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Big book, big city - review of the book 'The Encyclopedia of New York City
Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by James L. Wunsch
A few useful sentences on the canal may be found embedded in "port of New York" and "economy" but when general encyclopedias offer accounts of the Erie superior to this one, there is reason for concern.
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As with the Erie, other transportation issues are paramount in trying to understand a city. In the case of New York after the Erie, we find its civic and business community haunted by the fear that congestion might choke off the very movement of passengers and freight which had made the city so successful. Ultimately, rapid transit helped solve the problem at least for passenger movement and in this regard the "subway" article is important. Although substantial, it is limited only to the underground portion of the system, making no reference to major articles here on the "elevated railways" and "railways" which must be consulted to put the transit puzzle together. This uncoordinated approach is unwarranted since sixty years ago, Mayor LaGuardia brought underground, elevated, and portions of street railways together into the complex but more or less unified system which New Yorkers for years now have called the "subway." Along with drawing the transit entries together, a firm editorial hand might have tempered the contributors' reverence for the minutiae of railroading. Five pages are devoted to listing dozens of obscure street railways and trolley lines which were consolidated into what became the Metropolitan Transit Authority. What we never learn is something more important: how many New Yorkers in any given period were getting to work whether by walking, subway, bus, ferry, or car?
The tendency here to favor the trendy over the mundane may also explain why bicycling commands nearly a full page while the auto is given a few sentences and trucking nothing at all. Articles on traffic, Robert Moses, the Triborough Bridge And Tunnel Authority and Port Authority are helpful but what is left out is any sense of the degree to which the settlement of much of the city in this century, especially the East Bronx, Queens and Staten Island, depended on access to cars. If we venture beyond Seinfeld's Upper West Side, we discover that one and two-family houses occupy most of New York City's land and that those who reside in them can be as dependent on the car as their suburban neighbors.
As with the auto, the failure to discuss trucking represents yet another lost opportunity. Consider that for much of its modern history, New York was not just the nation's trade mart, but also its industrial center and that, before World War II, the city contained twice as many factories as any state except New York itself and Pennsylvania.(7) As late as the 1950s, close to a million New Yorkers worked in factories, about 30 percent of the entire workforce. How to get raw materials and finished products to and from these factories while providing for retail and seaport trade was perhaps THE central question for planners in this century. What New York needed of course was a way to move freight as expeditiously as the subway moved people, but such a way was never found and the city had to make do with railways, lighterage and increasingly as this century wore on - trucks. Traffic congestion made it difficult for trucks to deliver the goods in New York and after World War II, with the city's industrial base shrinking rapidly, Robert Moses and others proposed that major east-west superhighways across the city could improve access sufficiently to keep the factories from leaving the city. Only the Cross-Bronx expressway was built but the epic battles over the lower and mid-Manhattan expressways and later Westway along the Hudson divided the city and defined the planning debates in the post war era. These major issues are hardly dealt with.
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