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The Encyclopedia of New York City. - book reviews
Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by James L. Wunsch
In reviewing this encyclopedia, the reader does come across certain well-rendered articles which can serve as models for how this volume might be reworked. In "jazz," for example, contributor Barry Kernfeld demonstrates the importance of putting the subject into perspective. He begins his article by stating that "less important to the early development of jazz than New Orleans and Chicago, New York City made important contributions toward transforming jazz from a quaint little-known folk music into an international genre of great significance." Kernfeld goes on to detail how New York drew talent from other cities until the nineteen-forties when 52nd street became "the most extraordinary concentration of activity that jazz has ever known." Following the heady bebop experiments of the fifties, jazz declined but by then the once disreputable music had become so much a part of the canon, that it is now safely ensconced at Lincoln Center. Entries on Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Duke Ellington in their detail and thoughtfulness contrast to the perfunctory treatment given here of such major contemporary politicians as Robert Wagner, John Lindsay and Ed Koch whose mayoralties collectively encompassed more than thirty years of tumultuous city history. Good as it is to have the jazz, the encyclopedia is far more likely to serve as source on Mayor Lindsay than Miles Davis.
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Kernfeld on jazz shows, however, what the volume is generally lacking: a sense of the city relative to other places, a narrative framework sufficient to bear the weight of encyclopedic detail, and an emphatic sense of the importance of the subject. If the encyclopedia were revised along those lines, what might it say?
Surely, that after the opening of the Erie Canal, New York became not only one of the world's great cities, but among them, the favorite destination amidst an unprecedented trans-Atlantic migration. Also, the 1898 consolidation ensured that New York would remain for generations, the nation's largest and most densely populated city. Finally quite apart from size - and this in a way is most interesting - New York in the twentieth century became increasingly distinct from other American cities. Here we might venture a conclusion.
As we have seen, New Yorkers, among Americans, are uniquely dependent on public bus and subway service. Disproportionate numbers of them also live in apartments. The city itself lodges the equivalent of the entire population of Minneapolis-St. Paul in its massive housing projects; during the past twenty-five years it has served as landlord of last resort for tens of thousands of dilapidated units taken from landlords who failed to pay their taxes. The city in the nineteen-fifties and sixties promoted construction of 100,000 units for middle-income people and it extended World War II rent controls to buildings built long after the war. Forty percent of its population - including a number of very wealthy people - live in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartments. This is a strange way for Americans to live though it should be pointed out that residents of European cities often receive public housing and transportation services equal or superior to New York's. But those services were generally provided under the auspices of a national or provincial welfare state while in New York - notwithstanding the growing federal and state assistance - it was the city which took the initiative and often paid the price. Thus by 1987 to meet municipal hospital costs, Medicaid and other obligations, New York paid $4 billion - far more than any city in the world - to provide poor residents with medical care.(8) And what city in the world would have been so bold as New York in 1970 to offer all its high school graduates a free college education at its City University?
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