The recent wave of immigration into this country has given rise to myriad concerns—from the worries about the impact of immigration on the nation's economy to questions about whether multilingual education should be used in public schools. The resulting debates have overshadowed some very good news: this influx of New Immigrants has resulted in an astonishing rebirth of many of our older, decaying cities. Nowhere has this demographic renewal been more apparent than in New York City, as Louis Winnick demonstrates in New People in Old Neighborhoods, a timely and perceptive study of the effects of immigration in Brooklyn's Sunset Park.

Sunset Park was born of the late nineteenth century flood of immigrants who developed a prosperous waterfront commerce; by the end of World War I the community had achieved a thriving maturity. Yet the decades following World War II brought about a period of urban decay lifted only by the post-1965 influx of more than 20,000 immigrants, most notably from Asia and the Caribbean Basin. These New Immigrants not only revived the dying community but enriched it with greater ethnic diversity than it had ever known.

Winnick combines data on ethnic change and living patterns with data on employment, housing, school enrollment, and subway ridership to study the revitalization of Sunset Park. He discusses the ethnic composition and characteristics of the new immigrants; trends in self-employment and entrepreneurship ("microcapitalism"); immigrant impact upon retailing, manufacturing, and the lower echelons of the service industries; skill and education levels; and presence in the professions. Winnick also discusses the immigrants' positive effect on faltering New York systems, such as the subways and public schools, and places immigrant renewal within the larger context of overall housing and economic regeneration in New York City.

New People in Old Neighborhoods views today's immigrants as the historic heirs to the community builders of the last century, and offers important insights into the often-troubled yet transforming relationship between the nation and its foreign-born population. The future of these immigrants will be a yardstick to measure the quality and performance of our cities and their neighborhoods in the years ahead.

LOUIS WINNICK is a senior consultant for the Fund for the City of New York.

Residential patterns are reflections of social structure; to ask, "who lives in which neighborhoods," is to explore a sorting-out process that is based largely on socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and life cycle characteristics.

This benchmark volume uses census data, with its uniquely detailed information on small geographic areas, to bring into focus the familiar yet often vague concept of neighborhood. Michael White examines nearly 6,000 census tracts (approximating neighborhoods) in twenty-one representative metropolitan areas, from Atlanta to Salt Lake City, Newark to San Diego. The availability of statistics spanning several decades and covering a wide range of demographic characteristics (including age, race, occupation, income, and housing quality) makes possible a rich analysis of the evolution and implications of differences among neighborhoods.

In this complex mosaic, White finds patterns and traces them over time—showing, for example, how racial segregation has declined modestly while socioeconomic segregation remains constant, and how population diffusion gradually affects neighborhood composition. His assessment of our urban settlement system also illuminates the social forces that shape contemporary city life and the troubling policy issues that plague it.

MICHAEL J. WHITE is at the Urban Institute.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

New York City stands as the first expression of the modern city, a mosaic of disparate neighborhoods born in 1898 with the amalgamation of the five boroughs and shaped by the passions of developers and regulators, architects and engineers, politicians and reformers, immigrant entrepreneurs and corporate builders. Through their labor, their ideals, and their often fierce battles, the physical and social dimensions—the landscape—of the modern city were forged. The original essays in The Landscape of Modernity tell the compelling story of the growth of New York City from 1900 to 1940, from the beginnings of its skyscraper skyline to the expanding reaches of suburbanization.

At the beginning of the century, New York City was already one of the world's leading corporate and commercial centers. The Zoning Ordinance of 1916, initially proposed by Fifth Avenue merchants as a means of halting the uptown spread of the garment industry, became the nation's first comprehensive zoning law and the proving ground for a new occupation—the urban planner. During the 1920s, frenzied development created a vertical metamorphosis in Manhattan's booming business district, culminating in its most spectacularly modern icon, the Empire State Building. The city also spread laterally, with the controversial development of subway systems and the creation of the powerful Port of New York Authority, whose new bridges and tunnels decentralized the population and industry of New York. New York's older ethnic enclaves were irrevocably altered by this new urban landscape: the Lower East Side's Jewish community was nearly dismantled by the flight of the garment industry and the attractiveness of new suburbs, while Little Italy fought government forces eager to homogenize commercial use of the streets by eliminating the traditional pushcart peddlers.

