Synopsis

The narrative of "The City and the World" opens in 1945, a period when New York, according to historian David McCullough, stood "at the pinnacle." By 1975, however, the sentiment had shifted dramatically, as a Daily News headline declared, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." The program chronicles the city's decline, tracing its trajectory through what narrator David Ogden Stiers aptly describes as "a maelstrom of destruction in the name of urban renewal." A key element of this period was the constructi