Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898-1938 (review)

At the end of World War I, twenty years after the consolidation of the five boroughs into one enormous municipality, New York was already the largest, richest, and most important city in the world. Its metropolitan region housed ten million people and about half the wealthy families in the United States, its port and its factories were the busiest on earth, and its downtown business district was already assuming the vertical shape that would make the Manhattan skyline famous. Even London, the center of the British Empire, paled in comparison. Indeed, as early as 1893, Paul Bourget, a member of the French Academy, had noted that New York "is not even a city in the sense which we [Europeans] understand the term. . . . It is so colossal, it encloses so formidable an accumulation of human efforts, as to overpass the bounds of the imagination."

With great size came great problems, however. Gotham's harbor was inefficient and chaotic; its tenement housing was a disgrace; its sewers were "distressingly inadequate"; and it completely lacked comprehensive planning and zoning. On the one hand, New York was the capital of capitalism and the home and headquarters of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, F. W. Woolworth, and most of the nation's robber barons. On the other hand, it was congested beyond belief and a disaster waiting to happen.

Somehow, New York muddled through, and it ended the century as it had begun it, as a world city of matchless energy, diversity, and excitement. How this came to be, at least for the four decades after consolidation, is the subject of Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898-1938. This is an extraordinary book—sophisticated in conception, impressive in reach, and clear in execution. Keith Revell's focus is on the way the metropolis confronted a huge range of seemingly insurmountable problems: transportation, infrastructure, fiscal management, zoning, and regional planning, among others. Obviously, the city was not successful in confronting all of these demons, but the thrust of Revell's book is to show that professional experts, not multinational corporations, not real estate developers, and not ambitious politicians, were at the forefront of every effort. Quite simply, engineers, architects, economists, planners, and public health specialists were the primary actors on the urban stage, especially in the first decade of the century. On balance, they were better able than businessmen and elected officials to put partisan interests aside and to consider the needs of the city as a whole.

Building Gotham is divided into three parts. The first concerns railroad planning, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and freight problems in the harbor. The second is about the underground city and especially the intersection of taxing, spending, and borrowing to pay for civic improvements. The third is about zoning and regional planning.

The first section is the most interesting, if only because of the incredible reality of the world's greatest port lacking direct rail-water access. In other words, the railroads terminated in New Jersey, while most of the freighters loaded and unloaded in Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Staten Island. Thus, boxcars had to be pushed around the harbor on barges to connect the docks of New York City to the major trunk lines of the United States. The system did not work well even in normal times, but during World War I trains waiting to unload in New York were backed up all the way to Pennsylvania and boxcars all the way to Chicago. Meanwhile, the railroads did not want to share their facilities in the region with competing lines even though such a solution would clearly have been more efficient and cost effective.

Moreover, in the question of railroad and freight planning, among others, there was not always a single public interest, but rather a citywide or borough interest, a regional interest, and a national interest. Who, for...