New York and President Jimmy Carter — NYC Department of Records & Information Services
The pleas Carter heard from the residents of the South Bronx are essentially what the President heard from New York City officials throughout his administration: We want money, and we want jobs!
Beginning in the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia established a financial relationship between the City and the Federal Government that has continued to this day. It began with Federal funds from President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that the LaGuardia administration used to lift the City out of the Great Depression. With seven million inhabitants and dozens of “shovel-ready” public works projects, New York received more funding than any other city.
Since then, City finances have been inextricably linked to, and reliant on, federal sources. For a while, it worked. From the 1930s through the 1960s, federal funding flowed, with support for highways and housing as notable examples. By the 1970s, however, new administrations in Washington with different priorities became less sympathetic to urban needs. For New York City, the famous New York Daily News headline on October 30, 1975, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” summed up the change in relationship.
The election of Jimmy Carter to the White House in 1976 gave New York officials hope for an improved relationship with their Federal counterparts. Researchers interested in documenting the history of the connection between City finances and the Federal Government will be well rewarded by information in the Municipal Library and Municipal Archives collections.
The Municipal Library’s vertical files on Federal-City Relations are a particularly rich resource for investigating the dramatic story of New York’s fiscal crisis, and recovery, in the 1970s. Although the immediate peril to the city’s economy had passed by the time Carter took office in January 1977, intense negotiations between City, State, and Federal authorities continued throughout his administration. “Carter Cool to Plea on New York’s Loan,” (New York Times, February 1, 1977), and “Carter Opens Drive for Passage of Bill on Aid to New York,” (New York Times, May 9, 1978), are just two examples of the many, almost daily, clippings in the vertical file that chart the ups and downs of efforts to fix the City’s budget.
