And apropos intersecting collections in the Baruch Archives that we just wrote about…

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2016/08/how-nyc-became-nyc/

Eight years after Bernard Baruch’s 1889 graduation from the City College of New York in its original location on Lexington Avenue and 23d Street (it would later become a separate unit named for Baruch), another notable alumnus bade farewell to its ivied walls. Upton Sinclair, soon to write “The Jungle” and other muckraking classics, graduated in 1897.

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/alumni/online_exhibits/digital/2007/upton/upton.html

Why mention this now?

Because the previous post about how Luther Gulick and master publicist Edward L. Bernays engineered passage of the momentous 1960 rezoning of New York overlooked a key document.

On March 24, 1960, as Gulick and co-chair Robert W. Dowling of the Committee for Modern Zoning struggled to overcome a tide of business opposition to tightening the building restrictions, they wrote Sinclair hoping for an expression of support.

Sinclair obliged, scrawling on the bottom of the letter: “A city without zoning is a lunatic asylum without a superintendent.”

Could you ask for a better endorsement than that?