Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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Mass Transit, New Towns, and National Parks in New York City's 'Forgotten Borough'

January 1, 2016

My dissertation insists that Staten Island is central not only to the history of twentieth-century New York City, but to postwar urban planning and politics more broadly. Despite its absence from almost every major historical work on the postwar urban crisis, the borough was considered by many planners and politicians to be New York City's greatest asset and most volatile liability. Set against the rest of the boroughs' declining populations and shrinking tax revenues, Staten Island's large swaths of vacant acres provided a blank slate onto which urbanists mapped their conflicting critiques and cure-alls for the American city. Amongst a long list of influential politicians, environmentalists, and planning organizations that debated the future of Staten Island, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the Regional Plan Association (RPA) stand out as having particular interest in and influence on the borough. My research at the Rockefeller Archive Center was integral to tracking and contextualizing both Rockefeller's and the RPA's planning approaches to the "forgotten borough" -- philosophies which by the early 1970s had come into tension with one another. While Rockefeller would move, in the late 1960s, toward encouraging a dense, socially-diverse, mass-transit oriented Staten Island, the RPA's uncompromising support of Gateway National Recreation Area would forestall precisely the type of new town planning project -- the South Richmond Development Corporation designed by James Rouse -- that was capable of densifying and integrating the borough's overwhelmingly white, middle-class southern shore.

Progress and Protest: The Evolution of Public Works on Long Island under Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller

January 1, 2013

In the mid-twentieth century, parkways, highways, and expressways brought suburbanization to eastern Long Island. Until 1920, the island east of Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens, remained open, predominantly rural territory. Subdivision and home-building booms of the 1920s and post-World War II era, however, substantially filled the territory to the Queens-Nassau border. In response to suburbanization in the 1920s New York had become the first state to develop a centralized park planning agency and an action plan for automobilefriendly regional park development. The island was not subject to metropolitan traffic and lacked any significant manufacturing centers; it seemed destined to support the city's recreation and residential needs, as Governor Smith often claimed. Throughout the 1930s Robert Moses realized this potential.

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