Pamela Hanlon - A Worldly Affair: New York, the United Nations, and the Story Behind Their Unlikely Bond

A Worldly Affair

A Worldly Affair

New York, the United Nations, and the Story Behind Their Unlikely Bond

Pamela Hanlon

Empire State Editions An imprint of Fordham University Press New York 2017

Copyright 2017 Pamela Hanlon

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at

www.empirestateeditions.com

www.fordhampress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog.loc.gov .

Printed in the United States of America

19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

Contents

Preface

S ince the mid-1970s, East Midtown Manhattan has been my home. Its a neighborhood I originally chose because it was within easy walking distance of my office, then on Park Avenue in the Forties. The fact that the United Nations world headquarters was a mere block from my apartment never struck me as particularly remarkable. And while I had always been a believer in the UN and its ideals, my interest in the UN as a neighbor centered mostly around the pleasure of taking a walk in its landscaped North Lawn, in those days open to the public.

Then in the early 2000s, my perspective started to change. I became more active in local community affairs, and in 2007 wrote a book about the history of Manhattans East Midtown, the area called Turtle Bay. It was then that I began to better appreciate the fact that the eighteen acres of international land in the center of one of the worlds largest and most multicultural cities was truly unique, and not without some controversy. And I came to recognize that the decades-long relationship between New York and the UN speaks volumes about the greatness of the city. That the worlds huge peace organization, with its thousands of international workers, diplomats, and visiting foreign dignitaries, has carried on its business in the middle of Manhattan without overwhelming even its nearby surroundings seemed to me a wonder. I was curious to know more about the history of the bond between the two.

I might have been satisfied to simply read a book on the subject. But I found that no book had been written that addresses the decades-long interconnection between New York and the UN. So I began to research the background of the relationshiphow the two have accommodated each other, benefited each other, and quarreled with each other. My starting point was the extensive online archive of the New York Times , where a year-by-year search from the 1940s to the present provided great detail of the evolving city-UN partnership. With that, and what I culled from biographies and memoirs of New York mayors and UN officials, I began to piece together the New YorkUN story. At the same time, I looked at the origins of the relationship and the world bodys initial search for a headquarters site. The United Nations Archives and Records Management Section was key to this, and I spent many days there in late 2008 and early 2009, with some very experienced, and patient, UN archivists who helped me pore through boxes of yellowed memos and verbatim reports that led me to other resources.

After putting aside my New YorkUN work for a couple years while I was involved in other writing projects, I got back to the story with a search of the archived papers of the citys mayors since the midtwentieth century, and other collections, books, periodicals, and interviews.

Since its founding, countless books have been written about the UNits goals, challenges, programs, and leadership. And some have covered the organizations early days in New York, such as A Workshop for Peace by George A. Dudley (MIT Press, 1994) and Manhattan Projects by Samuel Zipp (Oxford University Press, 2010). A more recent work, Capital of the World by Charlene Mires (New York University Press, 2013), tells of the scores of locations that competed to become home to the UN headquarters, leading up to New Yorks surprising selection in late 1946. A Worldly Affair looks beyond that, to the partnership between New York and the UN that now spans more than seven decades and the terms of ten New York mayors and nine UN secretaries general.

I hope readers find A Worldly Affair both informative and entertaining, and will see that beneath an often rocky relationship lies a metropolis so resourceful and resilient that it has been able to host the world body over these past many decades without sacrificing its own special character, while providing the cultural diversity and inclusiveness essential for an assembly of diplomats striving to achieve their global goals.

Prologue

F or more than seventy years, New York City and the United Nations have been neighbors, the boundary between them a mere six-block stretch of First Avenue on one side and the banks of the East River on the other. That they share a postal zip code and telephone area code is all but taken for granted. And the world bodys headquarters has become a fixture along storied Forty-second Street, like the citys Broadway theaters, the Public Library, and Grand Central Terminal. Yet in 1946, when the nations of the world made an eleventh-hour decision to choose Manhattan as their global meeting place, it was a stunning development. The fifty-one founding members of the UN had been looking for a vast swath of land in the countryside, where they planned a self-contained international community of meeting halls, homes, and schools. So, many wondered, how could the unlikely pair ever coexista crowded, bustling metropolis and an enclave of diplomats located squarely in its midst?

Indeed, as the United Nations has grown over the yearsto 193 member states by 2017New York and the world body have had their share of conflicts. Each has suggested, more than once and often not so subtly, that the organization might find another place to meet. But their quarrels seem always to have been worked out, or papered over, or forgotten, before any foreign envoys have picked up and left. The two have stuck togetherthe ever-confident city, never wanting to appear overly enamored of its international guest, and the UN, never intimidated by its cosmopolitan host.

Over the decades, New Yorkers have grumbled about the UNs presence in the center of their townthe traffic-snarling motorcades, scofflaws hiding behind diplomatic immunity, member nations controversial policies, and provocative foreign guests. But the benefits to the city can hardly be ignored. Today, more than sixteen thousand employees work at the UN, its agencies, affiliates, and missions in New York, and the annual boost to the local economy is estimated to be $3.7 billion.[] Thats some ten times the economic impact of hosting a major partys political convention, a one-time event for which U.S. cities, New York among them, compete vigorously. The General Assembly session held each fall has been referred to as a kind of Diplomatic Olympics that most cities would be pleased to host just once, let alone every year.