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Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York
A “fascinating, encyclopedic history…of greater New York City through an ecological lens” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)—the sweeping story of one of the most man-made spots on earth.
Gotham Unbound recounts the four-century history of how hundreds of square miles of open marshlands became home to six percent of the nation’s population. Ted Steinberg brings a vanished New York back to vivid, rich life. You will see the metropolitan area anew, not just as a dense urban goliath but as an estuary once home to miles of oyster reefs, wolves, whales, and blueberry bogs. That world gave way to an onslaught managed by thousands, from Governor John Montgomerie, who turned water into land, and John Randel, who imposed a grid on Manhattan, to Robert Moses, Charles Urstadt, Donald Trump, and Michael Bloomberg.
“Weighty and wonderful…Resting on a sturdy foundation of research and imagination, Steinberg’s volume begins with Henry Hudson’s arrival aboard the Half Moon in 1609 and ends with another transformative event—Hurricane Sandy in 2012” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland). This book is a powerful account of the relentless development that New Yorkers wrought as they plunged headfirst into the floodplain and transformed untold amounts of salt marsh and shellfish beds into a land jam-packed with people, asphalt, and steel, and the reeds and gulls that thrive among them.
With metropolitan areas across the globe on a collision course with rising seas, Gotham Unbound helps explain how one of the most important cities in the world has ended up in such a perilous situation. “Steinberg challenges the conventional arguments that geography is destiny….And he makes the strong case that for all the ecological advantages of urban living, hyperdensity by itself is not necessarily a sound environmental strategy” (The New York Times).
Gotham Unbound recounts the four-century history of how hundreds of square miles of open marshlands became home to six percent of the nation’s population. Ted Steinberg brings a vanished New York back to vivid, rich life. You will see the metropolitan area anew, not just as a dense urban goliath but as an estuary once home to miles of oyster reefs, wolves, whales, and blueberry bogs. That world gave way to an onslaught managed by thousands, from Governor John Montgomerie, who turned water into land, and John Randel, who imposed a grid on Manhattan, to Robert Moses, Charles Urstadt, Donald Trump, and Michael Bloomberg.
“Weighty and wonderful…Resting on a sturdy foundation of research and imagination, Steinberg’s volume begins with Henry Hudson’s arrival aboard the Half Moon in 1609 and ends with another transformative event—Hurricane Sandy in 2012” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland). This book is a powerful account of the relentless development that New Yorkers wrought as they plunged headfirst into the floodplain and transformed untold amounts of salt marsh and shellfish beds into a land jam-packed with people, asphalt, and steel, and the reeds and gulls that thrive among them.
With metropolitan areas across the globe on a collision course with rising seas, Gotham Unbound helps explain how one of the most important cities in the world has ended up in such a perilous situation. “Steinberg challenges the conventional arguments that geography is destiny….And he makes the strong case that for all the ecological advantages of urban living, hyperdensity by itself is not necessarily a sound environmental strategy” (The New York Times).
544 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
September 28, 2016
Gotham Unbound is by turns heartbreaking and fascinating, an absolute must read for anyone interested in the greatest city on earth and how it came to be. It's a fitting title, as the author literally unbinds the city from the strictures of today to show us its past.
As a child born in Queens, raised on Long Island, and living in Manhattan, I would presume this book means more to me than it might to those who aren't intimately acquainted with the places the author discusses. It's exciting to read about these nooks and crannies as they were in the past and as you know them today. I felt an overwhelming urge to go back and see the city I love so much in its natural state.
It's not an exaggeration to say that industry, commerce, and the quest for growth wiped the natural slate of New York clean and put a new one in its place. The information is hard to fathom and harder to rationalize. The dredging and destruction of marshlands and the addition of manmade land where there once was water is heartbreaking to read about, but fascinating all the same. There is a much needed, albeit small, breath of fresh air at the end of the book where the author discusses the changes that are being made to keep New York safe and sustainable in the face of so many challenges, but this isn't a light and fluffy read.
As a child born in Queens, raised on Long Island, and living in Manhattan, I would presume this book means more to me than it might to those who aren't intimately acquainted with the places the author discusses. It's exciting to read about these nooks and crannies as they were in the past and as you know them today. I felt an overwhelming urge to go back and see the city I love so much in its natural state.
