On Governing New York: The first subway went from City Hall to what is now Grand Central Station in about 18 months. We're sitting here in the Chrysler Building, a magnificent building put up in 23 months. The rival, the Empire State Building, was built in 13 months. You had a city government that could make decisions and let them go forward. The endless review that has taken over modern government, the sort of entropy that settles in, is in direct aftermath of the end of the political machines, as they were called. The machines are not the worst image because they did work. Lincoln Steffens once asked Croker, "Why do you have to have a boss when you've got a parks commissioner, and a roads commissioner, and a mayor, and an alderman, and a council . . . ?" And he said, "That's why. You've got a parks commissioner, and a roads commissioner, and a mayor, and a council, and an alderman . . . Somebody has to say do it," -- and they could. They were reviled for it. They were not cultured people, not outwardly. They were not cultured people and at times they were not necessarily very empathetic, but they knew how to govern. And when they disappeared under the cloud of corruption and bossism, whatever exactly that was, nothing took their place. On Getting Things Done: I sit in the most important city in the world, which is also the only world-class city that does not have a rail connection to its airport. We have been planning it for 30 years. Jimmy Walker would have built it in 30 months, but there would have been side arrangements that in the end became unacceptable. I'm not trying to romanticize, I'm saying what is palpably the case. The city ceased to grow about the time the party politics faded, with discipline, among the actors and across different realms of authority. When that ceased, when that disappeared, when that faded, the city began to fade. On Immigration: Immigration made us huge. You could never breed yourself into eight million people in 50 years, immigration did it. It also made for an industrial city. People who were arriving were from the farms in Maine, arriving here in curious reversals. It was when the wheat from Kansas began arriving in the Baltic that peasant populations became surplus and town populations became sort of surplus; the turn around came, and they arrived here. The great Jewish migrations were in part the effect of those economic changes. Well, you have people who could produce a mass production system. And we had factories all over the city when I was a boy. My first job was at the American Can Company in Long Island City. Big place that made metal containers. The garment industry became very important as a source of entrepreneurship. You got a lot of variation. Jewish males did not think it unmanly to sew. Nobody ever told them that making suits was something that only women did. So the garment industry became ethnically defined and wonderfully productive. We could never get an Irishman to sew; he wouldn't dream of it -- we gave them the construction trades and so it would go. Variegated but peaceable. Very little crime, very little violence. The first half of the 20th century in New York everything settled down. The disruption of the 1930 depression was also an occasion for enormous public works. Fiorello La Guardia could get La Guardia airport built in 21 months and think nothing of it. The city was remarkably well-governed and self-governed. There was a civic ethos. There was no crime . . . very little vice, good schools, steady jobs with the depression aside, a lot of civic pride. And only one perceived problem which was: How do you deal with growth? In the 1920s, city planning became a real enterprise and the state helped out, and men like Robert Moses began laying out the arterial road systems and the tunnels and bridges. It was quite an astonishing success. New York City in 1945 was the most successful place on earth, and in terms of its size and population the most successful place in history.		An American sociologist and political leader, Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and raised in a poor neighborhood in New York City. He became active in Democratic party politics in the 1950s and worked in the Department of Labor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. After teaching for several years at Harvard University, he returned to government as a special adviser to President Nixon, later serving as Ambassador to India from 1973 to 1975 and Ambassador to the United Nations in 1975 and 1976. He was elected to the United States Senate from New York in 1976 and will retire from that position in 2000. A prolific author, his works include FAMILY AND NATION (1986, Harcourt Brace), CAME THE REVOLUTION (1988, Harcourt Brace), and BEYOND THE MELTING POT (MIT Press), a groundbreaking 1964 sociological study of New York City's minorities.