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(Mike Wallace is one of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice's
Marxist professors. His earlier book on NYC co-written with Edwin G.
Burrows is a masterpiece.)
NY Times Sunday Book Review, Oct. 15 2017
The 20 Years That Made New York City
By JOSEPH BERGER
GREATER GOTHAM
A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919
By Mike Wallace
Illustrated. 1,182 pp. Oxford University Press. $45.
“Gotham,” by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, the magisterial Pulitzer
Prize-winning history of New York City published in 1999, ran 1,424
pages, and covered roughly 375 documented years — from 1524, when
Giovanni da Verrazano anchored in the Narrows off Staten Island without
making the acquaintance of the resident Lenape people, all the way to
1898, when the five boroughs were consolidated into a single throbbing
metropolis. Wallace’s just-as-magisterial sequel, “Greater Gotham,”
itself more than a thousand pages long, covers a mere 20 years, stopping
with the end of World War I. But, oh, what years they were!
The city we recognize today was pretty much formed in those two decades,
the era of Teddy Roosevelt, the Titanic, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
fire, the Wobblies, the Shuberts, Lily Bart and Irene and Vernon Castle.
The iconic skyline began sprouting buildings like the Flatiron and the
Woolworth. Grand Central and Penn Station became fevered hubs. The first
subway line, a nine-mile jaunt from City Hall to 145th Street, opened in
October 1904, and other lines along with new steel bridges
(Williamsburg, Manhattan and Queensboro) soon connected the outer boroughs.
Times Square blossomed into the world’s crossroads, enhanced by new
palatial theaters that make up today’s Broadway. Tin Pan Alley’s
tunesmiths filled the nation’s hearts with songs still sung in
Manhattan’s jazz clubs and fueled the city’s swank night life. Canny
immigrant garment makers, glimpsing profits in a new gadget, the
nickelodeon, gave birth to America’s movie industry (even if most of
that industry soon departed for sunnier Hollywood).
Though some were founded earlier, the great Metropolitan and Natural
History museums, the New York Public Library and the Bronx Zoo became
the splendid institutions they are today. The erection of the Polo
Grounds and Ebbets Field fueled a local rivalry between the Giants and
Dodgers that would also include a team of Polo Grounds renters — the
newly christened Yankees. Lillian Wald, Margaret Sanger, Abraham Cahan,
A. Philip Randolph, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood and a band of
muckraking journalists championed the welfare and labor benefits that
New Yorkers currently enjoy and set up organizations to help the huddled
masses pouring in from abroad.
Wallace, a professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
tells the story of those two decades with encyclopedic sweep and
granular detail, but with enough verve and wry humor to make this
doorstopper immensely readable. Even weathered aficionados of city lore
will find moments of revelation. Newcomers will be fascinated by how it
all came to be.
What makes the book so entertaining is that it is not a conventional
chronicle of how government leaders handled that era’s crises. Rather
the book is as much a social and cultural history as it is a political
narrative. We learn about changes in how people were housed, how they
got to work, how they enjoyed their pleasures and vices. We learn how
new zoning regulations shaped the cityscape and why and how skyscrapers
were built. We learn almost as much about vaudeville, ragtime,
Victrolas, Ash Can painters and the realist works of Theodore Dreiser
and Edith Wharton as we do about City Hall and Tammany Hall, centers of
the era’s corrupt politics.
We learn how Jim Crow segregation in housing and jobs was almost as
omnipresent as it was in the South, and how the police sided with whites
in conflicts with blacks, yet we also learn how an emergent Harlem
became a bulwark in the fight against racism. We learn, too, how New
York grew into a union town, despite the presence of a hired group of
strikebreakers and an initial snubbing by unions of unskilled immigrant
Italians, Jews, blacks and women.
The animating theme of the book is consolidation. Wallace shows how
plutocrats like J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt joined political
leaders in pressing for the merger of Manhattan with the four other
boroughs. They wanted to lessen what was called “ruinous competition,”
just as they had done in engineering the consolidation of the smaller
companies that became United States Steel, American Telephone and
Telegraph, and Nabisco. Along the way they elevated Wall Street into a
global powerhouse. Unions, seeing the benefits of scale, also consolidated.
Flush with millions, these tycoons — for all their disrepute as robber
barons — enhanced the great cultural institutions. They also exerted
their influence and spent their money on the building of the subways and
the first limited-access highway (the Bronx River Parkway), the opening
of early public high schools and libraries and the upgrades in tenements.
Wallace doesn’t skimp on the seedy underside, with labyrinthine tales of
gangsters and gamblers, crooked cops and greedy ward-heelers. He
describes how prostitution was rife — 15,000 streetwalkers and brothel
workers in Manhattan alone. An effort by reformers to clamp down on
another vice, Sunday drinking, by limiting it to hotels with 10 or more
rooms inspired saloons to divide their barrooms into a bunch of
“bedrooms,” becoming de facto brothels. “Reformers had handed the sex
biz a vast new infrastructure,” Wallace writes.
The book is enlivened by fun factoids. In 1908, before automobiles took
over, 120,000 horses deposited 60,000 gallons of urine and 2.5 million
pounds of manure in the streets every day.
My one major quibble is TMI: too much information. The book’s volume of
detailed material at moments makes it like the whaling chapters in
“Moby-Dick,” possibly trying some readers’ patience. Do we need a
hundred crowded pages on the stories of a dozen strikes? A little bit of
Wallace’s own consolidation would have made for a less draining reading
experience. Yet he is seldom dry. His touches include a description of
the United Charities Building on East 22nd Street, which discounted
rents for social betterment organizations, as “bulging with the benevolent.”
Readers will also find debates about urban life that still resonate.
Were the police being too tough or too lenient? Reformers advocating
pensions for widows or shelters for the homeless were accused of
fostering dependency. Many New Yorkers believed then, as some do today,
that “wretched conditions would ward off freeloaders and keep taxes low.”
New York has always been a work in progress. But the particular years
recounted in this essential, absorbing and mostly sprightly history went
a long way in shaping the pulsating city we know.
Joseph Berger was a reporter and editor for The Times for over 30 years,
specializing in metropolitan news. He is writing a biography of Elie Wiesel.
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