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How did New York City come to represent the best and worst of urban life?
Empire City
The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape
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David M. Scobey
"Exhaustively researched, beautifully written, and powerfully argued.... Empire City will influence the theories and histories of urban geographers, historians, sociologists, and cultural theorists alike."
—George Chauncey, University of Chicago, author of Gay New York
For generations, New Yorkers have joked about "The City's" interminable tearing down and building up. The city that the whole world watches seems to be endlessly remaking itself. When the locals and the rest of the world say "New York," they mean Manhattan, a crowded island of commercial districts and residential neighborhoods, skyscrapers and tenements, fabulously rich and abjectly poor cheek by jowl. Of course, it was not always so; New York's metamorphosis from compact port to modern metropolis occurred during the mid-nineteenth century. Empire City tells the story of the dreams that inspired the changes in the landscape and the problems that eluded solution.
Author David Scobey paints a remarkable panorama of New York's uneven development, a city-building process careening between obsessive calculation and speculative excess. Envisioning a new kind of national civilization, "bourgeois urbanists" attempted to make New York the nation's pre-eminent city. Ultimately, they created a mosaic of grand improvements, dynamic change, and environmental disorder. Empire City sets the stories of the city's most celebrated landmarks—Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the downtown commercial center—within the context of this new ideal of landscape design and a politics of planned city building. Perhaps such an ambitious project for guiding growth, overcoming spatial problems, and uplifting the public was bound to fail; still, it grips the imagination.
Excerpt
Read the Introduction and an excerpt from Chapter 1 (pdf).
Reviews
"Lucidly written, deeply researched and thought through, Empire City zooms to the front rank of books about nineteenth century New York. Scobey examines the way real estate boosters, visionary reformers, business elites and Tammany politicos reshaped Gotham's cityscape, for good and ill. His analytical approach both illuminates a particular era, and provides a powerful general model for examining other times, other places."
—Mike Wallace, co-author of Pulitzer-Prize winning Gotham: A History of New York
"What made New York? In David Scobey's deft and deeply meditated account, it is not the blind forces of modernization nor the overarching will of an Haussman, but the complex interplay of interests, values and ideas—and above all the grandiose city—and nation-building aspirations of the 'bourgeois urbanists' of the 1860s and 70s. Scobey's New York is both a supremely self-conscious project—a 'mission civilatrice,' as he writes—and the battleground for the conflicting political, economic and social ambitions of an emergent world-city. This is a book for anyone who cares about cities—their future as well as their past."
—James Traub, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of City On A Hill: Testing The America Dream At City College
"Scobey has written a brilliant, evocative account of New York on the brink of economic and social chaos."
—Journal of American History
"Scobey's study is a significant contribution to literature in several fields... Perhaps most useful is Scobey's willingness to employ the lens of political economy to dissect the process of urbanization."
—History: Review of New Books
"It is best to treat [the book] not as a work of urban theory, but as a powerfully written (and very well illustrated) analysis of the specificities of class formation, class conflict and urban culture in the making of modern Manhattan."
—Cultural Geographies
"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."
—The American Historical Review
"If there were any concern that Scobey might not fire the imagination like a feature film, I can assure you that Scobey does his best not to disappoint. The book is lavishly illustrated with sumptuous prints of the New York landscape [which] add to the atmosphere created by Scobey's warm and relaxed writing style."
—Environment and Planning
"Erudite and wonderfully illustrated with contemporary maps and prints, the account illuminates the thought and action of a diverse yet intersecting group of elite New Yorkers..."
—The Public Historian
"[Scobey's] expertise shows in every page of the book. Scobey seamlessly blends data from newspapers, literature, real estate records, commission reports, government documents, and the papers of men like Olmsted to make Manhattan's history come alive."
—Reviews in American History
"This is an excellent book: it is meticulously researched, full of insights, and beautifully written."
—Business History Review
"The author of this study has written a graceful, tightly argued monograph that will appeal to all who are interested in the relationships among urban history, architecture, and landscape."
—The Historian
"Scobey's book appears as a timely and apt historical lesson.... this is an exhaustively researched, creatively argued, and beautifully written book that deserves to become an immediate standard for students and scholars of urban and cultural history as well as those of New York history... [His] argument is complex and multi-layered... Empire City is a densely packed, deeply thoughtful stuff of a city in the throes of change."
—Urban History
"This is an important book for historians of planning and will be of interest to anyone interested in the origins of planning in America."
—Journal of the American Planning Association
"Scobey obviously understands buildings, but his larger interests lie in the economic forces, political trends, and cultural values that together determine what buildings and supporting infrastructure will be built where, when and for the benefit of whom….[O]ne cannot help, after reading Empire City, feeling a bit of nostalgia for the idealism and broad geographic mindedness of New York’s nineteenth-century urbanists."
—Historical Geography
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Can a City Be Planned?
Bryant's Questions
City Building
Urbanism
City and Nation
1. Metropolis and Nation
Saint Olmsted and Frederick the Great
Allegories of the National Cityscape
The American Metropolis
The Class World of Bourgeois Urbanism
The Meanings of Empire
Olmsted's Return
2. The Midcentury Boom
The American Museum
Overview of a Boom
Terminals and Tenements
The Eternal Building Up and Pulling Down
May Day
3. The Rule of Real Estate
Myth of Origins
The Landscape of Accumulation
The Discipline of Land Values
The March of Improvement
The Logic of the Grid
Dreamland
4. The Frictions of Space
Uneven Development
Arterial Sclerosis
Modernization and Its Discontents
Boundaries and Boundarilessness
The New Urbanism
5. Imagining the Imperial Metropolis
Imagined Prospects
The Bridge Between Capital and Culture
Eros and Civilization
Second Empire
Disciplining the Streets
Urbane Domesticity
Melodrama
6. The Politics of City Building
The Emperor of New York
Best Men, Businessmen, and Boosters
City Building and State Building
City Blocs
The Politics of Stewardship
The Modern Prince
7. Uptownutopia
Overruling the Grid
Inside Out: The Paradoxes of Central Park
An Urbanism of the Periphery
Cheap Trains and Cottage Suburbs
The Uptown Prospect
8. The Failure of Bourgeois Urbanism
The Meanings of Reconstmction
The Legacies of Bourgeois Urbanism
The End of the Boom and the Politics of Retrenchment
The Battle for the Annexed District
The March of Improvement, 1890
Appendix: Statistical Tables
Notes
Index
About the Author(s)
 | David M. Scobey is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Arts of Citizenship Program at the University of Michigan. |
Subject Categories
History
Urban Studies
General Interest
In the series
Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig.
Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig, is concerned with the traditional and nontraditional ways in which historical ideas are formed. In its attentiveness to issues of race, class, and gender and to the role of human agency in shaping events, the series is as critical of traditional historical method as content. Emphasizing that history is itself an interpretation of material events, the series demonstrates that the historian's choices of subject, narrative technique, and documentation are politically as well as intellectually constructed.