Empire City: New York Through the Centuries Paperback – July 15, 2005

This book is a great one to have around. It is broken into many short entries, reads like journal entries so you can pick and choose and learn about different eras from NYC from an experiential viewpoint. This book makes me respect what NYC is and how it came to be through the hard work and trying times of the past. Kind of makes for a reminiscing of a time which I never lived or saw but could only imagine.

Editors Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar have amassed an enormous collection of essays, letters, diary entries, and poems about New York written by New Yorkers and visitors to the city from the dawn of the modern age (ca. 1600) to just after the ravages of 9/11. While an overwhelming majority of the pieces are pro-Gotham, I was glad that Messrs. Jackson and Dunbar had the wisdom and integrity to present some works that express anxiety and doubt about New York's status. The result is an extensive, celebratory, sometimes warts-and-all biography of the world's greatest city. As Mr. Jackson remarked in the 1999 Ric Burns New York Documentary, New York is not a stagnant, static thing: "New York is always becoming". He and Mr. Dunbar are to be congratulated for reminding us that New York's biography is long, and with a lot more greatness to come.Rocco Dormarunno,author of "The Five Points, A Novel"

I needed this book for my History of New York class so i placed the order on monday and on wednesday morning i already had the book, perfect condition. I haven't read the book yet to say my personal opinion but my professor said its one of the best history books to have.

Great book used it for a Discover New York class!

You'll love this book if you're interested in fairly dull essays written by people most of whom you have no knowledge or care. After reading about halfway through, I tossed it into the "pass along" stack. That said, the book does have some very interesting and memorable essays concerning the British attack on New York City at the beginning of the American Revolution. But if you're hoping for a colorful essay-type history of New York City as I was, purchase another. This is more of a collection of writings by people who happened to have lived in or around New Your City.

Excellent reading!!!

A true behemoth of New York City lore, Empire City isn't so much a textbook (although I used it as one) as the product of a couple of historians lovingly digging up primary documents and arranging them to tell four centuries of NYC history. Compiled by Kenneth T. Jackson (frequently seen on history channel documentaries about the city) and David S. Dunbar, it has first-person Joe Schmoe accounts, political documents, critical essays, travel journals, fictional selections, and plenty of ephemera, and divides them into 5 majors epochs: the Colonial Period, Rise to National Dominance, Industrial Metropolis, World City, and World Capital.The first part, the Colonial Period (1624-1783), covers the largest span of time in the fewest pages. Due to the language of the period though, the primary documents here are perhaps the hardest to trudge through. But there's some great stuff here, from an account of Henry Hudson's maiden voyage up the Hudson, to a few initial colonial social contracts between the city's first citizens, though accounts leading into the Revolutionary War. Jackson ends the epoch with his own heart-wrenching, ironic account of the slave ships of the British Army, where American prisoners were served rotten food as a deal between British General Howe and a New York City mercantilist when said mercantilist found out Howe was having an affair with his wife.Things get moving at a much quicker pace in the second part, Rise to National Dominance (1783-1860), with documents of the laying out of the street grid in Manhattan, DeWitt Clinton's then-revolutionary idea of using the public schools to educate the poor as well as the well-off, and plenty on the notorious Five Points district. There are also lots of accounts of European travelers having a look around at the Great Experiment (including a certain Victorian novelist who almost ruined his career with his account), but more important to this section are some of the first writers of the American literary tradition, including Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville.Industrial Metropolis (1860-1898), the third part, starts off with a selection of writings by a couple of relatively obscure black citizens of New York who might be credited as the start of the long, proud line of African American literature to spring from the tight racial relations of New York City. An account of the Draft Riots of 1863 follows, and the bulk of the literary work of this section is decidedly political, with most sides drawn between representation and/or endorsement of the capitalist model that, let's be honest, NYC was built on (George Fitzhugh, Horatio Alger, Edith Wharton), and a worker-based outcry against the dehumanizing effects of that model (Thomas McGuire, Henry George, Jacob Riis). On a lighter note, there are accounts of the building of Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as a poem in praise of the Statue of Liberty and an early view of Coney Island before it was ever lit up.The last two parts take up more than half of the book, which is understandable as by this time the printing press was heralding the rise of mass media and New York was replacing Boston as the literary capital of the world. It's no surprise, then, that a decent portion of part 4,World City (1898-1948), is composed of giants of the American literary tradition, including Henry James, Henry Adams, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Mitchell, and John Steinbeck. It's filled in nicely with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's Ten Misconceptions of New York, Le Corbusier's chimeric fancies about filling every space with a skyscraper, the compact that established the Port Authority, numerous documents of the horrendous worker treatment and tenement laws of the turn of the century, and "Brooklyn Could Have Been a Contender," a modern essay by John Tierney that imagines a world where Brooklyn hadn't accepted Manhattan's conditions for consolidating into the New York City we know.If part 3 showed the roots of the Harlem Renaissance, the fourth part and then the fifth, World Capital (1948-2002), reveal the bulk of its fruits; they're represented with selections by Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and James Weldon Johnson in Part 4, and James Baldwin, a searing poem by Federico Garcia Lorca about Harlem, and a slew of white writers who were influenced by them including Bernard Malamud, Jack Kerouac, and Tom Wolfe in Part 5. The rest of World Capital could probably be second-guessed more than any other section simply because of the wealth of material being written in and about NYC in the last half-century, but I don't have many complaints. This part is especially heavy on city planning arguments (what was that old saying? Something like, "New York would be the greatest city in the world, if they ever finished it."), with Robert Moses on one end of the spectrum and the Young Lords on the other and plenty in between. I got a little nostalgic to see they included Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That," the first thing I ever read on the subway when I came to the city. And they even were prescient enough to include a short essay by Junot Diaz of recent Oscar Wao fame, a cool little piece where he reveals some of the origins of that great novel with his mashup of New York City and science fiction imagery.

Superlatives seldom meet the mark, except EMPIRE CITY. This is a book of superlative moods, the city of true night and day, and of gifted writers meeting on Gotham's every old and new corner. Each in their own time, they're overwhelmed by the city's human vastness, its diversity, even attracted to its loneliness - the city's unique ability to confer absolute privacy in neighborhoods and buildings that rise into the sky.To paraphrase, one writer said, "No matter the hour, there's always something exciting happening in New York." Like rubbing minds with Jack Kerouac, or going uptown with Federico Garcia Lorca, and James Baldwin - or rooting for the Yankees with Bruce Catton. Last night I sat ringside at the Polo Grounds for the Firpo/Dempsey fight; the day before I broke my back as a laborer on the Brooklyn Bridge; tonight I'm taking the ferry to see Whitman's leaves of grass. And after that, supper at Delmonico's. If I have energy enough come morning, it's off on the Half Moon to discover Manhattan - and you're welcome to come along.I haven't even scratched the surface, because there's always something wonderful to do in Jackson & Dunbar's superlative collection, EMPIRE CITY.