Financial History Issue 128 (Winter 2019) | Page 22

FEAR CITY New York on the Verge of Default By Kim Phillips-Fein 20    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Winter 2019  | www.MoAF.org At 12:25 in the morning on Friday, Octo- ber 17, 1975, an aide for New York City Mayor Abraham Beame placed a desperate telephone call to President Gerald Ford. He was not permitted to wake the sleeping President, though the mayor’s office had serious news. That day, New York City had debt of nearly $453 million coming due, and it had only $34 million on hand. Without immediate access to more money, the city would be forced into default. As the day dawned, reports on what was about to happen in New York spread around the world. Currency trading nearly halted in Europe; the price of gold climbed; the Dow Jones plummeted. Doz- ens of people who owned city bonds lined up in the Municipal Building early in the morning, clutching notes they wanted to redeem; they were turned away and told to come back later on. For most New Yorkers, life that day went on as usual. The trains ran, people went to work, the streetlamps turned off as the sun came up. But for those who knew what was happening, it was as though the city was about to enter a strange new land, where nothing could be taken for granted any longer. The previous evening, the city’s eco- nomic and political leadership had been gathered at the political pageant known as the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner, held every year at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Midtown. This formal assemblage to raise money for Catholic charities had begun in 1945 in honor of Alfred Smith, the 1920s governor of New York State and the first Catholic presidential candidate. The fiercely anti- Communist Archbishop Francis J. Spell- man organized the first gathering the year after Smith died. The dinners quickly became a “ritual of American politics,” to New York City Mayor Abe Beame holds up a copy of the famous New York Daily News front page headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” published on October 30, 1975.