Fear City: How New York Nearly Went Bankrupt
A Talk by Kim Phillips-Fein, with Excerpts from the Documentary Drop Dead City
In 1975, New York City stood on the brink of financial collapse. The nation’s largest city was billions of dollars in debt, raising the question: Could New York City actually go bankrupt?
Join EPIC for an exploration of this pivotal moment in New York history with Kim Phillips-Fein, the Robert Gardiner–Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. Professor Phillips-Fein will discuss her acclaimed book, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, and introduce excerpts from the documentary Drop Dead City. The film revisits the dramatic events of 1975, when an unlikely alliance of political newcomers, rivals, fixers, and civic leaders found a way to avert disaster.
In Fear City, Phillips-Fein cornicles the crisis that transformed New York. As bankers and politicians argued that the city had to slash public services, freeze wages, and lay off thousands of workers, unions and ordinary New Yorkers pushed back. The resulting conflict became a struggle over the future and identity of the city.
Drawing on previously unexplored archival sources and interviews with key participants, Fear City traces the backroom negotiations and public battles that reshaped New York and helped establish ideas about fiscal austerity that continue to influence American politics today.
Professor Phillips-Fein is a historian of 20th-century American politics and political economy and the author of Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America (2026) and Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (2009). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and the Journal of American History.
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