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The Encyclopedia of New York City. - book reviews
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by James L. Wunsch
All moveables of wonder, from all parts Are here ...
Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty city is herself.
William Wordsworth on the Bartholomew Fair(1)
The aim of an encyclopedia is to gather together the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth, to set forth its general plan to the men with whom we live and to transmit it to the men who will come after us, in order that the labors of past centuries may not have been in vain ... [and] that our children, better informed, may at the same time become happier and that we may not die without deserving well of mankind.
Denis Diderot(2)
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Publication of this hefty volume culminates a thirteen-year, million dollar effort which drew on the talent of hundreds of scholars and the good offices of Yale University Press and The New York Historical Society. Whether by accident or design, its arrival could not be more timely, especially approaching the centennial of January 1, 1898. That was the day when Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island joined to become the City of New York.
Trying to do justice to that entity in a single volume demanded audacity though the Yiddish "chutzpah" - conveying an authentic New York sense of nerviness - might be the more appropriate term. The result of this considerable undertaking is a veritable Bartholomew Fair of names, dates and facts, eminently useful for researching New York City in its particulars, but falling short in Diderot's terms of making the subject broadly comprehensible.
Consider what editor Kenneth Jackson and the encyclopedia's staff were up against:
* Consolidation united not just the nation's largest and fourth largest cities (Manhattan and Brooklyn respectively), but along with them the many towns and villages within the five boroughs including some with histories dating to the seventeenth century. Leaving aside the geological history of New York and the ancient history of its Indian tribes, (there are entries for both topics), the book sets for itself the task of recounting New York City history from Peter Minuit and the purported $24 deal for Manhattan in 1626 to that curious, if not singular occurrence, the coming in the 1990s of a Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. In musical terms, this broad stretch of history might be reckoned as the span from Monteverdi to Madonna.
* In 1643 with a mere 500 people, there were already eighteen languages spoken in New York and even when it was not the biggest city in America, it was almost immediately the most cosmopolitan. In the matter of immigration, a library of books has already been produced on that comparatively brief period, 1892-1924, when sixteen million immigrants - 71 percent of the national total - passed through Ellis Island with many settling in or around the city. Today amidst another great wave of immigration from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, we realize that to study New York is to study the world.
* The scale of the place is hard to fathom. The Brooklyn and Queens population alone is much larger than that of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined.
* Finally this is a city of extremes. According to this book, the per capita income of Manhattan is exceeded only by that of Marin County and what makes that all the more remarkable is that the Manhattan figure includes the 20 percent of its population on public assistance. Only a truly astonishing concentration of wealth could compensate for such poverty. Indeed, The New York Times reports that the boards of certain Park and Fifth Avenue cooperatives will no longer approve an apartment sale if the prospective buyer's net worth is not at least $100 million.(3) Not many blocks away from these sumptuous apartments - in East and Central Harlem and well north into the Bronx and eastward to Brooklyn, from Bedford Stuyvesant to Brownsville - we find a million on public assistance, a population which by itself would constitute one of nation's ten largest cities.
From such perspectives, a 1350-page book, far from being ponderous, appears svelte almost to the point of anorexia. No wonder Professor Jackson can lament over "the time consuming and frustrating task ... [of] winnowing down lists" to limit the volume to a manageable 1.3 million words.(4) When the trimming is done, The Encyclopedia becomes vulnerable to critics - this one no better than the rest - who cannot resist second guessing. In the matter of New York baseball, for example, if there are individual entries for Berra, Stengel and Seaver, then why none for Mantle, Mays, Snider and the cruellest cut - none for swing-era icon and paragon of grace under pressure - Joe DiMaggio? Why a generous entry for the undistinguished World Telegram and Sun but none for its more influential predecessor - The New York World? And instead of the now obligatory apology for inclusion of so many men, dead and alive, why not simply have included the formidable Jane Jacobs? As a resident of Greenwich Village battling the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, she schooled and inspired a generation of activists in how to deal with arrogant officialdom intent on promoting highway and "slum" clearance at the expense of neighborhood. And then in one mighty stroke, The Death And Life of Great American Cities (1961), she mounted a devastating critique of a city planning, public housing and urban renewal programs which changed the way her friends and foes alike looked at the fabric and scale not just of New York, but all cities.
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