Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

Gotham #1

by Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace

To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe.

In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city.

The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, New York, American History, Cities, The United States Of America, American

1383 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 19, 1998

About the author

Edwin G. "Ted" Burrows was a Distinguished Professor of History at Brooklyn College. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1964, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1973, where he studied under Eric McKitrick. He started teaching at Brooklyn College in 1973. He and historian Mike Wallace won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1999 for Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.

Reviews

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a long and engrossing book of the history of New York City. It is ever so readable and incredibly informative. Don't let its hefty 1400 pages be intimidating. Despite the wealth of detail, the writing is done with class and occasionally with humor. The topics of immigration, slavery, racism, feminism, the labor movement, and political corruption are all thoroughly covered. I can't wait to try reading the sequel, Greater Gotham, which features the same bulk but covers only from 1898-1919!

Terrifyingly sad quote about slavery:
Sugar also brought wealth to British refiners, shippers, bankers, insurers, au
investors, not to mention the royal treasury, which came to depend on the taxes,»
duties sugar and sugar products could be made to bear. Thousands of workers we
employed in the refineries and distilleries of London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and te
British ports. Their need for food and clothing and shelter created jobs, in turn, in
additional thousands of laboring people and was an important reason for that gren
upsurge of manufacturing around the middle of eighteenth century- the indust
revolution.
No less momentous was the parallel Africanization of the West Indian populations
Between 1678 and 1745 the number of whites living on the Leeward Islands declines
from 10,400 to 9,500 while the number of African slaves rose from 8,500 to 59,500.h
the half century from 1651 to 1700 some 78,000 slaves had been brought to Jamaica
between 1701 and 1750 imports ballooned to 339,000. All told, between 1700 and 175
the West Indies absorbed 1.2 million slaves.
After 1713, when Britain was awarded the asiento-the coveted exclusive right to
supply Spanish America with slaves- the business was almost entirely in British hands
When Parliament broke the Royal African Company's monopoly two years later, inde
pendent slavers raced in to open new markets as well as new sources of supply. A report
of 1753 said that British captains purchased 34,250 slaves every year from Africa; a sec-
ond report, fifteen years later, put the figure at 53,100.

[Dorothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am loving this book. This is the way I always wanted to read history. Not just the battles or the politics but what were the people doing? Why did they think what they did? What were they reacting to? First hand perpectives give a real view of what it was like. How the power shifted back and forth over the course of history. How "the greatest city in the world" fit into the history of the world, from its very beginning. I can't even imagine the research that went into this 1400 page volume. Reading it on my Kindle, of course makes it much easier. I've only just reached the end of the Revolutionary War but I look forward to the next century. Having only a rough concept of the New York landscape, I wish I was more familiar with the locales, but for an actual New Yorker, to hear that such and such happened at the corner of X St and Y Ave would have to bring history closer to heart.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

My son, Shannon, a resident of Chelsea gave me this book two years ago. As a Southern Californian, I was not in a hurry to read a "New York" book. I also put it off because of it's bulk(1236 pages!!). When I finally got around to it, I found it absolutely riveting. It is far more than merely a history of New York. It is a history of America from the perspective of New York, written with great humor. Unfortunately it only takes us up to 1898, and it took the authors Edwin G Burrows and Mike Wallace 20 years to complete! I only hope that the second volume is available soon! I have been spoiled by vol 1 and want to continue the march into the New York City of the 21st Century! This book ALMOST made me want to live in Manhattan so that I could visit locales and buildings while I was reading the book.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time is not a carousel on which we might, next time round, snatch the brass ring by being better prepared.

When I began this book, I thought that I would speed through it in a summer month of dedicated reading, while there was little else to distract me. Yet after four weeks of slogging I had not even gotten a third of the way through. Worse still, I never felt fully engaged; every time I returned to the book it required an act of will; the pace never picked up, the writing never become effortlessly pleasurable. So I put it aside, to finish at the end of summer. When that didn’t work, I put it aside, to finish during Christmas break. And when that didn’t work, I bought the audiobook, to finish the remaining chapters on my runs. Now, 261 days later, I can finally tick it off my list.

