The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America's Big Cities.

This is a brilliant and important book about how sixties' liberalism "in a series of, great gambles regarding work, welfare, public order, and a common culture, reshaped the three great cities." Siegel chose these cities - New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles - because, he says, each had set not just its own but much of the national urban agenda.

Yet Siegel's choice has to make a reader pause before even beginning the book: New York, Washington, and Los Angeles? By no conventional standard is Washington a great city - it is small both in land and population, and it has virtually no economy beyond the government sector. Unlike other world capitals - Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid - Washington was never its own city. Washington was, to use one of Siegel's favorite attack words, "dependent" from the start. Nor has it ever set any part of the national agenda on its own terms. What influence it has exerted has been in its role as a federal colony.

The country's third (or second!) great city is Chicago - the most beautiful and perhaps the most successful of the old industrial urban centers, having overcome the classic obstacles of middle-class flight and manufacturing job loss that have hit all American cities. Siegel stacks the deck for his argument by including Washington and ignoring Chicago.

He may have omitted Chicago for two reasons. The first is that the city of big shoulders has always marched to its own Midwestern drummer, sitting in splendid isolation on Lake Michigan's shore and caring little for national media influence. It is a great city that is content within its own boundaries. (According to local lore, Chicago politicians who found themselves in Mayor Richard M. Daley's disfavor during his 1955-76 reign were sent to Washington as punishment. Thus did Paul Douglas, for example, become a U.S. Senator.)

But the second reason is that Chicago undermines Siegel's thesis.

Siegel argues that what set American cities on their downward spiral was the liberal response to the black urban riots of the 1960s, particularly to the 1965 Watts riot. The violence spawned a "riot ideology," he says, and legitimated criminal behavior as not only justified but functional in rectifying the sins of racism. Mayors and civic leaders, backed by leading intellectuals, pressed the federal government for huge new programs to placate the rioters. Siegel calls this "peddling pathology."

Yet while the sins of Chicago's Mayor Daley were no doubt many, peddling pathology was not among them. Even as New York's Mayor John Lindsay was receiving national praise from what Siegel calls the "prestige press" for walking the streets of Harlem to calm its residents following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mayor Daley issued the Chicago police his notorious order to "shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city."

No one beyond Chicago's boundaries had a public word of praise for Daley - yet he was reelected twice more. As he said on reelection in 1974: "I always win." As a powerful Democratic city, Chicago managed to sustain a large government role before and after the riots without catering to riot ideology. And even though its huge government programs led to fiscal meltdown by the late 1970s, Chicago just doesn't fit Siegel's thesis.

Even Los Angeles, which Siegel covers compellingly, doesn't really fit the thesis. He devotes an entire chapter to L.A.'s horrifying "Police Politics," and concludes that L.A.'s highly decentralized political structure both freed it from the costs of an overextended government and helped produce the unaccountable police system that made it both the first city to experience a major postwar riot and the only city to experience two such riots.

What this book is really about is New York. It is a book propelled by the author's anger at what he sees as the destruction wreaked over the last three decades by white liberals setting the country's urban policy agenda, but particularly New York's.

Mayor Lindsay, Mayor Daley's opposite in every way, comes in for rough though not unfair treatment at Siegel's hands. He is the ultimate example of the liberal whose principles are "simultaneously morally libertarian and statist," driven by both "antipathy to economic markets and faith in a free market in morals."

Part of Siegel's anger stems from his own love of cities, an intellectual's cry of "Look what they done to my song, Ma." He describes himself as a "son of New York City" who was "weaned on a pride for her accomplishments; now I am saddened by her decline, even as I hope for her renewal."

For there is little doubt that despite its much heralded renaissance as the financial capital of the world and the country's number-one international tourist destination, New York is in many ways a mess today - and probably always has been. A fabulous, flamboyant wreck of a great city. New York's precariousness cannot be attributed solely to the failure of liberalism, abysmal as Siegel thinks that failure may have been. It has self-destructed so many times that its triumphant perch at the pinnacle - despite its filth, noise, and pollution - has to be astonishing to onlookers. Watching New York is like watching the Flying Wallendas, but with cyclical crashes.

When I moved to New York from Southern California in 1973, one of Mayor Lindsay's deputy mayors admonished me: "The smart money's getting out." He was moving to Los Angeles, one of many top officials abandoning New York. It looked like the deputy mayor was right when New York's economy tanked in 1974, and hit its world-class fiscal crisis in 1975, when Wall Street's bond market just shut down on New York City's debt. The city had been a victim of extraordinarily irresponsible fiscal policies by its own as well as state officials.

Since then the city's economy has soared to great heights only to stall once again in 1990. And as the stock market flirts with disaster in late 1997, every New Yorker has to worry about just how badly their perennial boom-and-bust economy might fall. Even before the stock market's problems, the city's unemployment rate had stood at 9.3 percent, twice the national average. As Siegel notes, New York still retains its old, deadly combination of very high taxes and very low levels of public service. And despite Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's regular assurances that he is in full control of all aspects of life within the five boroughs, everyone knows that City Hall can do very little to improve the private economy.

What it can do, as this book shows effectively, is undermine the economy, turning a basically entrepreneurial city like New York into a dependent ruin like Washington. Washington remains the nation's most heavily subsidized city, says Siegel, as well as the only city with both falling employment and a rising crime rate.

Washington is not a great city, but it looms as a great city's nightmare, an example of just how bad social conditions can become even with a beautiful city plan, magnificent housing and boulevards, and steady employment via the government.

Siegel stacks the deck for his argument by using Washington rather than Chicago - or even Boston. But he's right enough.

Liberals are going to hate this book. They should read it anyway and ponder whether liberal good will plus hubris indeed led to two decades of urban disaster.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a political scientist. at the Vera Institute of Justice, edited Breaking Away: The Future of Cities (Twentieth Century Fund Press).