Empire City: New York Through the Centuries
Empire City: New York Through the Centuries
As perhaps never before in its extraordinary history, New York has captured the American imagination. This major anthology brings together not only the best literary writing about New York — from O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Paul Auster, and James Baldwin, among many others — but also the most revealing essays by politicians, philosophers, city planners, social critics, visitors, immigrants, journalists, and historians. The anthology begins with an account of Henry Hudson’s voyage in 1609 and ends with an essay written especially for this book by John P. Avlon, former Mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s speechwriter, called “The Resilient City,” on the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center as observed fr
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New York’s Biography,
Editors Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar have amassed an enormous collection of essays, letters, diary entries, and poems about New York written by New Yorkers and visitors to the city from the dawn of the modern age (ca. 1600) to just after the ravages of 9/11. While an overwhelming majority of the pieces are pro-Gotham, I was glad that Messrs. Jackson and Dunbar had the wisdom and integrity to present some works that express anxiety and doubt about New York’s status. The result is an extensive, celebratory, sometimes warts-and-all biography of the world’s greatest city. As Mr. Jackson remarked in the 1999 Ric Burns New York Documentary, New York is not a stagnant, static thing: “New York is always becoming”. He and Mr. Dunbar are to be congratulated for reminding us that New York’s biography is long, and with a lot more greatness to come.
Rocco Dormarunno,
author of “The Five Points, A Novel”
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|Essential, Thorough NYC Reading,
A true behemoth of New York City lore, Empire City isn’t so much a textbook (although I used it as one) as the product of a couple of historians lovingly digging up primary documents and arranging them to tell four centuries of NYC history. Compiled by Kenneth T. Jackson (frequently seen on history channel documentaries about the city) and David S. Dunbar, it has first-person Joe Schmoe accounts, political documents, critical essays, travel journals, fictional selections, and plenty of ephemera, and divides them into 5 majors epochs: the Colonial Period, Rise to National Dominance, Industrial Metropolis, World City, and World Capital.
The first part, the Colonial Period (1624-1783), covers the largest span of time in the fewest pages. Due to the language of the period though, the primary documents here are perhaps the hardest to trudge through. But there’s some great stuff here, from an account of Henry Hudson’s maiden voyage up the Hudson, to a few initial colonial social contracts between the city’s first citizens, though accounts leading into the Revolutionary War. Jackson ends the epoch with his own heart-wrenching, ironic account of the slave ships of the British Army, where American prisoners were served rotten food as a deal between British General Howe and a New York City mercantilist when said mercantilist found out Howe was having an affair with his wife.
Things get moving at a much quicker pace in the second part, Rise to National Dominance (1783-1860), with documents of the laying out of the street grid in Manhattan, DeWitt Clinton’s then-revolutionary idea of using the public schools to educate the poor as well as the well-off, and plenty on the notorious Five Points district. There are also lots of accounts of European travelers having a look around at the Great Experiment (including a certain Victorian novelist who almost ruined his career with his account), but more important to this section are some of the first writers of the American literary tradition, including Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville.
Industrial Metropolis (1860-1898), the third part, starts off with a selection of writings by a couple of relatively obscure black citizens of New York who might be credited as the start of the long, proud line of African American literature to spring from the tight racial relations of New York City. An account of the Draft Riots of 1863 follows, and the bulk of the literary work of this section is decidedly political, with most sides drawn between representation and/or endorsement of the capitalist model that, let’s be honest, NYC was built on (George Fitzhugh, Horatio Alger, Edith Wharton), and a worker-based outcry against the dehumanizing effects of that model (Thomas McGuire, Henry George, Jacob Riis). On a lighter note, there are accounts of the building of Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as a poem in praise of the Statue of Liberty and an early view of Coney Island before it was ever lit up.
The last two parts take up more than half of the book, which is understandable as by this time the printing press was heralding the rise of mass media and New York was replacing Boston as the literary capital of the world. It’s no surprise, then, that a decent portion of part 4,World City (1898-1948), is composed of giants of the American literary tradition, including Henry James, Henry Adams, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Mitchell, and John Steinbeck. It’s filled in nicely with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s Ten Misconceptions of New York, Le Corbusier’s chimeric fancies about filling every space with a skyscraper, the compact that established the Port Authority, numerous documents of the horrendous worker treatment and tenement laws of the turn of the century, and “Brooklyn Could Have Been a Contender,” a modern essay by John Tierney that imagines a world where Brooklyn hadn’t accepted Manhattan’s conditions for consolidating into the New York City we know.
If part 3 showed the roots of the Harlem Renaissance, the fourth part and then the fifth, World Capital (1948-2002), reveal the bulk of its fruits; they’re represented with selections by Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and James Weldon Johnson in Part 4, and James Baldwin, a searing poem by Federico Garcia Lorca about Harlem, and a slew of white writers who were influenced by them including Bernard Malamud, Jack Kerouac, and Tom Wolfe in Part 5. The rest of World Capital could probably be second-guessed more than any other section simply because of the wealth of material being written in and about NYC in the last half-century, but I don’t have many complaints. This part is especially heavy on city planning arguments (what was that old saying? Something like, “New York would be the greatest city in the world, if they ever finished it.”), with…
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|Before you do anything else, READ THIS BOOK,
I bought this book as soon as it was in stores because David Dunbar, my former teacher, wrote it and he is a GENIUS. Reading the essays and stories between the covers was an even greater experience than owning the work of a friend. It now sits on my coffeetable, waiting for my next trip to Dobbs Ferry, where I will ask David to inscribe the title page with his autograph. Each essay is packed with all the feeling and emotion to be found in the city, in all of its people and buildings and history. To read this book is not simply to follow words on a page…It is to experience the greatest city on Earth. From Joplin to New York and back again, this book, and CITYterm, have together been one of the most enlightening opportunities I have ever had.
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