It's not an exaggeration to say that industry, commerce, and the quest for growth wiped the natural slate of New York clean and put a new one in its place. The information is hard to fathom and harder to rationalize. The dredging and destruction of marshlands and the addition of manmade land where there once was water is heartbreaking to read about, but fascinating all the same. There is a much needed, albeit small, breath of fresh air at the end of the book where the author discusses the changes that are being made to keep New York safe and sustainable in the face of so many challenges, but this isn't a light and fluffy read.
August 17, 2016
Excellent ecological history of the New York City metro area, and what we've done to our rivers, estuaries, wetlands, harbors, and forests in the name of growth, the long-term price of living on landfill, and how densely populated urban living has made us more energy efficient while increasing the risks of storms, sea rise, and flooding. It also makes one understand why our official city birds are the seagull and the pigeon, rather than the osprey, heron, or plover.
October 29, 2019
The cover says it's an ecological history but it's more a history of the built environment -- I wish it had foregrounded the actual ecology a bit more (like, more passages like the ones on the oysters or the marshlands, fewer comments on the "piercing gaze" of some 19th century developer). Nevertheless, required reading for anyone interested in the city's history, and the final chapter is chilling.
July 7, 2022
Made me want to go visit the nearest marsh to see more up close what's been lost around here
April 12, 2018
Steinberg does an excellent job of connecting the past with the present and highlighting the implications of the previous four centuries of environmental and development choices in the context of modern systems. Although it spans Dutch settlement to the present, it does so efficiently and with intention and does not feel cursory, although if this were the first book I had ever read about the history of New York City, I would feel lost. The major premise of the book reminds me of Mike Davis- environmental change is not inevitable but is the work of human development. In cities, "natural disasters" are not natural. The general conclusion that the ecological damage is irreparable and the ecological risk to New York remains high but the situation is not hopeless leaves room for a wider application of this work to more practical endeavors. I look forward to assigning students research topics based on this book.
March 7, 2017
This was just great! The full history of greater New York from wooded hilly terrain to the metropolis we know today. Didn't realize how much man-made extension into the rivers/harbor there is and how much original swamp / marsh land was destroyed for expansion and construction. And who knew in the 19th Century they would sink older boats to start foundation of building out into the river.
March 15, 2019
A comprehensive history of the ecology of New York harbor, with consideration of the risk inherent in floodplain and landfill construction in an era of rising oceans.
February 6, 2024
probably the best and most beautiful history book i’ve ever read
January 7, 2025
Informational and seemingly interesting to anyone interested in this topic.
December 19, 2016
Prior arrival to the Dutch, Manhattan was under the collective stewardship of the native population. And so, a sustainable socialist society was removed to make way for modern Manhattan. Whites like to think of the $24 price for Manhattan as a great bargain but few were taught the indigenous were generous in hopes of establishing a reciprocal relationship. Manhattan Island in white hands then became a capitalist tool for generating wealth. Next came the “burying streams, glistening ponds and green marsh, and creating one gargantuan drainage dilemma.” Creating Central park involved the planting of 250,000 trees and bushes and a massive drainage system. The East River isn’t a river, it’s a tidal flat. In 1810, NYC began in the garbage business with two carts sent out: one for manure and one for everything else. Manure sales were huge and paid for the collection and gave good profit to the city. There were horse-drawn traffic jams on Broadway in the 1820’s. Long Island farms produced the hay for these horses. Each horse produces 30-50 pounds of dung a day. Meanwhile, human waste was simply thrown out into the streets until 1700. Then came outhouses which were emptied in the middle of the night. New Yorkers were generating “100 tons of excrement every 24 hours.” Dropping it at the end of the pier, led to putting it further out in the bay, which led to sending it out even further to filthy up the ocean. Not a small amount of New York City is built on land reclaimed from the sea and JFK airport itself was made by huge vacuum tubes shooting sand from the nearby ocean bottom onto a marsh and then adding enough dikes to evoke comparison with Holland. The terrible price of the building of the JFK airport was that it now takes three times as long to flush pollutants out of New York Harbor because the JFK sand siphoning sent the water depth from three to a whopping sixteen feet. The book discusses the inadequate local drinking water system leading to the building of first the Croton Aqueduct, then the Ashokan reservoir (where 2,000 people were displaced). Throughout this, New York, like San Francisco was acting as an imperial city – sucking from the areas around it forcing them to supply the urban center. “An entire forest was destroyed to convert the Flushing marsh into solid foundation.” The destroyed Gowanus Canal (with 0% oxygen level) and other locations taught the city how “an enormous amount of valuable fertilizing material… is irreparably lost in the sea.” The city’s tacit approval of planned obsolescence eliminated “craftsmanship while destroying the countryside (Fresh Kills and other dumps)”. In 1991, Fresh Kills became the first human made object to become larger in volume than the Great Wall of China. What an accomplishment; hooray for unchecked capitalism and no thought of limits in a finite world! This is a deep well-written book that gives you a smart ecological history of New York City, just as advertised.
