The Encyclopedia of New York City. - book reviews

Apart from these considerations, the central problem is simply that in pursuit of the arcane - seven full columns can be devoted to listing ticker-tape parades - the fundamentals have been overlooked. Thus Professor Jackson in the preface can sensibly begin distinguishing New York from other American cities by its "extreme density" but we never do find out what that density is because nowhere this reader could find, certainly not in the lengthy entry on population, is the subject deemed worthy of further consideration. But density, as much if not more than population in aggregate, defines what a city really is. For example, once we learn from the U.S. Statistical Abstract that New Yorkers reside 23,701 to the square mile - about triple the Los Angeles and twice Chicago and Philadelphia figures - we can begin to understand why New York seems so crowded, so quintessentially urban and so much more dependent on public transit than other American cities. Density figures also show that different as New York is from other American cities, Manhattan with 52,415 residents per square mile (not including more than three million daily commuters and visitors) is different from the "outer boroughs." Thus in trying to figure out what makes this place so special, one is inevitably drawn to the core, Manhattan, which is of course, also the financial, cultural and media center for the nation. Yet strangely, the text of the Manhattan article is only half as long as the one for "lesbians" and even allowing for quirks, idiosyncrasies and a measure of political correctness, this imbalance seems typical of the general tendency here either to give major subjects short shrift or to treat them as the repositories for an undifferentiated mass of fact. This inability to underscore what is most important demands a demonstration which it is hoped, will be useful in suggesting approaches for a revised edition.

Let us begin with a basic question: why did New York grow bigger than other American cities? The student exploring the issue would sooner or later be obliged to consider the Erie Canal. While the canal was not the only reason for New York's becoming the dominant North American trading center - Robert Greenhalgh Albion's masterpiece The Rise of New York Port(5) makes that abundantly clear - its importance is hard to underestimate. What the student finds in this encyclopedia, however, is a perfunctory third of a column which concludes that the canal "spurred the development of the interior and the Port of New York" which is not unlike describing the Ten Commandments as a notable memo. What has been lost is the opportunity to explore an element critical in the rise of New York, to establish the city's exalted position relative to other places and to highlight a rare moment when a state and local initiative proved of almost incalculable national consequence.

What might have been said (in not many words and following standard sources) is that the Erie was the most significant public works project in New York City and New York State history. Prior to its completion in 1825, the longest canal in the U.S. was 28 miles; when Governor and former New York City mayor DeWitt Clinton proposed a 364-mile ditch (replete with watertight locks and aqueducts) through an untamed upstate wilderness, it was not unlike New York State, in advance of NASA, proposing its own lunar landing. The Erie so fundamentally shaped and altered trade routes that midwestern produce which might otherwise have been shipped south down the Ohio and other tributaries to benefit St. Louis and New Orleans on the Mississippi, instead flowed east through the Great Lakes to Buffalo across New York State via the canal to Troy on the Hudson and then down to New York City. Equally important (and here we are indebted to Albion), New York - already the nation's great importing center - now had before it a chance to sell to the heartland. The Erie proved so immediately successful that envious states and cities were driven into a frenzied, competitive fifteen-year spending spree resulting in construction of 3,000 miles of canal which took three states to the brink of bankruptcy. Thereafter, as rail lines tended to confirm trading patterns established by canals, what emerged was New York City as the national colossus with Chicago, at the terminus of New York's east-west water and then rail route, the brightest star in the west.(6)