Description
Book SynopsisBuilding Gotham thus demonstrates how a group of ambitious professionals overcame the limits of traditional means of decision-making and developed the city-building practices that enabled New York to become America's first mega-city.
Trade ReviewAbsolutely essential reading for anyone trying to appreciate the achievements of Progressive reform-and its inadvertent consequences... A richly insightful book that will be read by anyone concerned about New York, public life, and the present state of American liberalism. -- Joel Schwartz Journal of American History An enjoyable, highly readable, and very detailed account... An excellent text for students and researchers to better understand the often unique and always complex set of issues and actors that initiated, implemented, or thwarted urban planning efforts in New York City. -- Susan Turner Meiklejohn Journal of Planning Education and Research Building Gotham documents with an insightful and unbiased eye the roles played by businesses and government in erecting the modern city's buildings, tunnels, sewers, transportation system, and the like. -- Harry Siegel New York Sun 2003 This well informed book... examines the origins of the various forms of planning New York City... [A] very exciting technical account... thorough and interesting. -- Peter Eley Urban Design Quarterly 2004 Revell, a professor of public administration, pays particular attention to the army of experts-from engineers and architects to lawyers and financiers-who solved the enormous problems that initially had the 'ambitious experiment in collective living' teetering on the brink of disaster... the message distilled by Revell from his study of bygone New York-that 'outdated notions of individualism and local autonomy' can be detrimental to solving shared problems-is sure to strike a responsive chord. Civil Engineering 2003 Deeply researched, clearly written and argued... required reading for scholars of early twentieth-century New York City. -- Angela M. Blake Urban History 2005
Table of ContentsContents: Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction: Conceiving the New Metropolis: Expertise, Public Policy, and the Problem of Civis Culture in New York CityPART 1: Private Infrastructure and Public Policy 1 "The Public Be Pleased": Railroad Planning, Engineering Culture, and the Promise of Quasi-scientific Voluntarism 2 Beyond Voluntarism: The Interstate Commerce Commission, the Railroads, and Freight Planning for New York Harbor PART 2: Public Infrastructure, Local Autonomy, and Private Wealth3 Buccaneer Bureaucrats, Physical Interdependence, and Free Riders: Building the Underground City 4 Taxing, Spending, and Borrowing: Expanding Public Claims on Private Wealth PART 3: Urban Planning, Private Rights, and Public Power 5 City Planning versus the Law: Zoning the New Metropolis 6 "They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets' hair": Regional Planning and the Metropolitan DilemmaConclusion: "An almost mystical unity": Interdependence and the Public Interest in the Modern Metropolis Appendix Notes Index
