Transcripts For CSPAN2 Senator Marco Rubio Book Signing 2015

[applause] >> thank you very much. thank you for coming today. [applause] i want to thank the miami-dade college for hosting us here today. i'm proud to be here. i said this a week ago at an event we did hear with small businesses. i don't know if any other institution in america that has opened the door to more american dreams than miami-dade college has and it's a true treasure for our community and dr. predrawn's leadership is a true treasure and we thank you for your service to our committee and our country. i want to spend a few minutes talking about the book. the title of the book is "american dreams." american dream has nothing to do with how much money you make. the american dream isn't about getting rich although that may be your dream and a lot of americans a lot of americans would dream that. american dream is about achieving happiness as we define it. for most people the american dream and happiness is about simple things like owning a home in a safe and stable neighborhood being able to raise their family and the safe and stable environment having a job you find rewarding but ultimately patient enough to be able to enjoy the things you like save for retirement and be able to leave your children better off than yourself. of all the communities and i've spoken about the american dream in many places there are few that i have to spend less time in describing a dream than ours because in this audience in our community there are hundreds of thousands in fact millions of people in south florida throughout the greek count -- three counties over that dream despite starting from difficult backgrounds and circumstances. i want you to imagine for a moment being born into a society where your future was determined by who your parents were. imagine growing up in a society where you only got to do whatever your parents to do for you. your parents were rich if your parents are connected if they had influence then you got to move ahead but if you came from parents that were poor or disconnected from power no matter how hard your -- how hard you worked or how much talent you had he would not be allowed to succeed. imagine living in a place like that. let me finish my description of the book. the book talks about that dream that millions of people in this country have. i think i'm the only one that gets heckled by both sides of the immigration debate. it's pretty amazing. we are going to wait for them to finish and we will continue talking about the book. we are just going to wait for them to finish and then we will talk about the book. i apologize folks. they will be gone in a second. i just hope they bought the book. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. [applause] if what they wanted was a discount on the book we could have worked it out. the american dream, think about for a moment living in a country like that in a place where no matter how hard you work or how hard you try you can't get ahead. that has been the rule not the exception throughout human history. most people have grown up in societies like that. what is make us different is here people can achieve anything if they work hard and play by the rules. that has been the rule for 230 some odd years. is this for the discount too? i apologize. we will wait a few minutes so we can continue to talk about the important topics in this book. so the question now is what is happening today with the fact that millions of people in america -- though i promise you we will get through this. millions of people in america feel like that is no longer possible for them. and what's frustrating to people as they open the newspaper or they watch on the new senate says the economy is getting better. wall street is having record years companies are making record profits the wealthiest americans are better off than they have ever been that they are wondering what is the prosperity going to what reach them. and there are reasons why this is happening and that is the core of the book. one of the main reasons that is happening is because the nature where economy is rapidly transform. the nature of our economy has transform. for example 25 years ago if you are willing to work hard there would always be a job available that allowed you to achieve happiness. maybe not a job that made you rich or famous but a job that allowed you to do the things we talked about, buy a home race your family and them better off. today people are finding more and more that what they are getting paid this and keep up up with the cost of living which continues to grow. the reason is not because of the cyclical downturn or our economy is going through tough time. the reason is because our economies undergoing deep rapid permanent structural changes in the outline of the economy. globalization is real. globalization has changed the nature of our economy pretty means we are competing with more nations than ever before for jobs, investment in creativity and innovation. we have to be globally competitive more than we ever have. it would have been difficult for them to achieve what they achieved working as a bartender and it made. those jobs don't pay enough anymore compared to most places to what the cost of living has become. there are jobs in the 21st century that pay more but they require a higher level of skill than ever before. and the problems we have are twofold. one our policies have adjusted to this new century and two increasingly we are led by people at every level of government that don't understand we are living through the fastest most rapidly evolving economic times in all of human history. we are basically having the equivalent of the industrial revolution every three to five years. so what are the answers to the problem and that is what we outline outlined in the book. we describe the stories of real people of a single moms struggling to raise her daughters while making