Illustrated with striking photographs and maps, The Landscape of Modernity links important scenes of growth and development to the larger political, economic, social, and cultural processes of the early twentieth century.

DAVID WARD is professor of geography and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

OLIVIER ZUNZ is professor of history at the University of Virginia.

CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel Bluestone, Jameson W. Doig, Gail Fenske, Robert Fishman, Donna Gabaccia, Nancy L. Green, Deryck Holdsworth, Clifton Hood, Thomas Kessner, Deborah Dash Moore, David Nasaw, Keith D. Revel, David Ward, Marc A. Weiss, Carol Willis, Olivier Zunz.

Winner of the 1997 Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association

Since 1965 more immigrants have come to Los Angeles than anywhere else in the United States. These newcomers have rapidly and profoundly transformed the city's ethnic makeup and sparked heated debate over their impact on the region's troubled economy. Ethnic Los Angeles presents a multi-investigator study of L.A.'s immigrant population, exploring the scope, characteristics, and consequences of ethnic transition in the nation's second most populous urban center.

Using the wealth of information contained in the U.S. censuses of 1970, 1980, and 1990, essays on each of L.A.'s major ethnic groups tell who the immigrants are, where they come from, the skills they bring and their sources of employment, and the nature of their families and social networks. The contributors explain the history of legislation and economic change that made the city a magnet for immigration, and compare the progress of new immigrants to those of previous eras. Recent immigrants to Los Angeles follow no uniform course of adaptation, nor do they simply assimilate into the mainstream society. Instead, they have entered into distinct niches at both the high and low ends of the economic spectrum. While Asians and Middle Easterners have thrived within the medical and technical professions, low-skill newcomers from Central America provide cheap labor in light manufacturing industries.

As Ethnic Los Angeles makes clear, the city's future will depend both on how well its economy accommodates its diverse population, and on how that population adapts to economic changes. The more prosperous immigrants arrived already possessed of advanced educations and skills, but what does the future hold for less-skilled newcomers? Will their children be able to advance socially and economically, as the children of previous immigrants once did? The contributors examine the effect of racial discrimination, both in favoring low-skilled immigrant job seekers over African Americans, and in preventing the more successful immigrants and native-born ethnic groups from achieving full economic parity with whites.

Ethnic Los Angeles is an illuminating portrait of a city whose unprecedented changes are sure to be replicated in other urban areas as new concentrations of immigrants develop. Backed by detailed demographic information and insightful analyses, this volume engages all of the issues that are central to today's debates about immigration, ethnicity, and economic opportunity in a post-industrial urban society.

ROGER WALDINGER is professor of sociology and acting director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.

MEHDI BOZORGMEHR is assistant professor of sociology at City College, City University of New York.

CONTRIBUTORS
Lucie C. Cheng, William A. V. Clark, Claudia DeMartirosian, David Grant, Angela James, John Laslett, Michael Lichter, Ivan Light, David Lopez, Ali Modarres, Melvin Oliver, Paul Ong, Vilma Ortiz, Eric Popkin, Betsy Roach, Georges Sabagh, Allen J. Scott, Edward Telles, Abel Valenzuela, Philip Yang

This bold and lively essay is one of those rarest of intellectual achievements, a big small book. In its short length are condensed enormous erudition and impressive analytical scope. With verve and self-assurance, it addresses a broad, central question: How can we improve our understanding of the large-scale processes and structures that transformed the world of the nineteenth century and are transforming our world today?

Tilly contends that twentieth-century social theories have been encumbered by a nineteenth century heritage of “pernicious postulates.” He subjects each misleading belief to rigorous criticism, challenging many standard social science paradigms and methodologies. As an alternative to those timeless, placeless models of social change and organization, Tilly argues convincingly for a program of concrete, historically grounded analysis and systematic comparison.

To illustrate the strategies available for such research, Tilly assesses the works of several major practitioners of comparative historical analysis, making skillful use of this selective review to offer his own speculative, often unconventional accounts of our recent past.

Historically oriented social scientists will welcome this provocative essay and its wide-ranging agenda for comparative historical research. Other social scientists, their graduate and undergraduate students, and even the interested general reader will find this new work by a major scholar stimulating and eminently readable.

