(FORTUNE Magazine) – Roger Starr, who has some unique credentials as a commentator on New York City, has written a book offering a gloomy perspective. At the end of World War II, he tells us, New York was a glowing eminence, a jewel among cities. In the postwar years it went into a steady decline, culminating in the near bankruptcy of 1975. New York has since recovered modestly and is generally deemed fiscally healthy today. But The Rise and Fall of New York (Basic Books, $17.95) leaves you thinking that the city may be poised for another collapse. The title suggests an elegiac chronicle or an extended analytic essay; however, Starr is offering something less ambitious. In effect, Rise and Fall is a series of essays exploring different aspects of life in New York. Included are chapters on crime, on the city's cultural life, on its bizarre housing policies, on its politics, and on its economic base. The essays are witty, discerning, knowledgeable, and agreeably subversive of the conventional wisdom, especially as articulated by New York's intellectual and financial elites. But Starr is less than clear about the connections between these subjects and is maddeningly vague about a few major matters. He is also capable of factual sloppiness. He has the famous Kefauver hearings, which put New York politicians and gangsters on nationwide television, occurring in 1948 (instead of 1951). And in the course of lengthily developing the political and cultural significance of a 1934 play about the Scottsboro case, in which Southern blacks were shown being framed by a white sheriff, he identifies the author as John Howard Lawson (it was John Wexley). One reason Starr is worth listening to is that he is the voice of the New York Times on matters relating to the city. As a member of the Times's editorial board, he is generally anonymous, and his views do not always prevail. Still, more often than not, what Starr thinks about New York is what the Times says in its editorials, which gives him a degree of influence beyond the dreams of most urbanologists. He got to his present situation by a circuitous route. His youthful aspirations were literary, but early in his career he felt obliged to go into his father's business, which was operating barges in New York Harbor; ultimately he ran the company. During the Fifties Starr became avocationally interested in housing, and within several years was executive director of the Citizens' Housing and Planning Council of New York. From 1974 to 1976 he headed Mayor Abe Beame's Housing and Development Administration. He did a lot of writing all during these years, and in 1977 he joined the Times. Starr begins his analysis on February 12, 1946, Lincoln's birthday -- ''the day on which it could be said fairly that New York stood at the very peak of its postwar power, a day never again to be matched in the view it seemed to provide of the undaunting future of a city as powerful in its spirit as it was in its markedly diversified economy.'' On that day, Mayor William O'Dwyer issued an emergency proclamation that in effect ordered the city to close down: department stores, theaters, restaurants, all were closed. O'Dwyer was responding to a tugboat strike, then in its ninth day, that had blocked fuel shipments into the city. In retrospect, the response of the city was quite astonishing. With a sang-froid worthy of Germans or Swedes, New Yorkers took the shutdown in stride and without questioning the mayor's order. The strike was settled within a day. Starr extols the city's ''sense of unified purpose,'' and contrasts the events sadly with later local crises like the 1977 power failure, which was accompanied by endless recriminations and episodes of looting. Where did New York go wrong? Starr nowhere crisply provides a clear answer to that question, instead swamping the reader with details of political and economic mismanagement. But at many points along the way, Rise and Fall seems to be saying that the mismanagement reflected the follies of New York's elite thinkers. Starr suggests, for example, that the city first began going off the rails during Mayor Robert Wagner's first administration in 1954, when city government became much too ambitious. Wagner was following the lead of enlightened private citizens who wanted City Hall ''to assume new roles in solving social problems, assisting cultural growth . . . and offering higher education and better health care to a larger part of the population than had been served in the past.'' But the Wagner administration had no desire to pay the price of this mini-welfare state. Instead, it developed an ingenious technique for capitalizing certain current operating expenses, which helped keep the budget in spurious balance. THESE TRENDS WERE accentuated during the Lindsay administration, which sought to raise the quality of life for everyone. Starr notes caustically that by this time public references to ''everyone'' tended to mean ''the poor, especially the minority- group poor, and the rich,'' and he adds: ''The rich were to get a more interesting city . . . a city with a soul, an intellect, and style.'' But as under Wagner, the city's political leadership did not want to pay the bill or even acknowledge its dimensions. Lindsay did institute a city income tax, and extended the unincorporated business tax to