nine or $10 an hour. not one but two students who graduate with degrees and cannot find jobs and what is worse they owe money. a small businessman in florida run by a couple struggling to stay ahead and compete in an increasingly complicated environment for big companies and higher lawyers who can comply with rules and read galatians that small businesses like them struggle. and the young lady named india we met through great program called take stock in children who overcame extraordinary obstacles to achieve extraordinary things. we also talked about poverty and affect their tens of millions of americans living in poverty and wire programs dealing with poverty don't work. our programs to deal with poverty do nothing to cure it. the ultimate cure for poverty the real cure for poverty is a good paying job and too many for programs don't address that. they alleviate the pain of poverty. what are the steps we need to take? the first is straightforward. we need to become globally competitive. we are not the only economy in the world anymore. they're dozens and dozens of countries competing against us for investment in innovation and that's why we need things like a simpler tax code, why we need to reduce regulation and deal with the national debt and take advantage in a reasonable way but in a responsible way of our energy resources and the second day we talk about this even if you grow the economy and bears were a fault my party. sometimes the republican party stops of economic growth and says if we just go our economy everyone is going to be better off. theoretically that's true but in the 21st century there's a second step is more important. even if you grow your economy and if you're prepared to create better paying jobs those jobs today require more skill and education than has ever been required. the problem is we have a 20th century higher education system that tells everyone in the only answer to that is a four-year degree. let me tell you for your degrees will always be one of our choices. it will always be a legitimate choice that we need to level predicates as well. some of the best paying jobs in the 21st century require more than traditional high school but less than four years of traditional college college. welders plumbers and electricians and airplane mechanics and bmw technicians. these are also good-paying jobs that are in demand in the 21st century. we need to have systems allow people to acquire those skills. in particular believe the high schools in america should be graduating more students ready to work right away in many of these professions which are good-paying jobs that are critical to 21st century success. perhaps the most challenging area is what you do if you are 30 years old you have to work full-time to provide for yourself when you're trying to raise two or three children on your own? you are making $9 an hour as a home health aide or $12 an hour as a receptionist. the only way you are ever going to improve jamaica and ultimately your life is to acquire skills allow you to become a paralegal for a dental hygienist. the problem is in order to achieve those skills oftentimes depending on where you live that requires you to drop everything. most people facing these circumstances can't do that. what we need are innovative and creative programs allow people who have to work full-time and are raising families to be able to go back to school at their pace on line at night on weekends. i will admit there are some for-profit programs to do a great job that are trying to address these needs that they are also incredibly expensive than as a result we have seen people pursuing those programs graduating sometimes with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. that is a good point to stop and congratulate miami-dade county for the work it does. miami college for the work it's doing to fill that gap in our community. we need to invest in more of that because the truth is the only way that receptionist who's making $9 an hour will make $50,000 a year is if you or she can become a paralegal or dental hygienist or some other profession like it. we need to acquire education systems that allow access to that. last but not least i would say the four-year college will be a legitimate way forward but we cannot afford to continue to graduate people with degrees that do not lead to jobs that we can't afford it as a country one of the things we propose is before anyone takes out a loan for a degree before anyone can take out a loan for a degree you should be told by that school this is how much you can expect to make when you graduate from the school with that degree grade i myself graduated with over $100,000 in student loans which i was only able to pay off after the publication of my first book and american son available in paperback in case you are interested. it's something i hold deeply personal and important. we cannot continue to graduate people in this country with degrees that do not lead to jobs. there is over a trillion dollars of his student loan debt. student loan debt stays with you forever. it can't be discharged in bankruptcy. it locks you out of entrepreneurship and homeownership in rincher credit. so we have to have alternatives as well. in that space about creating alternative ways to credentialed people including the ability to package learning no matter where you acquired from. ability to come forward and say here is who i am. i have studied these three are for things on line are my own. taken these courses in this college in these courses not college. i've served in the military. someone should package that experience into the equivalent of the degree the private sector recognizes. by the way i outlined an alternative to the traditional student loan that would be beneficial to graduate students called the student investment plan which allows private-sector investors to pay college costs in exchange for a percentage of your