Yuppies: Young Urban Professionals and the Making of Postindustrial New York

Abstract

In the early 1980s, the yuppie stereotype emerged as an object of media and popular fascination. In 1984,Newsweekmagazinedeclared it the “Year of theYuppie,” thewords emblazoned above a Gary Trudeau caricature of two urbane white people in New York’s Central Park. Inside, an article profiled the members of this newly discovered class: professionals who earned high salaries, coveted loft apartments, trained for marathons, owned Cuisinarts, and supped on sushi and chardonnay. Elsewhere, commentators trotted out the image of the yuppie to make sense of a host of related issues: from new modes of masculinity, to unease about consumerism, to the entrance of women into the professions. Yuppies, ultimately, were anxieties about affluence made flesh.1 When I began my dissertation research, I wondered: What would happen if we took “yuppies” seriously—not as a stereotype or as an object of satire, but as a real demographic wave that washed over America’s cities beginning in the late 1970s?What would I discover if I looked critically at the highly educated professionals who came to New York to work onWall Street and in law firms? Would it help me tell a new story about the 1980s—one that did not foreground Ronald Reagan, Sunbelt suburbanites, corporate revanchists, or conservative economists, as other historians have?2 What I discovered was that yuppies themselves—real, living young urban professionals— are essential to understanding how the booming financial and professional sectors remade America in the closing decades of the twentieth century. They were at the forefront of the concentration of capital and brainpower in ahandful of cities. They embodied the split ofwhat was once a broad middle class in two: an upwardly mobile, college-educated metropolitan class, on the one hand, and a downwardly mobile class of workers on the other. They transformed American politics, as the Democratic Party became more beholden to educated professionals than to blue-collar workers, more indebted to Wall Street than to urban political machines, more in thrall to highly paid young people than to older or poorer voters. Ultimately, yuppies, while never numerous enough to swing national elections by themselves, were able to reshape American politics—and with it, American economic and social life.