It would not have been possible to complete a research project as ambitious as this without the funding made available to it, in whole or part, from many sources. I wish to thank them all for their vision and patience: the Center for Metropolitan Studies (Metrocenter) at the National Institute of Mental Health; the Professional Staff Congress/Board of Higher Education research grants for faculty of the City University of New York (four awards); the New York Community Trust; the Taconic Foundation; the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development; the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development; the Graduate and Research Dean, Queens College, City University of New York.
Professor Herbert Gans deserves special thanks for his willingness to trust me to the extent that he cosigned the original research proposal to NIMH, and thus made funding possible (for at that time I was an unknown newcomer to the United States), and then continued to encourage me as I learned to cope with the problems of administering a large research team.
Special thanks also go to Mark Naison, who supervised the completion of the final drafts of all segments, and encouraged and made suggestions to each author, while I was on leave away from New York City. His suggestions concerning my own segments were very valuable.
Many research assistants have helped with this study. Jody Dworetzki and John McLoughlan worked with historical data, while those engaged in contemporary (post-1972) data gathering included Reuben Johnson III, Stephen Barton, Kathleen Schneider, Anita Nager, Stephen Burghardt, Karolynn Siegel, Judy Sandwell, Danny Guenzberger, Steven Kennedy, Mark Bierman, Susan Gibson, Karen Leiner, Shelly Zabrowski, Kim Edel, and Patty Celentano, together with a great many interviewers, mostly selected from among the students at Hunter College and Queens College, the City University of New York.
It is important that we recognize the contributions made by many who have given generously of their time and information: past and present activists and officials whom we have interviewed, librarians and archivists who have made suggestions and helped us find what we needed, colleagues who have given us feedback. The reviewers for Rutgers University Press also contributed very helpful suggestions.
Most of all, I would like to thank the other historians who have contributed to this volume. All proved to be faithful workers who were excellent at the historian's craft. As historians, they had all been socialized to be academic rugged individualists who were used to working alone, and who therefore found my team approach, derived from my sociological apprenticeship, foreign. But they caught my vision of the potential of this study, and their own enthusiasm burgeoned as their research proceeded. I know each one doubted whether we would ever pull the whole historical project together into a completed volume. But as individualists, each took pride in his or her own work, while my definition of the subject matter and the themes resulted in a high degree of teamwork and unity in the final product. It is extremely gratifying to realize the original vision, to find the historical fabric that we have unfolded to be as interesting as it is.
Ronald Lawson
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