income over time. it's not for everyone but it's one more alternative to traditional student loans. i would also be remiss if i didn't point out one more aspect of our book and that is the impact of societal breakdown. the breakdown of families and this has been documented on both the left and the right one of the single largest contributors of poverty today. that's assuming i can pass a law to make someone a better husband or a better wife. if i could pass a law to make people a better husband my wife would run for office. it does mean we need to recognize and we do recognize that in two ways. we need to recognize is elected officials and policymakers that stable intact families are good for people. we also need to recognize the children that are growing up in disadvantaged backgrounds with broken families in dangerous neighborhoods and substandard housing with no access to a quality education those children will struggle to succeed unless we do something to intervene unless we do something to break the cycle, unless we do something that allows them to overcome these things. in that realm is a lot the government can do but ultimately it's on us as members of the community as neighbors as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers. as members of community groups. tie it all together the general theme of the book is optimistic because of what we face challenges i remind you or ask you what nation would you trade places with? what country in what country in the world would you rather be than us right now? every nation on earth faces challenges. every time in our history we face challenges too but i believe we have it within us to confront these challenges and solve them and i believe everything it takes to succeed in the 21st century are things we are better at than anyone in the world. the 21st century will be about productivity and the american worker is still the most productive worker on the planet. 21st century will be about innovation. the american people are the most innovative people on the planet. most of all the 21st century will be about big aspirations and dreams and the american people still have those too. i honestly believe if we confront the challenges and embrace the opportunities of this era the 21st century will be an american century. i believe that not only will they save the american dream that we will allow it to reach more people than it has ever reached before and for me that's a deeply personal principle. it's one that i hold dear to my heart. i tell people the time was compelled me to public services the reality that america doesn't only a single thing. i have a debt to this country that no matter how long i live for how hard a worker will never be able to repay it. i've been able to achieve things in my life and live the life that would have been impossible had my parents not come here and had this nation not existed, had america not been exceptional. what we want is not just for that continued to but to reach more people than ever before. as i said at the outset every country in the world has success. there are other countries that have large militaries in other nations with large economies and big companies. i truly believe that what separates us not just from other nations on the earth but other nations in history is that here we have united by the belief that every human being has a chance to reach their god-given potential. if we were ever to lose that we will lose what mix is different. we will still be big and still be powerful and we will still matter on the global stage but we won't be as special. i for one don't want to be part of the first generation of americans that leaves the next generation were softer than want to be one the first generation has to turn to the children and explain to them why we have got to grow up in the greatest country in history but they will not have the same chance. i know there's a lot of narrative about how divided we are between republicans and democrats and how divided we are among our political feelings and ideas and it's true. we have always been as evidence the other night. that's the benefit of our freedom but i believe what unites us is more important. no matter what your voter registration card says are who you voted for i believe there's enough i principle in america and if the idea that every single human being should matter that everyone deserves the right to achieve and we will continue to be a country that provides that. not only will this be the greatest era in american history the 21st century will also be an american century. that is why took the time to write this book and i tell the story of real people and the real challenges. describe what is gone wrong in their lives and what we are doing about it now and what we can do better or you will notice in the book there many ideas that are bipartisan. they involve my collaboration with the people of another party party. colleagues like chris coons of connecticut and cory booker of new jersey. many of our policy proposals are part of it at all particularly when it comes to higher education that you will read about how important it is to make higher education more affordable and working with cory booker to provide access to wi-fi and internet platforms especially in hispanic neighborhoods. these are important initiatives and they are not easy to put on a bumper sticker. i am won a lot of elections but they are critical to the future of our country. we still have time and space and we should debate the issues we disagree on but i hope you can come together and incorporate on the essential issues of our time because what we have before us is an extraordinary opportunity and that is to usher in the most prosperous era and all of our history and that is saying a lot for history of a country that i appreciate you being here tonight and i look forward to talking to you in person and thank you for this opportunity to address