self-employed professionals; however, revenues still lagged behind expenditures, and more gimmicks were used to paper over the hidden deficits. Abe Beame, who succeeded Lindsay, plainly shared responsibility for these fiscal delinquencies, for he had served as comptroller under Lindsay. Starr treats his former boss kindly, which is understandable but distorts the record. Rise and Fall is consistently interesting on New York's past. Starr reminds us that the city's harbor, long identified as the ''natural'' asset that made it preeminent in the 19th century, was in fact not so natural. It was by no means inevitable that New York would become the Atlantic ''port of choice.'' Philadelphia, Boston, even Newburyport, Massachusetts (which was closer to Britain on the great-circle route), might have beaten out New York. A major reason they didn't is that the New York elite led by DeWitt Clinton pushed for the Erie Canal, which in Starr's words ''unlocked for New York City the center of the North American continent.'' In retelling this story, and in arguing that the city today needs ''similar imagination and energy'' to maintain its position, Starr is again making a point about the failure of the city's modern leadership. By the Sixties, in his view, the leadership was less disposed to take for granted the desirability of economic growth. ''Quality of life'' was now the cry, and any expansion of industry that seemed to threaten amenities was resented by local residents and often successfully resisted, even though the city was to lose over 600,000 manufacturing jobs in the process. One of the bitter ironies of the period was that the city's germinating fiscal crisis was paralleled by a decline in the quality of life. The amenities that were being sheltered from industry were conspicuously not improving. The streets were dirtier, crime was more threatening, educational attainment was slipping, housing became ever scarcer. As you might expect, the book is especially interesting on housing. Some of the author's best pages are devoted to the economic lunacy of the city's rent- control programs, which have created severe shortages of rental apartments and hastened the deterioration of existing buildings. Unfortunately, Rise and Fall never tells us clearly how New York might now get rid of rent control, although Starr has elsewhere described a scheme for doing so. It would allow landlords to charge whatever they could get when a lease ended, the only qualification being that if the sitting tenant refused to pay the new price, he would be allowed to stay until the landlord got another tenant at this price. (The point of the qualification is to discourage landlords from demanding too much, and thereby causing needless dislocation, while trying to determine what the market would bear.) Rent control is perpetuated by the kind of shortsighted perceptions that hobble the city in endless ways. One problem in dealing with crime, for example, is the shortage of jail space; yet every neighborhood where a new jail is proposed resists furiously. There is widespread support for putting more police on the streets but overwhelming resistance to the taxes needed to pay for them. But why have the city's morale and discipline and sense of common purpose broken down? Why is its leadership so often marching in the wrong direction? Starr's efforts to explain and exemplify this phenomenon are often woolly and occasionally silly. At one point he takes out after the artistic tastes of the elite, and specifically its alleged preference for abstract art, which he finds ominous. He suggests that ''when the institutional leaders of the city make modern painting and sculpture their most prized art form . . . they demonstrate a set of values that endangers those needed to keep an urban polity on a firm, reasonable, and safe course.'' Huh? What kind of art would promote a safe urban polity? Capitalist realism? IN THE END, Starr's only hope for New York is that the ''new elites'' will lead the city toward a new era of fiscal discipline. At the same time, he worries that the city has some inescapable, huge spending in store; he particularly fears that the deplorable state of the subways will lead to enormous new commitments of capital funds, pushing the city into a replay of the 1975 fiscal crisis. Just how the new elites would fight their way out of this bind is unexplained.

Starr shares the general view that New York's present mayor, Ed Koch, has been prudent and sensible in running the city and has taken care not to raise too many expectations. In many ways, however, the city continues to present a & bleak prospect. No one, including Starr and Koch, has a plan to deal with the city's vast welfare population -- over 900,000 at last count -- which continues to impose a huge tax burden on New Yorkers, and not only in the direct cost of welfare aid. The city is dirty, yet few New Yorkers want to pay the price of cleaning up the parks and streets. No politician in sight, and least of all Ed Koch, shows a desire to cope with the problem of rent control or even to speak realistically about the subject. The city will doubtless have a housing shortage into the next century. Parts of it will look splendid, and parts will be wastelands. And some of our best writers will still be trying to explain just where the city went wrong.