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace set an ambitious goal: to write an authoritative, comprehensive, and accessible history of New York City. In their words, they want to include “sex and sewer systems, finance and architecture, immigration and politics, poetry and crime,” and that list is only the beginning. The amount of research required to assemble this vast and teetering edifice of knowledge is almost nauseating. When you consider that this book, heavy enough to serve as a deadly weapon, is the condensed version of thousands of smaller books, dissertations, papers, and studies, you cannot help but feel admiration for the many hours of sweat and toil that went into this pharaonic task. And in the end they have accomplished at least two of their three goals: the book is authoritative and comprehensive. But is it accessible?

This is where my criticism begins. Burrows and Wallace attempt to gather together so many threads of research that the final tapestry is confused and chaotic. In a single chapter they can pivot wildly from one topic to another, going from department stores to race riots to train lines, so that the reader has little to hold on to as they traverse this whirlwind of information. The final product is an assemblage rather than a coherent story, an encyclopedia disguised as a narrative history. Granted, encyclopedias are good and useful things; but they seldom make for compelling reading. What was lacking was a guiding organizational principle. This could have taken the form of a thesis on, say, the way that the city developed; or it could have been a literary device, such as arranging the information around certain historical figures.

Lacking this, what we often get is a list—which, as it happens, is the authors’ favorite rhetorical device. To pick an entirely typical sentence, the authors inform us that, in 1828, the Common Council licensed “nearly seven thousand people, including butchers, grocers, tavern keepers, cartmen, hackney coachmen, pawnbrokers, and market clerks, together with platoons of inspectors, weighers, measurers, and gaugers of lumber, lime, coal, and flour.” Now, lists can be wonderful to read if used sparingly and assembled with care—just ask Rabelais. But overused, they become tedious and exhausting.

This is indicative of what is a more general fault of the book, the lack of authorial personality in its prose. Perhaps this is because Burrows and Wallace edited and rewrote each other’s chapters, creating a kind of anonymous hybrid author. Now, this is not to say that the prose is bad; to the contrary, I think that this book is consistently well-written. If the book is dry, it is not because of any lack of writerly skill, but because the prose limits itself to recounting fact rather than expressing opinion or thought. Again, the book is an encyclopedia without the alphabetical order, and encyclopedias are not supposed to contain any speck of subjectivity. Unfortunately, even the most masterly prose is dead on the page if there is no discernable person behind it.

I am being rather critical of a book which, without a doubt, is a triumph of synthesis and scholarship. If I am disappointed, it is because I felt that I could have retained much more of the information in these pages had it been presented with more coherence—a larger perspective, a sense of overall order, an underpinning structure. As it stands, I do not have that satisfying (if, perhaps, untrustworthy) feeling that an excellent history can provide: that of seeing the past from a high perspective, as a grand and logical unfolding. Though not exactly fair, I cannot help comparing Gotham unfavorably with another massive book about the history of the city, The Power Broker, which forever changed how I look at the city and, indeed, at the nature of power itself. Yet after finishing this, I am not sure if my perspective on the city has been appreciably changed.

But I should end on a positive note. This is a well-written, exhaustive, and thoroughly impressive history of the city. And despite all my complaints and headaches, I liked it enough so that I will, someday, drag myself through its sequel.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is above all a great testament to the overall high level of current American historical writing and academic research. While Burrows and Wallace have unquestionably written a great work of synthesis history, they obviously could not have achieved such an excellence if that there had not been an extraordinary collection of monographs to synthesize. Hats off to Burrows, Wallace and the academics producing excellent studies on narrow topics.

I devoted roughly one quarter of my undergraduate studies to American history placing slightly more emphasis on the History of France and New France (i.e. Canada prior to the British conquest.) Thirty-five years ago I had a good solid grounding in most areas of American history.

Gotham demonstrates that great advances have been made everywhere since. The brilliant section on the New Netherland indicates great progress in the understanding of the societies and economies that preceded the American revolution. The discussions on machine politics, municipal corruption, police forces, the management of relief services, education, water supplies, road construction, street-car services, public lighting, and subways all show a more sophisticated understanding of American society than existed when I was at university. The bibliographies for each chapter make it abundantly clear that the authors of Gotham were able to draw on numerous recent monographs to tell their stories.

The excellent quality of the source material should not be allowed to obscure that Wallace and Burrows perform brilliantly at what they supposed to do as synthesis historians which is to create a coherent overview and tell an engaging story. I especially enjoyed the section in which they explained how the major New York retailers with the help of Washington Irving's fabrication of Santa Clause from the SinterKlaus of the Knickerbockers were able to convert Christmas from an obscure Catholic feast day to world wide retailing phenomenon. However, this is just my favourite moment. The colour and human interest is everywhere in this book.

