How Filming Rules Remade New York City

"In New York alone, it helped to usher in what has become virtually an entire new industry, generating over five billion dollars a year in economic activity and bringing work to more than 100,000 New Yorkers: renowned directors and stars, working actors and technicians, and tens of thousands of men and women employed by supporting businesses, from equipment-rental houses to scenery shops to major studio complexes that now rival those of Southern California. Along the way, it has also helped to ensure that New York retains its status as one of the most familiar and compelling urban landscapes in the world.

Yet in retrospect, the creation of the Mayor's Film Office, significant as it was, can be seen as simply one piece of a much larger and more pervasive shift introduced during Lindsay's two terms in City Hall. It is a change in sensibility so pervasive - from the city as a place of function, in essence, to a place of pleasure - that today it surrounds us, almost invisibly, having quietly revolutionized the way we think about the meaning and purpose of New York and other American cities."

This move was the most important and lasting legacy of Lindsay's administration, according to this piece by architect and filmmaker James Sanders.