Greater Gotham

Starred review from July 3, 2017
A metastasized New York straddles the turn of the 20th century in Wallace’s magisterial follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning Gotham (coauthor, with Edwin G. Burrows). Wallace, the director of the Gotham Center for New York City History, takes the 1898 municipal consolidation of New York’s five boroughs, which made it the world’s second-largest city, as a peg for an exploration of a new socioeconomic order based on consolidated corporations—usually headquartered in Manhattan—that tamed chaotic markets and made New York the capital of capitalism and epicenter of such industries as insurance, biscuits, and musical theater. Wallace traces this theme in the city’s struggles to manage explosive growth; zone forests of skyscrapers; dig a subway system; forge a regulatory state to solve health, housing, and economic crises; and unify its immigrant masses into a new kind of Americanism. It’s a tumultuous, often violent story pitting Republican plutocrats and Progressive reformers against corrupt Tammany pols, WASPs against Catholics, strikers against sweatshop owners, cops against gangsters, militant socialists against reformists, and Greenwich Village bohemians against everything holy. Miraculously, Wallace shapes this sprawl into a coherent, engrossing narrative that’s nicely balanced between historical sweep and colorful detail. The result sets a standard for urban history, capturing both New York’s particularities and its protean dynamism. Illus.

Starred review from August 1, 2017
From the consolidation of the city into five boroughs to the massive upheavals after World War I.After the Pulitzer Prize-winning first volume, Gotham (1998), by Wallace (History/John Jay Coll. of Criminal Justice; A New Deal for New York, 2002, etc.) and Edwin G. Burrows, which traced the city's founding up to 1898, this massive second installment explores themes of business consolidation, construction, and the backlash that would accompany such intensive growth--e.g., labor unrest through World War I. This is a huge undertaking, and Wallace organizes the work tidily. He first identifies the key players in the creation of this modern city ("Who Rules New York?"), which, at the time, replaced London as the financial hub of the world. These figures and organizations included, among countless others ably delineated by Wallace, J.P. Morgan, Tammany Hall trough-feeders, ferocious reform groups like the Women's Municipal League and muckraker Lincoln Steffens, and maverick publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst. Everyone wanted a piece of the building boom, as evidenced by the skyscraper boom in the first two decades of the new century: "the skyline replaced the harbor as New York's emblem, just as financiers supplanted merchants in the city's economy." The author captures the frenetic mood of the time, as many New Yorkers were "gripped by a Promethean frenzy." As the author writes, "for these Gothamites, soaring buildings signaled prosperity, power, and movement into the front rank of world-class cities." On the other hand, as trains, bridges, subways, tunnels, terminals, stations, docks, and islands evolved to meet the needs of the huge influx of immigrants and workers, there emerged an important reform movement to address the poor, sick, and disenfranchised. From "Progressives" to "Repressives," Wallace devotes an entire block of chapters to New York gangs, crime, and cops, as well as to "Radicals," "Bending Gender," "Black Metropolis," and "Insurgent Art," among numerous other lively strands. True to its subject, a monumental work of myriad vantage points.

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