Sui Generis

It has been quite a while since a complete history of a single American city has been the subject of serious scholarship. Historians’ reluctance to span the entire existence of a city is understandable given the risk of losing any focus beyond the mere passage of time, or worse, reification—a city grows, dominates, rivals, and so forth. Then too, there is the morphological issue. What, exactly, is a city when considered as something other than a backdrop for activity—the sum of its buildings and infrastructure? a particular urban type? Even if all these difficulties are resolved, current scholarly concern for comparative analysis will not have been met.

In recent decades, therefore, historians have addressed specific urban topics usually within fairly restricted time periods that mesh with the accepted durations of political and economic history. In so doing they have revivified urban history. Traditional subjects have been explored from innovative perspectives, new subjects have appeared. New York City looms large in this endeavor, witness the forty-two-page list of recent works in Gotham.

Burrows and Wallace acknowledge their debt to these historians, stating that their task lay in making connections among these varied perspectives. If Gotham were only a solid synthesis, it would be quite an achievement. But it is more than that. New York City in their vivid, superbly crafted prose becomes intelligible across two centuries and more as it shaped and was shaped by peoples’ beliefs and actions. That dialectic between a place and its people creates the temporal and structural dimensions of Gotham. In his introduction, Mike Wallace outlines their innovative mode of analysis which represents a solid contribution to urban theory. The book, like the place, is sui generis.

Virtually no one in this century has made a serious attempt to do some-thing similar. Perhaps their closest comrades-in-arms are Carl Bridenbaugh, Gary B. Nash and, at a certain remove, Louis Mumford. ¹ A brief examination of how each built his scaffolding sets the structure of Gotham in relief.

Bridenbaugh seems to have given little thought to the question of frame, taking the definition of development for granted, and pouring a wealth of information into prefabricated molds. Despite his encyclopedic knowledge of the Americas, despite a world view worthy of Immanuel Wallerstein and a sensitivity to geographical hierarchies, Cities in the Wilderness and Cities in Revolt seem built from details. “[T]he founding process occurred at a time when western Europe, under Dutch and English leadership, was gradually outgrowing and casting off the limitations of medieval feudal economy . . . [towns] grew to maturity in the era of world expansion attending the emergence of modern capitalism.” ² By 1742, three sections had appeared in British America, urban along the seaboard, agricultural countryside, and backcountry. Thereafter, “cities came to dominate the other two by means of their particular form of urban imperialism.” ³

Bridenbaugh’s organizational scheme, however, turns its back on those perspectives and seems drawn from a standard economic textbook for undergraduates. Development occurs in a regular and accelerating manner, his durations based upon its stages. Hindrances to growth become the convenient exogenous factors. With development came attendant social difficulties. “When we consider American urban society, apart from its economic aspects, we find it characterized by certain problems affecting it as a unit, and with which the unit had to deal.” ⁴ Bridenbaugh’s works are not descriptive. Rather, an anachronistic method of organization made them seem so.

Wallace also stresses the importance of the larger world to New York City history, but in a fundamentally different manner. The city’s evolving connections with the world do not determine its history, but provide “the context within which the men and women of New York, in conflict and compromise, repeatedly reshaped their city” (p. xvii). His durations frame particular periods of development, but Wallace is attentive to contemporaries pondering change. Whereas Bridenbaugh might have seen New York’s emergence as a de facto...