The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life

By Fred Siegel

In this first comprehensive account of the career of “America’s Mayor,” Fred Siegel shows how Rudi Giuliani’s successes in New York — restoring law and order, cutting taxes, and radically reducing the welfare rolls—demonstrated that cities might again become vibrant and dynamic places to live after thirty years of middle class flight.

Someone who has worked with Giuliani as well as studied him, Siegel sees this colorful figure as an immoderate centrist, who, like the city he came to embody, evokes contradictory emotions. A self-promoting, self-absorbed man, he made his own enormous ego serve the city’s well being. He promoted the virtues of duty and sacrifice, but was sometimes unable to honor those values in his personal life. He was suspicious of those outside his immediate circle, but he also placed this tribal ethos in the service of ideals that transcended New York’s ethnic politics and business as usual.

The Prince of the City is at once a fascinating character study, a history of New York over the last forty years, and an insight into on how cities function. The story Siegel tells culminates with an account of September 11, 2001 which shows how Giuliani’s s eight years in office had prepared him and the city to rise to the occasion. Siegal concludes with a look at how Guiliani’s successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has handled his legacy.

Fred Siegel is a professor of History at The Cooper Union for Science and Art in New York City and a Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. His last book, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, DC, LA and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, was named by Peter Jennings as one of the 100 most important books about the United States in the 20th century. Siegel lives in Brooklyn with his wife Jan Rosenberg.