you. thank you. [applause] [applause] >> in 2008 i got a call from dexter filkins who is a well-known correspondent and he was a very good friend. we work together very extensively in iraq and afghanistan. he called me up and he said hey mandate he talks to everyone with the exact same tone whether it's the taliban me or his girlfriend doesn't matter. he calls me and says i have a great assignment. he said it's on the talibanization of pakistan and i remembered my husband sitting next to me and he rolled his eyes. you are not going to make the taliban. i just didn't answer. dexter went i learned not to answer. dexter went to pakistan and he spent months trying to line up access. the thing about south asia and the thing about pashtun culture it's a tribal culture is when they invite u.n. they will protect you with their life. we knew if dexter was able to line us up and they invited us in we would be relatively safe. the one thing we had to worry about was in order to reach the commander he was negotiating with we had to cross through to other commanders territory. we got the permission and the night before we were supposed to leave the got a phonecall from the commander's guys are they said you were welcome to come tomorrow but the one thing you cannot do is bring a woman. dexter and i looked at each other and said we are not separating there is no way. our translator who had close ties to the taliban said what are we going to do? they said don't bring a woman and we said you have to figure it out because i'm going. the next morning he showed up early and he said we will say you are mixed or death -- mr. mr. dexter's wife and he can't leave you alone in a strange city. i was completely covered. he couldn't see an ounce of my skin. we got in the car and when we arrived at his house the men go inside and ask them to come in. it's very awkward to bring a woman into the situation because most of these men have never even spoken who are met with a woman who is not either the wife or a blood relative. so i was given permission to come in and i stumble them. i could barely see. it was a very small room full of about 15 to 20 taliban fighters. they all had their guns and rockets and weapons and they were lounging around. i sat down and dexter said thank you for letting my wife come. this is my wife and by the way my wife has a camera. do you mind if she take some photos? >> sally ride did not grow up with astronaut dreams. back then the job was not available. when she was born in may of 1951 the united states space chrome was a white man's club restricted to fighter pilots and military men take a few women who did apply and keep in mind we have a lot of very qualified women pilots in those days in the early 50's out of world war ii and the work they had done. but all of these talented women were summarily rejected. women were considered too weak too unscientific, too womanly to fly in the space program. one newspaper editorialized that a female in the cockpit would be and i quote a nagging backseat rocket driver. thank you very much. another newspaper columnist ridiculed the prospect of women as astronauts by calling them astro-nets. sally ride love science as a kid and her interest was simply as a spectator. like most kids from that era and certainly she watched those early space lift offs when the teacher will then debate black-and-white tv set with rabbit ears into the classroom and watched john glenn and everybody else take off. as a child sally ride learned how to play tennis and she was so accomplished and so good at the junior circuit in the women's circuit should consider turning pro. in fact she dropped out of college for a few months to give it a try but when she realized she was never going to be one of the elite at the elite and that's all the sally ride would have settled for she decided that was not the play she needed to be. years later when she would be asked what it was that stopped her from a tennis career sally always said wistfully my forehand. but it never stopped her forward progress. when tennis did work ashy pivoted back into science went to stanford university for her undergraduate and her masters and her doctorate in astrophysics. i should also point out let's say she was not an underachiever. she was a double english in astrophysics major. sally was in the midst of writing a post graduate school applications one morning in 1977 1977 january 1977 when she wakes up the morning. she goes to the stamper student union to get a coffee and as we roll to try to wake up before class preaches picks up the stanford daily and never gets beyond the front page. the headline was just above the fold and it read nasa to recruit women. sally's future had just dropped into her lap. next on booktv from the savannah book festival and georgia donald miller discusses his book the supreme city how manhattan gave birth to modern america. [applause] >> thank you. it's been a long time since i have been in church. [laughter] it's great to be back in savannah and speaking before an audience and two of my former students and one of my former students dave mcauliffe junior just gave a performance this morning at 9:00. [applause] i want to clear up a little misconception by the way. [inaudible] i just finished the scripts an hour ago. i had to present them to tom hanks this week. [applause] lest i be accused of false advertising i noticed savannah book fair donald miller on jazz. while i love jazz and duke ellington is one of the characters in my book the jazz jazz age was a term that was coined by f. scott fitzgerald to capture the sink of poetic energy of the 1920s. i take one part of the 20s midtown manhattan and deal with that. and although it's been 20 some days since the book was published it kind of feels like 20 some years because i've entered a new world. i am writing another book and this is a civil war saga set in 1863 in vicksburg mississippi. when you do that when a