The Encyclopedia of New York City. - book reviews

Such specific omissions can be remedied without much difficulty in a prospective second edition on CD-ROM. The more fundamental problem of organization and presentation of basic material is another matter. For the moment, however, consider the encyclopedia's considerable strengths which include its excellent treatment of immigrant groups and neighborhoods. Here we find not only detailed entries on the major groups, Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews, but also Albanians, Croatians, Guyanese, Koreans, Turks and others whose often substantial populations can be overlooked in the metropolis. The histories of churches and synagogues, religious groups, publishers, newspapers, shops and businesses, legal and financial firms are tightly but effectively presented so that browsing can be stimulating. A random glance under say "Drexel, Burnham Lambert" reminds the reader that when Michael Milliken bankrupted that firm in 1990, he brought down not just a junk bond house, but a venerable institution, a direct descendent of the House of Morgan and Drexel of Philadelphia.

Readers also owe a debt to an inspired group of editors who managed to break the monotony of triple 10-inch long columns of text with hundreds of brilliant illustrations including classic Riis, Steiglitz, Hine, and Berenice Abbott photos, Nast cartoons, and many lesser-known items poignant, witty or illuminating. Here we find a sardonic Charles Dana Gibson sketch ridiculing high society, a photo of the giant toes of the Statue of Liberty, the dark-suited men at the makeshift morgue amidst the remains of those poor girls, the Triangle Shirt Waist fire victims. Then there is a four-picture series (one photo is out of sequence) showing a single lot in the Bronx - a multi-story apartment house abandoned and gutted by fire, razed, and then miraculously at the end - the lot filled in with modest single-family attached housing. In a glance, the fall and rise of the South Bronx! The only concern with visual matters here is with the maps which are in short supply and rather drab.

Among the most satisfying entries are those concerning slightly offbeat topics. Brenda Edmunds' "graffiti" begins in 1970 when Demetrious, a Greek-American teenager from Brooklyn, scrawled his "tag" - "Taki 183" - on subway cars and walls, inspiring dozens of copycats. Norman Mailer sought to justify the more decorative aspects of this blight in his celebrated tract, "The Faith of Graffiti," and then in justification of Mailer, there emerged from the ranks of the vandals the genuinely witty and talented young artist, now, alas, a victim of AIDS, the late Keith Haring. The unappreciative Mayor Edward I. Koch proposed wolves to patrol subway storage yards to keep the spray painters at bay, an expedient which apparently was never tried. What did work were potent solvents, the due diligence of transit workers and Transit Authority Chairman David Gunn who could announce triumphantly in May 1989, that subways (if not other structures) were graffiti-free. How O. Henry and Damon Runyon would have loved these yarns. Perhaps a new generation of writers of city stories, film scripts and opera bouffe may yet find inspiration in these many pages.