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  • Another Bite at the Big Apple
  • Glenn C. Altschuler (bio)
Mike Wallace. Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 1196 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $45.

Sequels are rarely as good as, and even more infrequently better than, the original. There are, however, some notable exceptions. Among movies, Godfather II sits on top of a very short list of critically acclaimed second acts. In American history, Perry Miller's landmark volume in intellectual history, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953) followed his immensely influential The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939). David Brion Davis's masterful The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975) was preceded by the brilliant The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966). And, for good measure, Miller and Davis also produced memorable third volumes.

Extraordinarily distinguished in its own right, Greater Gotham joins this list of excellent and enduring sequels. In its predecessor, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1998), Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace accomplished something that Jeanne Chase, writing in Reviews in American History, claimed no one had seriously attempted in a century: provide a comprehensive, richly detailed, eminently readable, economic, social, cultural, and political history of New York, covering 250 years, highlighting "contradictions, conflicts, and consensuses." Chase urged historians to lose themselves in "the labyrinths of Gotham." They did. Widely regarded as "definitive," Gotham was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History.

In Greater Gotham, a long book, Mike Wallace, the sole author, (Burrows died in May, 2018) covers a relatively short time period. The volume opens in 1898, with a newly consolidated New York, consisting of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, and a population twice as large as any other city in the United States. Wallace considers the implications of the creation of a "super city" from the perspective of corporate elites (financiers, manufacturers, merchants, landowners, and lawyers) who promoted the grand merger; and native-born workers and immigrants, millions of whom flocked to New York at the turn of the twentieth century. [End Page 471]

The overwhelmingly Anglo-Protestant, cohesive and powerful corporate elite, Wallace points out, sought to preside over the city's physical, economic, social and cultural development through a reconstruction of capitalism that replaced competition with consolidation. Many less affluent citizens, Wallace reminds us, had distinctly different ideas about how to rearrange and run New York, focusing less on efficiency and profit, and more on economic and social justice and equality.

Four sections follow "Consolidation and Competition." "Construction and Connection" examines the built environment: skyscrapers, transportation infrastructure, townhouses and tenements, industrial and commercial complexes. "Cultures" surveys high and middle brow institutions (universities, zoos, libraries, theaters, symphony and opera houses), show business, sports, and "the staging" of ethnicity and race. "Confrontations" investigates the aims and impact of progressives, transgressors (gangsters, gamblers, prostitutes, sellers and consumers of alcohol and drugs), civil rights and labor activists, gender benders, socialists, and modernists. Greater Gotham concludes with a section on World War I and its immediate aftermath in New York.

Reprising the approach taken in Gotham, Wallace does not offer a grand (or revisionist) synthesis of urban history or theory. Instead, he surveys the cityscape from multiple vantage points. Taking a global perspective, he describes the spread of finance capitalism and corporations based in Gotham as the leading edge of the rise of the United States as a world power. A second angle of vision tracks the emergence of New York as the de facto nation's capital in politics, finance, fashion, entertainment, and advertising. A third analytical lens examines changes in the macroeconomy of the city in, for example, the building trades, real estate, oil and sugar refining, and shipping. Wallace's fourth point of view gauges the responses to alternating periods of prosperity, panic, and depression. A final perspective takes readers to the streets of New York to meet "hundreds of individuals and innumerable varieties of Gothamites" (p. xxii).

Greater Gotham pulsates with the energy and enterprise of New Yorkers and the sights, sounds, and smells of New York. Weighing in at 1,196 pages, the...

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