The Encyclopedia of New York City. - book reviews

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)

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.

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.

Splendid in parts, The Encyclopedia of New York, is less satisfactory in dealing with the city as a whole. Considering that much of the book was written by trained historians and other scholars, there is every reason to hold it to the Diderot standard which calls not only for the gathering up of knowledge, but the setting forth of "some general plan" to make it understandable. New York demands a good deal of explaining not only because it was and is so big, but also because its influence in the nation and world has been disproportionately great, even taking size into account. What we have on our hands is something more than Los Angeles doubled.

The apparent strategy for explaining New York has been to designate the major entries such as "economy," "government and politics" and the borough articles as the vehicles to convey a sense of the city's growth, development and general history. If contributors to those and other major entries had been invited to produce broadly interpretive essays, cross-referenced to shorter factual pieces, then the results might have been satisfactory. But cross-referencing is at best haphazard and often nonexistent here, suggesting the absence of a thoughtful and systematic effort to connect related entries. Without support from shorter articles, the longer ones tend to sag under the burden of 300 years of history.

Further, instead of exhorting experts to take an authoritative approach, the editorial watchword appears to have been caution, resulting in "just-the-facts-in-chronological-order" entries, the very sort of writing which can make "encyclopedia" a synonym for dull. Also, caution seems to have dictated that contributors not venture even a glance beyond the city limits to put New York into state, national and world perspective. Thus the political duel between city and upstate legislators, played out generation after generation in Albany, passes largely unnoticed. This disregard for other places also makes it difficult to discern the ways New York can be reckoned either typical or distinct from the rest of urban America. Nor is there much consideration given to how New York has appeared to outsiders. This is important because the very initials NYC have long summoned up in the hinterland, feelings of loathing, envy and awe. For some, New York can be the sinkhole of corruption while for others, it is the glorious refuge from American provincialism. For left-wingers, it is the fount of predatory capitalism; for the right, the welfare state run amok. And somewhere, if only for the sake of posterity, it might have been said that in the last half of this century New York became the most influential city in the world.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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?

Whether these and other programs were prudent or extravagant remains at the heart of a political debate which continues to this day. Suffice to say that as America's center of commerce, capital and industry, New York City felt it could bankroll this tremendous array of services.

As the city assumed its greatest responsibilities, however, the well-springs of its wealth were threatened or destroyed. Between 1960 and 1985 the city lost half a million factory jobs and from 1970 to 1980, population fell by 800,000. In the South Bronx and central Brooklyn, 100,000 units of housing were lost to arson or abandonment. The leading port in North America for a century and a half became superfluous as shipping headed to modern container ports at Newark and Elizabeth in New Jersey. Nothing like that had ever happened before. During the Great Depression, unemployment levels had been much higher, but at least the roots of future prosperity - shipping, manufacturing, and a well-to-do population - had remained intact. Now all seemed lost. This is not to say that New York suffered more grievously than St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore or other cities. Indeed the size, wealth, and diversity of its economy allowed New York to weather the storm better than those places. Yet because New York was the center of media, it came to stand for the urban crisis, More importantly, in shouldering the burden of its own distinctive welfare state, the city in 1975 came close to bankruptcy. In the end the city passed through the crisis, saved by its growing financial, insurance and real estate sectors. However, the idea of imperial New York, the supremely arrogant city, was forever altered. No longer could New York offer its youth a free college education; no longer was it presumed that Manhattan was the place to headquarter a Fortune 500 company; no longer did the city appear to the nation so dominant.

Here then is the familiar story of hubris, decline and fall. Of course, the story has a twist. As New York declined nationally, it became more influential globally. Having benefited from the influx of European emigres during World War II and the concomitant decline of London and Paris, New York became the world's center in dance, music, and art. Wall Street remained with London and Tokyo, a world center of finance. Fortune 500 companies left Manhattan, but banks from around the world took their place. The city remained dominant as the center for news and information; Madison Avenue via satellite told the world what to buy.

How long New York City will remain THE metropolis, no one knows. As Bertolt Brecht put it:

it all looked like lasting a thousand years For the people of the city of New York put it about themselves: That their city was built on the rock and hence Indestructible.(9)

New Yorkers think differently now and if not exactly humble, they are wary of what might befall them. In any event, the story up to now could be made plain in this encyclopedia. It will require not so much additional research as a solid review of key topics with an eye toward coherence. Such an effort would produce a volume worthy of M. Diderot and posterity. Then might a young scholar, coming across some electronic version of this volume, find an account of a city which was so attractive to the world's people that they built there not just a single tower as in ancient Babel, but as nowhere else, a dark, dense forest of towers all soaring to the heavens in the name of Mammon. Surely it might then be said - "what a place was this!"

Let us not conclude with what might have been or the CD-ROM yet to be. For all its shortcomings, The Encyclopedia of New York City still compels admiration. Almost a foot tall and seven and a half pounds, it stands on the shelf (as no CD-ROM ever will), dwarfing the other volumes, replicating in size and bulk of great Gotham itself. If this is a work in progress, then so too is New York City. For the city builder and the city scholar then, there is much to be done. In the meantime, readers drawn to the big city will also be drawn to the big book, glittering with detail.

NYNEX Corporate/College Program Bronx, NY 10470

ENDNOTES

1. William Wordsworth, "Prelude, Book Seventh," in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. II (New York, 1973), 214.

2. Quoted in Rene Hubert,"Encyclopedists," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 5 (New York, 1937), 528-29.

3. The New York Times, October 31, 1995, B2.

4. Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City, (New Haven, 1995), xiii.

5. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port [1815-1860], (New York, 1939).

6. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860, (New York, 1951; 1968), 33-36.

7. New York Panorama: A Companion To The WPA Guide to New York City, (New York, 1938; 1984), 373.

8. The Commission On The Year 2000, New York Ascendant, (New York, 1987), 96.

9. Bertolt Brecht, "Late Lamented Fame of the Giant City of New York," in Christopher Ricks and William L. Vance, eds., The Faber Book of America, (London, 1992), 380.

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