The Second Annual Fiorello La Guardia Book Award: Fear City

The LaGuardia Book Award, in its second year, recognizes an exceptional work of scholarship that utilizes collections from the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, a repository of New York City history. The inaugural award, in 2024, went to historian and journalist .

“LaGuardia Community College is delighted to honor the historian Kim Phillips-Fein for her groundbreaking work on New York’s fiscal crisis. Meticulously researched, drawing from resources at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, Fear City illuminates the origins of the fiscal crisis in 1975 and the response of politicians and bankers. The crisis changed the way the city is governed. It also permanently transformed CUNY,” said President Kenneth Adams. “On the 50th anniversary of the crisis, as we grapple with other economic challenges in New York, Fear City couldn’t be timelier.”

LaGuardia and Wagner Archives established the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Award in 2024 and Soraya Ciego-Lemur, Deputy Director of LaGuardia and Wagner Archives said since the 1980s the Archives has been a major research center for scholars doing work on New York City history.

“Many books have been written based on our rich collections. We decided that it was time to recognize stellar works that have come out of the Archives,” Ciego-Lemur said. “Fear City by Kim Phillips-Fein was an obvious choice. She used the Papers of Mayors Abraham Beame and Ed Koch as well as the City Council Collection,” said Soraya Ciego-Lemur, Deputy Director of LaGuardia and Wagner Archives.”

“Fear City became an instant classic when it was published in 2017, recognized by scholars as a seminal work on the urban political economy,” said Stephen Petrus, Ph.D., Director of Public History Programs at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives. “Phillips-Fein sheds light on the rise of austerity politics in the city in the late 1970s. It was a pivotal moment in New York history and had ramifications on the global economy. The policies implemented became a blueprint for neoliberals around the world.”

Each year the recipient of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Award will deliver a talk at LaGuardia. On April 24 at the Little Theatre at 1 p.m., Phillips-Fein will be in conversation with Petrus. The event will incorporate LaGuardia students studying the fiscal crisis as well as showcase resources from the Archives. The talk is free and open to the public.

Host or Publisher LaGuardia and Wagner Archives