This is the second of five volumes commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary.

"In this short, brilliant book Tilly suggests a way to think about theories of historical social change....This book should find attentive readers both in undergraduate courses and in graduate seminars. It should also find appreciative readers, for Tilly is a writer as well as a scholar." —Choice

CHARLES TILLY is at the New School for Social Research.

Times Square, in its heyday, expressed American culture in the moment of vivid change. A stellar group of critics and scholars examines this transitional moment in Inventing Times Square, a study of the development of New York's central entertainment district. A fascinating visit to Times Square, from its christening in 1905 to its eventual decline after the Depression, the book explores the colorful configuration of institutions and cultural practices that propelled Times Square from a local and regional entertainment center to a national cultural marketplace.

Changes in the economy, in religion, in leisure culture, and in aesthetics gave birth to a geographical space that fostered Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, Flo Ziegfeld and Billy Rose, the spectacle of the Hippodrome and the bright lights of the Great White Way. Out of this same place eventually came national network radio and many Hollywood films. Though conceived as a public space, Times Square was quickly transformed into a commercial center. Power brokers wielded their influence on a public ready to succumb to consumerism. Theatrical entertainment  became a large-scale national business based in, and operated out of, Times Square. A new commercial aesthetic travelled with Joseph Urban from Vienna to Times Square to Palm Beach, bringing to society a sophisticated style that will forever say "Broadway."

Times Square as the "center of the universe" had its darker sides as well, for it was the testing ground for a new morality. The packaging of sexuality on the stage gave it legitimacy on the streets, as hotels and sidewalks became the province of female prostitution, male hustling, and pornography.

At the center of New York City, Times Square's commercial activities gave full rein to urban appetites and fantasies, and challenged and defied the norms of behavior that prevailed elsewhere in the city. Cultural history at its finest, Inventing Times Square portrays the vibrant convergence of social and economic forces on Forty-second Street.

WILLIAM R. TAYLOR teaches history at State University of New York at Stony Brook and is program director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jean-Christophe Agnew, Betsy Blackmar, Peter Buckley, George Chauncey Jr., Peter A. Davis, Lewis A. Erenberg, Richard Wightman Fox, Philip Furia, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Gregory Gilmartin, David Hammack, Ada Louise Huxtable, Margaret Knapp, Eric Lampard, William R. Leach, Brooks McNamara, William Wood Register Jr., Laurence Senelick, Robert W. Snyder, William R. Taylor.

Unemployment among black Americans is twice that of whites. Myriad theories have been put forward to explain the persistent employment gap between blacks and whites in the U.S. Structural theorists point to factors such as employer discrimination and the decline of urban manufacturing. Other researchers argue that African-American residents living in urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty lack social networks that can connect them to employers. Still others believe that African-American culture fosters attitudes of defeatism and resistance to work. In Lone Pursuit, sociologist Sandra Susan Smith cuts through this thicket of competing explanations to examine the actual process of job searching in depth. Lone Pursuit reveals that unemployed African Americans living in the inner city are being let down by jobholding peers and government agencies who could help them find work, but choose not to.

Lone Pursuit is a pioneering ethnographic study of the experiences of low-skilled, black urban residents in Michigan as both jobseekers and jobholders. Smith surveyed 105 African-American men and women between the ages of 20 and 40, each of whom had no more than a high school diploma. She finds that mutual distrust thwarts cooperation between jobseekers and jobholders. Jobseekers do not lack social capital per se, but are often unable to make use of the network ties they have. Most jobholders express reluctance about referring their friends and relatives for jobs, fearful of jeopardizing their own reputations with employers. Rather than finding a culture of dependency, Smith discovered that her underprivileged subjects engage in a discourse of individualism. To justify denying assistance to their friends and relatives, jobholders characterize their unemployed peers as lacking in motivation and stress the importance of individual responsibility. As a result, many jobseekers, wary of being demeaned for their needy condition, hesitate to seek referrals from their peers. In a low-skill labor market where employers rely heavily on personal referrals, this go-it-alone approach is profoundly self-defeating. In her observations of a state job center, Smith finds similar distrust and non-cooperation between jobseekers and center staff members, who assume that young black men are unwilling to make an effort to find work. As private contractors hired by the state, the job center also seeks to meet performance quotas by screening out the riskiest prospects—black male and female jobseekers who face the biggest obstacles to employment and thus need the most help.