writer does that he or she enters a world that they are creating so they are inside that world building the characters the characters who fashion that world and you are in there with them. you decide who gets into the world. you decide who gets on the ark, what animals and then when you are finished it's a sad thing to finish a book because you leave it all behind. you can never really into that world in the same way you once entered it. as a builder of the world as the creator of the world. all you can do is enter as the leader does as a visitor. that can be exciting but not for the author. i tend to kind of dump it when it's done because you have to. you have to be totally immersed in your new world. for the reader can be a very exciting experience because everything you see in this world is new hopefully and hopefully exciting and has a pull to it. but sadly the writer can't enter that world in the same way. i could never go back and reread. i never have one of my own works but i hope today i can do justice to the book that i have spent so long writing. it's not the book and this happens a lot in the writing community. it's not the book that i set out to right. originally a big grand idea. i was going to do new york over 20 year span. end of world war i to the beginning of world war ii boom and bust and do all five boroughs taking in all of new york city. but then as often happens in writing not long into the research i was drawn to another topic in the story if you will a larger story and that was the story of the sudden and spectacular emergence of midtown in the 1920s as the epicenter of new york city. you have to understand that for 300 years lower manhattan dominated new york city, almost was new york city to the world. then in the 20s bears the sudden eruption of midtown and to give you a sense of eruption in 1919 there is not a single skyscraper north of 42nd street. nine years later half of new york's skyscrapers are in midtown. a new building goes up in midtown every 57 minutes in the 20s. so this is one of and i don't exaggerate i think one of the great city building decades in all of history. and it's a process that is accompanied by and i deal with the building boom. i deal with the architecture and the people who built the buildings and the workers, some of the mohawk indians and i deal with the concomitant revolution but a culture revolution that accompanied it that created in a sense for help to create modern america. for me the 20s and for my students i think the 20s are exciting because we start to recognize ourselves in the 20s. it's hard for me to envision having a conversation with jane addams. it would be transient and wonderful and things like that but i can see having a conversation with f. scott fitzgerald somewhere in a café here in savannah. he is a modern person and in the 20s is a modern decade. 20 became if you were recognizable. it's an exciting. not to do it in the book and all books have the kind of the spine to them. you have to have something to hold it together. some people call these things tropes and i never knew what that meant but for me it was the year 1927 and of course in that year david sarnoff founded in b.c. first national radio network and fred french built the first horrific that tall building that still stands on fifth avenue north of 42nd street. 27 is the year of charles lindbergh's flight and the solo flight from new york to paris and his has returned and the parade they had for him in new york 4 million people showed up for this parade. it's a fantastic time. fitzgerald perhaps captured it best. he writes this. in that year he says the temple of the city change. change sharply. the parties were bigger the buildings were higher and the morals were looper -- looser and the liquor was cheaper. great filling stations full of money. i wish i could have written that. so new york then was in the vanguard of big transportations that would make the 20th century the american century and a place who rants that i have to see. you have the rise of commercial radio. you have the rights of tabloid journalism. you have the invention of television. you have the spread of radio and records of this pulsating jazz with armstrong and ellington. you have emergence of something we never have before, sports spectator sports. 59,000 come to yankee stadium and it had never happened before. and i try to tell this story to a series of biographers and there are about three dozen major characters. i think cast of characters in the book and most of them and i should say this too one of the great challenges that everybody faces when they start to create this characters and incidents are connecting them. dante said once that hell is a place where nothing connects well that is a bad book as well. you have to draw them together and i hope i can show you how we can draw close together. maybe in a q&a and i'm not going to leave a lot of time for q&a. somebody may fire a spitball at me when we get tired of this but maybe we can talk about writing as a process. there are a lot of authors like gail sheedy in the audience you can join the conversation. but my characters are the makers and shapers of this world i have talked about. most of them are from west of the hudson and east of the venue. they are not native workers. halfway through the book and this often happens with writers i kind of realize what i was writing. i read a passage from one of my favorite writers eb white. he wrote this classic called here is new york. it's the best book about new yorkers. he writes this. it's the person who was born elsewhere they came to new york requesting something that accounts for new york's high strung disposition its dedication to the arts and its incomparable achievements. that and a great quote from alexis de tocqueville captures the zeitgeist of my book. he wrote that every american is eaten up with a longing to rise. that is what this book is about. so