrote with colleagues Anthony Mancini and Pamela Howard a six-part series, “The Great Apartment House Crisis.” I worked on another six-part series, this one about the newly opened Co-op City and its impact on the South Bronx, especially the Grand Concourse from which many of the residents had moved. I was stunned to observe such massive relocation out of one neighborhood into another. Later, I investigated shady landlords and cheating nursing home operators, covered hot zoning battles and ongoing urban renewal clearance projects, and investigated Forty-second Street property owners purposely renting to illicit uses to make a case for city condemnation and payout for their properties.

    THE APPEAL OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION
    Historic preservation grabbed me most of all, probably because so much of the city was threatened by demolition and I was so impressed by the local people I met in the neighborhoods fighting to save their communities and the things that made them special. Sometimes the battle was to save a building, other times to get a traffic light in front of a school or to prevent a rezoning that would permit an out-of-scale new project to intrude on a neighborhood.
    Most of these grassroots warriors did not know the difference between architects H. H. Richardson and Philip Johnson, but they knew what the local church, school, library, or firehouse meant as an anchor to their neighborhood. They saw the row houses and modest apartment houses dating from the lost eras of quality and care being replaced by dreary, barrackslike structures or excessive scale, projects that undermined the fragile economic and social