Synopsis

The period from 1929 to 1945, often called the "City of Tomorrow," centered on Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Leveraging his relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt, LaGuardia transformed the city into a vast experiment in civic renewal. Historian Kenneth Jackson describes the work of master builder Robert Moses as an effort to "adapt a 19th-century city to 20th-century needs." Crucially, this transformation was profoundly shaped by the automobile, as narrator David Ogden Stiers observes: "It challe