often in american history all the kids learn in the classroom is about expectation. for example upton sinclair's the jungle and that's a unique writing where the meat is cut up and books like that have to be written. what is missing from that book in missing from so many classrooms i think is well the students asked this, did anybody ever get out of this place? did anybody ever rise above the circumstances? yes, they did. they crawled out of the place, lot of them including people from my own family. i come from a family of railroad workers and coalminers in pennsylvania. my people crawled out but the point is how they did it is hugely interesting and hugely important. it's the process of how we became a country we are. a lot of the book deals with people who are very successful but it takes you from the time when they were hugely unsuccessful and shows you how they did it. common people just trying to make it into the working class to get some recognition people who wrote -- rose rocket like to the top people like david sarnoff. so my characters come into new york fresh. they plant their flags and they try to refashion the city's economy and its culture and its dialectic. they changed new york, new york changes them. as jeff denham see the boxer said he came into new york 126 pounds and got the hell beat out of them the first time he fought in new york city and nobody recognized him. he said i finally figured out something about new york. you might want to new york but new york has to want you. steinbeck had the same experience before he wrote nation of wrath. he said it wasn't the city do is mean until i was able to cope with this energy and have some recognition -- recognition of my own that i live to new york and settled and he did. a lot of these characters in the book came from nothing. he came from belarus eight village that was so backward he hadn't seen a ship or anything that moved that wasn't pulled by a horse until he was 11 years old and came to new york with his mother. one of the characters is tex ritter. he is a big boxing promoter. he is a saloon keeper from the alaskan colon. he built modern madison square garden. he taught boxing promoters are lasting lesson that every successful fight has to be built around a big story. i like boxing but i really liked writing about boxing. i that good writers are in boxing, not bad anyway but guess who is the best? george carol oates. a fantastic book. she does the great dempsey and that as well. of course dempsey is the meal ticket. he's a hard hitter from the western mountain country and turned boxing in new york in new york into million-dollar menace -- industry. the next million-dollar game is not joe louis. the next million-dollar gators -- he turns baseball from small ball into long ball. like dempsey he is a slugger. there is lou gehrig born in new york columbia university. there is jean tunney who beat the great dempsey native new york from greenwich village. it was always the big hitters, the outsiders the roofs in the dempsey to capture the crowds. this came in with a lot of money. joe patterson from the patterson mccormick family in chicago. he is a a breakaway a one-time socialist and the rebel of the family. .. in a new way and reading it in a new way. and the tabloids, of course have never gotten away. and what i tried to do with these characters -- and this is important, i think, for the story -- knowing the future, knowing what's going the happen can be a tremendous liability for a writer of history. because then you slant your whole story toward that. if i write the story on the '20s knowing that the depression's on the horizon, the whole story becomes a prelude to the depression. but nobody in the '20s knew the depression was coming. david mccullough sr. always reminds me that the most inaccurate phrase in the english language is "the foreseeable future." the future can't be foreseen, okay? so i think what good historians and good historians are good storytellers. they have to get behind the characters' eyes and see the world the way they did. in the '20s, it was blue skies forever. and that's the way it was seen by the characters. and so you take away so much of your story, so much of the contingency, so much of the excitement when you take away their decision making, when you take away -- unless you take it to spot where they're making the decision and there's this way to go and that way to go and it's a choice and a difficult choice, then you start to understand. then you achieve whatever your story tries to achieve; empathy not sympathy. empathy. so it seemed absolutely unimaginable to new yorkers that that in the midst of this boom and with a mayor like stylish popular jimmy walker that this new york would crumble into depression and walker himself would be brought down and forced to resign by franklin roosevelt for charges of corruption. nobody could foresee that. nobody could see that. now, although great parts of my book are devoted to baseball boxing and proto hix i -- prohibition, i wanted to today talk about what i think is the central drama of the book, this building of sudden eruption of modern midtown. now, the story really gips -- and it is like a once upon a time thing -- it begins with completion of grand central terminal used to be grand central station. and that was finished in 1913. second largest project at the time next to panama canal. and that project was set in >> >> smoking and swirling cent in the trade would drive into the rail yard in came barreling through and hit the train in front of it. in the carnage was unbelievable. it caused the new york state legislature that new york's central electrify the trains. now has an engineer who worked there digest's discovered him and found out about him and i thought i knew. sova to electrify the trains to move with the underground passageways like the subway but he goes further than that. he takes this place of swirling smoke