I urge everyone to read this great history of a great city.

[Lawrence A · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly monumental romp through the first 275 years of the world's most monumental city, although I'm probably biased, since I was born in Brooklyn and now live in Manhattan. I began reading this book several years ago, put it down for a while, and picked it up again a few months ago. The narrative thread is enlightening, although the book can also be used as a reference volume with respect to certain events, epochs, and personalities. And, oh, what personalities! Outsized, egomaniacal, visionary, venal, public-spirited, saintly, carnal, criminal, moral, grasping, moralistic, hypocritical, self-dealing, self-deluding, creative, etc etc. As we like to say here in the Big Apple, if you're one in a million, that means that there are eight of you.

[Antonio Nunez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Summarizing this book is a bit like summarizing the Bible: the outline of both is easy to make out but what makes them memorable are the details. Gotham is monumental history, in the sense of Mount Rushmore or the Holy Family Cathedral in Barcelona: the work of decades, an emblem of an age. Here we begin with Indian Manahatta, an earthly paradise for the Lenape Indians, a nomadic tribe that visited the Island to hunt and fish. Then come the Dutch who found New Amsterdam. Then the English partisans of James II, who christen it New York. Although not the greatest city in the colonies (that honor would probably go to Philadelphia or Boston), New York was destined for greatness by its location. The monies made by Southern planters and Boston merchants flowed to the island, which was shortly and briefly the capital of an independent country after a long war also fought there. Its greatest man, fittingly foreign born, Alexander Hamilton, gave up the capital in exchange for the creation of a national bank: another instance of commerce taking first place in the city’s priorities.

Independent New York’s history is one of colonizing first itself (as Manhattan was built up from Wall Street up), then its surroundings (Brooklyn starting from the heights, Queens, New Jersey) and then finally swallowing up the other boroughs to make up a greater version of itself. In the meantime, it became the terminus for the canals connecting with the North and Midwest, then for the railways that spanned the American continent, the biggest abattoir before Chicago came up, the center for the gold rush and the eventual starting point for the war with Spain and American global power. Capital of the world, a new Rome.

These are the highlights. Then there are the set-pieces. Washington crossing the Delaware. Burr killing Hamilton in Greenwich Village. The mob taking over the city to protest conscription in the Civil War and massacring African-Americans. The Brooklyn Bridge being opened by PT Barnum, who marches a parade of 21 elephants across its expanse. Thomas Alva Edison lighting up Wall Street.

Then there are the peoples and tribes. The Dutch. The English. The French (for a century after independence New York was closer to France than to England. This was reversed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the gilded age barons decided to ascend into plutocrat heaven by marrying their daughters off to the sons of English dukes and earls). The Irish, the Italians and the Jews, whose histories are consubstantial with that of New York. The Germans and the Chinese. For a long time New York was the third largest German city in the world after Berlin and Vienna.

There are great conflagrations, mainly between Protestants and Catholics and between bourgeois and workers. There are massacres and pestilences and plagues. There is greed and idealism. There are market booms and terrible market crashes, some sounding as bad as the Great Depression. Politics alternates between nativist WASPs, in cahoots with the rich, smarter, more honest but nastier towards everyone who isn’t a WASP, unwilling to invest large sums, and Tammany Hall ethnics, mainly Irish, corrupt but willing to provide investment and jobs for the boys, as well as charity targeted to their constituents. The city oscillates between laissez faire alcoholic raunchiness and puritanical, prohibitionist control of people’s lives, represented by bluenose supreme Anthony Comstock, a postal inspector who dedicated his life to the elimination of smut, who set up many of the mail regulations that were later dismantled though litigation by Playboy and Mad Magazine. Everything happened in New York. Abolitionism. Socialism. Anarchism. Liberalism. Prohibitionism. Large museums. Concert halls. Opera. Black face and minstrels. Vaudeville. Large landscaped parks. Skyscrapers. The penny press. The book industry and the rag trade. The first millionaires and billionaires. Mythical figures like John Jacob Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt. JP Morgan. John D Rockefeller. Andrew Carnegie. Joseph Pulitzer. Horace Greeley. PT Barnum. New York swallowed and spit out Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, whereas Walt Whitman, who was from Brooklyn did quite well for himself there.

