Creative Process
How did we come to choose this topic? It was a Monday morning, and President Barack Obama had signed a massive stimulus plan to free up the credit market and to hopefully have the banks lending again. Then one of us mentioned how the present credit environment was similar to how the banks stopped lending to New York City in the 1970s. And there we had it. We chose to pursue the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. As the semester progressed, our project evolved. Our focus shifted from the economics of the crisis to the social effects of the crisis.
During the research component of this project, we chose to split the research among the four of us. We divided the research into four components: how government policies and accounting practices led to the city’s collapse, how the financial institutions, in particular the banks, contributed to the city’s collapse, how the people of New York City were affected by this crisis, and the national and international consequences the city’s collapse may have had and the recovery from the crisis. After individually researching, we came together and worked on putting our documentary together.
To successfully do this project, we had to interview many individuals. Often setting up these interviews took a huge amount of time and patience, since many of our interviewees lead busy lives and we wanted to do the interviews at times most convenient for our interviewees. Before we went to interview someone, we had to have prior knowledge on who the person was, the role of the individual during the crisis, and prepare questions to ask the interviewees. Through the interviews, we learned a lot about the crisis, but we also learned about how helpful and friendly many professors, and city politicians are. Meeting former Mayor Koch was absolutely awesome and amazing and also allowed us to gain a deeper appreciation of the tough decisions city politicians have to take in the face of a crisis. Meeting Brooklyn College President Christoph Kimmich allowed us to understand the tough times the CUNY system has been through in the past few decades and to be grateful for the current resurgence. Meeting and interviewing these individuals was an absolute pleasure.
Our documentary is centered around these interviews. The ideas and the underlying themes presented in our documentary are ours, but we use the stories of the interviewees to present our views and analysis on the fiscal crisis. And that is how a true documentary should be. We feel we have done so successfully. The thesis of our documentary is that the fiscal crisis was profound in that its effects led to heavy tremors in the lives of all New Yorkers.
Choosing what goes into the documentary was very difficult. All our interviewees contributed so many different things to this project. We all wanted to present different things as well. Deciding on what to incorporate or what not to incorporate was the most difficult part of this project, and, after considerable wrangling, we agreed. For your convenience and in the hopes of you gaining a deeper understanding of the fiscal crisis and its social effects, we have posted our interviews in the Interviews segment of our site.
Another challenge we faced was finding the time to meet together. Each of us lives in a different borough in New York City, and each of us has different commitments. Thus we often had to make sacrifices to find the time and complete this project well.
Beneath is a small video that we made in addition to our documentary. Hope you enjoy it.