September 1, 2015
I have always wondered what the New York City landscape looked like before the concrete came. Well this book sure answers that question.
It begins with Henry Hudson's discovering of the North River and ends with Hurricane Sandy pounding the entire metropolitan area. Steinberg knows his science and, at times, this is his classroom. We hear about a smaller Manhattan Island overrun by foxes, forests, fauna and flora of all kinds. My personal favorite, mountain lions!
The history here is pretty stark, the development of New York Harbor as nothing more than a property grab. There is the selling of underwater land to fill and create more real estate. Ditto for marshlands from Jamaica Bay to Flushing Meadow to Arthur Kill to Newark Bay. And usually for the glory of airports, garbage dumps, and parks.
The 1809 street grid is presented as the beginning of the end. I always loved the Manhattan street grid, thought it an ingenious bit of engineering. Now I find that it resulted in leveling of hills, filling in ponds, streams and canals, and creating neat, rectangular tracts of land to be sold!
It's a great book but starts to run out of steam halfway through. The same points are made over and over. Yes, marshlands are important filters, and NY had miles of them. Now they are largely gone. It's important, but that same theme creeps up everywhere in this book. Also, the author likes to illustrate sizes by comparing them to other things: (e,g, enough dirt to fill the Twin Towers, more water that would cover a football field to a height of 600 feet). Once or twice, cool. After the seventh or eighth time, it gets tiresome.
It would be a cautionary tale if the die had not already been cast. Like it or not, we are stuck with the New York we have. And climate change will make things even more difficult. This book gives you a great primer of what has occurred and what we can expect. Interesting and scary.
It begins with Henry Hudson's discovering of the North River and ends with Hurricane Sandy pounding the entire metropolitan area. Steinberg knows his science and, at times, this is his classroom. We hear about a smaller Manhattan Island overrun by foxes, forests, fauna and flora of all kinds. My personal favorite, mountain lions!
The history here is pretty stark, the development of New York Harbor as nothing more than a property grab. There is the selling of underwater land to fill and create more real estate. Ditto for marshlands from Jamaica Bay to Flushing Meadow to Arthur Kill to Newark Bay. And usually for the glory of airports, garbage dumps, and parks.
The 1809 street grid is presented as the beginning of the end. I always loved the Manhattan street grid, thought it an ingenious bit of engineering. Now I find that it resulted in leveling of hills, filling in ponds, streams and canals, and creating neat, rectangular tracts of land to be sold!
It's a great book but starts to run out of steam halfway through. The same points are made over and over. Yes, marshlands are important filters, and NY had miles of them. Now they are largely gone. It's important, but that same theme creeps up everywhere in this book. Also, the author likes to illustrate sizes by comparing them to other things: (e,g, enough dirt to fill the Twin Towers, more water that would cover a football field to a height of 600 feet). Once or twice, cool. After the seventh or eighth time, it gets tiresome.
It would be a cautionary tale if the die had not already been cast. Like it or not, we are stuck with the New York we have. And climate change will make things even more difficult. This book gives you a great primer of what has occurred and what we can expect. Interesting and scary.
February 21, 2017
The book told the ecological story of NYC. It is essentially a history of New York, focused more on the earlier years, told from the standpoint of the natural environment. its a good idea, but not always well executed. The book is sometimes quite dull—going on and on about particular details without providing the context. Further, the author’s anti-development bias comes out in a few places, and it doesn’t seem very rationalized.
May 1, 2014
“Gotham Unbound” by Ted Steinberg, published by Simon and Schuster.