The problem of chronic black joblessness has resisted both the concerted efforts of policymakers and the proliferation of theories offered by researchers. By examining the roots of the African-American unemployment crisis from the vantage point of the everyday job-searching experiences of the urban poor, Lone Pursuit provides a novel answer to this decades-old puzzle.

SANDRA SUSAN SMITH is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Despite the rapid creation of jobs in the greater Atlanta region, poverty in the city itself remains surprisingly high, and Atlanta's economic boom has yet to play a significant role in narrowing the gap between the suburban rich and the city poor. This book investigates the key factors underlying this paradox.

The authors show that the legacy of past residential segregation as well as the more recent phenomenon of urban sprawl both work against inner city blacks. Many remain concentrated near traditional black neighborhoods south of the city center and face prohibitive commuting distances now that jobs have migrated to outlying northern suburbs.

The book also presents some promising signs. Few whites still hold overt negative stereotypes of blacks, and both whites and blacks would prefer to live in more integrated neighborhoods. The emergence of a dynamic, black middle class and the success of many black-owned businesses in the area also give the authors reason to hope that racial inequality will not remain entrenched in a city where so much else has changed.

DAVID L. SJOQUIST is professor of economics in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ronald H. Bayor, Irene Browne, Obie Clayton Jr., Nikki McIntyre Finlay, Christopher R. Geller, Gary Paul Green, Roger B. Hammer, Truman A. Hartshorn, Cynthia Lucas Hewitt, Keith R. Ihlanfeldt, Sahadeo Patram, Travis Patton, David L. Sjoquist, Mark A. Thompson, and Leann M. Tigges

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

Capital of the American Century investigates the remarkable influence that New York City has exercised over the economy, politics, and culture of the nation throughout much of the twentieth century. New York's power base of corporations, banks, law firms, labor unions, artists and intellectuals has played a critical role in shaping areas as varied as American popular culture, the nation's political doctrines, and the international capitalist economy. If the city has lost its unique prominence in recent decades, the decline has been largely—and ironically—a result of the successful dispersion of its cosmopolitan values.

The original essays in Capital of the American Century offer objective and intriguing analyses of New York City as a source of innovation in many domains of American life. Postwar liberalism and modernism were advanced by a Jewish and WASP coalition centered in New York's charitable foundations, communications media, and political organizations, while Wall Street lawyers and bankers played a central role in fashioning national security policies. New York's preeminence as a cultural capital was embodied in literary and social criticism by the "New York intellectuals," in the fine arts by the school of Abstract Expressionism, and in popular culture by Broadway musicals. American business was dominated by New York, where the nation's major banks and financial markets and its largest corporations were headquartered.

In exploring New York's influence, the contributors also assess the larger social and economic conditions that made it possible for a single city to exert such power. New York's decline in recent decades stems not only from its own fiscal crisis, but also from the increased diffusion of industrial, cultural, and political hubs throughout the nation. Yet the city has taken on vital new roles that, on the eve of the twenty-first century, reflect an increasingly global era: it is the center of U.S. foreign trade and the international art market: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have emerged as international newspapers; and the city retains a crucial influence in information-intensive sectors such as corporate law, accounting, management consulting, and advertising.

Capital of the American Century provides a fresh link between the study of cities and the analysis of national and international affairs. It is a book that enriches our historical sense of contemporary urban issues and our understanding of modern culture, economy, and politics.

MARTIN SHEFTER is professor of government at Cornell University.

CONTRIBUTORS: James L. Baughman, Paul DiMaggio, Nathan Glazer, Miles Kahler, James R. Kurth, Martin Shefter, David Vogel, and Vera L. Zolberg.

This widely acclaimed study of political power in a metropolitan community portrays the political system in its entirety and in balance—and retains much of the drama, the excitement, and the special style of New York City. It discusses the stakes and rules of the city's politics, and the individuals, groups, and official agencies influencing government action.

WALLACE S. SAYRE is Eaton Professor of Public Administration at Columbia University.

HERBERT KAUFMAN is associate professor of political science at Yale University.