| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David M. Scobey. Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape. (Critical Perspectives on the Past.) Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 340. $40.00.

The most important achievement of David M. Scobey's study of New York city building and city planning in the 1860s and 1870s lies its combination of serious attention to political economy and culture. Equally comfortable with both modes of analysis, the author offers a history of planning in New York that is deeply embedded in the concrete dynamics of the city's growth and in representations of the idea that New York was the "Empire City." Scobey builds on the work of historians who have moved the origins of city planning back from the Progressive era to the third quarter of the nineteenth century, focusing on the group of "bourgeois urbanists" who coalesced around the construction of Central Park. These genteel reformers, downtown elites, and real estate boosters had different specific agendas, Scobey argues, but forged a shared vision of planning that combined "genteel environmental reform with a booster erotics of growth" in the pursuit of "a cityscape that could embody both commerce and civilization, market energy and moral uplift" (p. 10). Thus, the origin of American city planning did not depend on "Progressive ideals of efficiency and expertise" but on "the bourgeois touchstones" of economic boosterism, moral environmentalism, and the civilizing mission of moral stewardship embedded in the idea of the "Empire City" (p. 256). It was a fundamentally Victorian project.

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