Category – History/Ecology Publication Date – June 03, 2014
If you are a New Yorker, or if you want to know about the history and ecology of New York this will be an excellent read. I am neither but I must admit that there are parts of this book that amazed me and kept me reading it until the end. The book is very detailed and contains too much information for a reader that has little interest in New York history and specifically the ecology of this city that was built out of swamp, marshland, and ocean. The story begins with the Dutch settling in the New York area, and how lucky it was that it was the Dutch. They knew how to reclaim land from water which began a process that continues to this very day. Some of the amazing statistics brought out in the book is the amount of garbage that was and is generated by the city and how much land was literally manufactured by reclamation. The garbage was initially put in landfills or incinerated until the amount became overwhelming. The city then decided to dump the garbage in the ocean. This came to an end with the Clean Air and Water Act. The city again turned to using a landfill and the most known landfill, Fresh Kills. Fresh Kills is a story in itself in the amount of garbage that was dumped on the site and how it has become a habitable area today. There is also the story of the Meadowlands, another swamp that has been reclaimed by dumping garbage on the site that now houses a sports complex.
There are many interesting facts contained in this book that make it worthwhile if the subject matter is of interest to the reader. If you are interested in ecology and what man has done to his environment, and how the environment reacts to the intrusion of man, the reader will find this an excellent read.
Category – History/Ecology Publication Date – June 03, 2014
If you are a New Yorker, or if you want to know about the history and ecology of New York this will be an excellent read. I am neither but I must admit that there are parts of this book that amazed me and kept me reading it until the end. The book is very detailed and contains too much information for a reader that has little interest in New York history and specifically the ecology of this city that was built out of swamp, marshland, and ocean. The story begins with the Dutch settling in the New York area, and how lucky it was that it was the Dutch. They knew how to reclaim land from water which began a process that continues to this very day. Some of the amazing statistics brought out in the book is the amount of garbage that was and is generated by the city and how much land was literally manufactured by reclamation. The garbage was initially put in landfills or incinerated until the amount became overwhelming. The city then decided to dump the garbage in the ocean. This came to an end with the Clean Air and Water Act. The city again turned to using a landfill and the most known landfill, Fresh Kills. Fresh Kills is a story in itself in the amount of garbage that was dumped on the site and how it has become a habitable area today. There is also the story of the Meadowlands, another swamp that has been reclaimed by dumping garbage on the site that now houses a sports complex.
There are many interesting facts contained in this book that make it worthwhile if the subject matter is of interest to the reader. If you are interested in ecology and what man has done to his environment, and how the environment reacts to the intrusion of man, the reader will find this an excellent read.
December 17, 2017
He calls it the ecological history of greater New York. It will help any reader understand the relationships between nature and man and his works. For four centuries New York and New Jersey have been filling in meadows and marshlands. He focuses on the relationships between the land and water and the effects on humans and animal life. I didn't realize how much of New York was built on garbage and how much water under the land there still is. I have a better understanding of the impact from Hurricane Sandy and why New Yorkers should still be concerned. The book is dense but worth it. It's a wonderful education on ecology. He has over 100 pages of notes, references and additional reading for students of the topic.
February 26, 2015
This book outlines in great detail everything that New York has done to change the physical environment of the city. Mostly this means altering shorelines and filling in marshes -- turning water to land. It's interesting stuff, and goes far beyond what I knew had happened. But the writing is dry (boom!) and the tone is a bit sanctimonious. It's clear that the author disapproves of everything that has ever happened to change New York at all, and there are parts where this really wears on the reader.
August 26, 2015
The book was very well written and covers a ton of material in a short amount of time. The amount of references and data that the author presents is second to none. He captures the readers attention and imagination when going into the details surrounding ecological events in NYC; I had no problem "seeing" things as they were or how the events unfolded.
June 1, 2016
This is a really cool book for anyone who lives or spends a lot of time in NYC. Now when I walk around, I wonder about how the land beneath me has been changed. It's made me a little cynical towards parks.
August 22, 2014
A fascinating and thought-provoking book. I am not a New Yorker (as they say, it's a nice place to visit, but...) but this book gave me a much better sense of what Gotham is all about. Well-written and a pleasure to read, though it would have benefited from more pictures and maps.
February 3, 2016
A nice easy read about the ecology of Manhattan and how it changed. Worth it.
September 4, 2016
A bit of a slog sometimes, but very interesting. A must read if you're a science teacher in the NY metro area.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews