| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape. By David M. Scobey. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. xii, 340 pp. $40.00, ISBN 1-56639-950-5.)

Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898–1938. By Keith D. Revell. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xii, 327 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8018-7073-9.)

These are remarkable books about the long origins of what had been our time, our twentieth-century liberal era. They reach back to the formative stage of New York's history to understand the institutions and people behind its web of governance and vast public sphere. David M. Scobey wrestles with the question of what touched off New York's spasm of civic improvement in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when laborers turned the first earth for Central Park, steps were taken toward comprehensive planning, and towers rose for the great bridge that would unite a metropolis. Looking for a causal explanation, Scobey borrows the Marxist perspectives of the historian Henri Lefebvre and the geographer David Harvey. The era of improvements, he argues, was forced by the turmoil of uneven development, the lurching capitalism that brought the extremes of terminals and tenements. "Instead of mastery over time and space," he writes, "the built environment embodied a propulsive drama of rupture and displacement" (p. 87). Beginning in the 1850s a coalition of urban intellectuals such as William Cullen Bryant, genteel reformers such as Frederick Law Olmsted, and enlightened businessmen such as Andrew H. Green came together to build the "tutelary" ground for the masses at Central Park, plan improvements along upper Broadway, and sketch entire cityscapes for the Bronx and Staten Island. For a brief time in the 1870s, Green became the overall coordinator of uptown development, as near to an American Haussmann as the city would have.

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