and ash and builds a roof over the electrified trains. and looks like a parking lot. in that is a new thing at the time. id within seven years or eight years after that you have modern park avenue almost exactly the way it looks today. with a wonderful piece from the queens borough bridge that goes down to me on a fran essentials through grand central then down park avenue. that the husband sold them put under his name but we know from the archives that she wrote it. show he builds on malaria an entirely new city called terminal city. non-residents see this how they work together. the residents on park avenue they are building high-rise apartments never have they ever lived that high before in the history of the world. the old park avenue were vendor builds it was called vendor build alley on each side was lined with the terrifically large vendor built mansions. most are empty of life the millionaires are dead the children are gone though widows survived and not enough irish maids to staff them. so there are aggressive jewish realtors and the minute they buy the buildings and the mansions including the largest in the world they tear it down. they build modern fifth avenue. sax but that the new moves up and campbell turns into one of the great merchandise marts and you have another chance to ration. then moving up the river some places now one of the most exclusive the oberth neighborhoods they turn the place around. the queens of the upper fifth avenue although they have their shops in hated one another but rubinstein even though they are so close but they don't talk to each other the entire time they're in new york city. but he is the canadian farmer's daughter. but rubinstein is the daughter of a polish kerosene dealer from krakow. there billionaires'. the for the 1920's only women wore powder and paint the with the movies now they put on eye shadow and i make up it is a badge of independents like smoking in fact americans spend more on beauty products in 1927 than they did electricity. it is a different world. this is one of the fun things about writing a book like that is you can explore to find the new worlds you didn't think that was an existence like cannot believe i had never been to sutton place it is only a five minute walk from the east river and built by a guy who built the first skyscraper in there is a self-contained community right in the heart of midtown manhattan and it is affordable living with the golf course in a miniature golf course and it is a terrific place and i had never heard of it. i've read the novel underworld in those two characters walk into a lobby and david mccullough worked that building. the mother said to in the world is read french? light guy in the car and went to new york one of the classic art deco buildings of new york city. and he turned out to be the enchanting character. he looks like a babbitt and talks like a basket. but he is selling real-estate in great numbers to ordinary americans like they are buying stocks in his construction company. after he built the skyscraper he discovers on 42nd street and says i will build affordable for the middle class and he does it. he is a titanic figure of the '20s. and there is a lot of these people in new york city. just go around the cluster to start with the chrysler building. everybody knows chrysler but my editor did not know there was a person called walter chrysler. that was kind of embarrassing to them. he came from the kansas plains he was an oil boy and got a job with general motors and the new age and in 1928 after he introduces the first car in his name the chrysler six he decides to build the tallest building in the world and everybody is watching. the same day he makes that announcement a group of speculators come downtown to build the building that is now the truck building. and they announced they would build the tallest building in the world and it is the sky race for two years between wall and chrysler. in 1929 just before the crash of the new york newspapers named the winner as wall. that chrysler would not be beaten. he builds in the cone of the building at the top inside the tower he had his engineers built along skinny needle and in one day and nobody knows exactly when he raises it into the sky than the chrysler building is the tallest structure he wanted to build the eiffel tower as well. he wins the race but loses 11 months later when the empire state building goes up. these are the kinds of stories. you have the 77 story building and is on top of the world bested by somebody and that is new york city. what i try to do in the book is talk about the people behind the building there is the tower it is a near perfect representation with his speed and style and romantic excess and the architect nobody knows who he is felt the tremor of this lustrous new material that does not bust. inside you can see this he built a wonderful mural to the workers who put up the structure and it is new york's commanding testimony to those blue-collar workers but right across the street from the chrysler building is again a building i never paid attention to which is the third largest building. i had the same filling who is standing? it is a 56 story tower people from new jersey when they describe it like it was an island floating in the sky in the '20s he built broadway theaters and he came out of nowhere. 1919 son of a ukrainian family from brooklyn to come back to united states he is broken 10 years later he is a multimillionaire builder. described as a master of the midtown skyline he is one of the wonderment of new york city. with the city of of opportunity to describe explore cities you could read them like to read the pages of a book every stone has a tongue and every tongue tells the story was concentrated expressions of civilization that can be told almost autobiographical a. that is the city of opportunity where he

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