There are hundreds of characters. Mainly villains like Jay Gould (a rascal, but a likable one) and “Clubber” Williams, a corrupt police inspector who retired a millionaire on a policeman’s salary (guess why he was nicknamed “Clubber”), or the famous abortionist madame Restell, who set up her mansion right by Saint Paddy’s Cathedral. There are also a few heroes. Virtually everyone turned up in New York at some point. Near the end of the book, there’s José Martí, rolling cigars and planning revolution. There’s Giuseppe Garibaldi. There’s Chateaubriand and Napoleon III. Talleyrand. There are potted histories of canals, railways, the telephone, electricity, streetcars, whorehouses, insurance. Law firms. Much English slang in current use comes from old New York too.

Everything began or came together in New York. One can now understand why aliens always land in New York rather than Muncie, Indiana or Abilene, Texas. They too know that nothing really happens unless it happens in New York.

The book ends in 1898 as New York becomes greater New York and the US becomes an imperial power as it defeats Spain, aided by New York press baron William Randolph Hearst and New York político Teddy Roosevelt (whose term as a city police inspector- there were four of them- turns out to have been quite nasty). In the future greatness beckons: the Brooklyn Dodgers. The NY Yankees. Babe Ruth. Fiorello La Guardia. Robert Moses. Broadway melodies. The Empire State Building. Al Smith. The golden and silver ages of comics. Madison Avenue advertising. The UN.

This is History with a capital age. “Gotham” in scope, breadth and execution is in the same ballpark as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Mommsen’s History of Rome. Highly recommended.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Gotham" by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace earns its name, not just because of its subject but because of its heft at more than 1200 pages. The coverage is exhausting, the reading of sources nuanced; this is no straight trajectory to the top for America's best-loved and most-vilified city. In a modification of the adage originally attributed to Balzac, perhaps beneath every astonishing city is a crime, and New York was no stranger to its country's original sin. The useful myth that Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 worth of beads is laid to rest, with its self-congratulatory subtext (Oh, those prescient Dutch! Oh, those naive Native Americans!) In fact the place was purchased with the torture and extermination of the native Lenapes. Yes, Dutch people died as well, but the ratio of dead natives to dead Europeans was very high, and names like Vanderbilt and Van Cortlandt live on while the anonymous Lenapes were extinguished. I should say that the city's wealth rests on both of the nation's original sins, because slavery existed there, a slave rebellion (the evidence for the existence of which Wallace finds "less than convincing") ended in brutal executions, the city had close economic relations with the South and was not entirely committed to the Union, and of course the draft riots turned into a racist massacre that ranks with the worst. Not that "Gotham" is strictly revisionist history; the growth (and sometimes decline) of banks, Wall Street, railroad companies, great stores and mansions all appear, but so do the Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews and Chinese, women's causes and the labor movement. Although Tweed and Teddy Roosevelt have their parts in the eternal struggle between machine and reform (without the usual reverence for the latter), this is in large part economic and social history rather than political. This is a New York that is less a succession of struggles between great men than a panoramic view of as many of the people who lived in, built and entertained the city. Alexander Hamilton, DeWitt Clinton, J. P. Morgan, Horace Greeley and Walt Whitman all get their moment, but so do Fanny Wright (an early feminist), Father Aaron McGlynn ("the Priest of the People"), Emma Goldman, the Plug Uglies gang of Five Points, problems of sewage, overcrowding and water supply. Such a comprehensive review inevitably leads to a feeling that some communities--African-Americans, immigrants, the vanished Lenape--are underrepresented. But this is a story too often told exclusively in terms of the scarcity of real estate, the manipulation of wealth and the celebration of status. "Gotham" is much more comprehensive than that, which is an accomplishment and not just in terms of weight.

[Arthur · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had one of the authors (Wallace) as a professor in a history of NYC class in my college days but have no other dealings with him so I don't think I'm biased in stating this is a very well researched book, nicely put together.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an immensly detailed history of New York City from it's beginning to 1898. It is well written but long, very long. There were times when I was totally fascinated and other times when I was totally bored. At one point I even stopped reading for a while. One thing really surprised me. In the 1800s and before the Civil War, there was a chapter on women's issues. The hot topic? Abortion. Yup. Ending abortion and prosecuting those providing abortions. And those seeking it? Yup, same group as today, conservative Christians. I guess the sayings are true. There's nothing new under the sun and the more things change, the more they stay the same.

All in all it was good, and I was considering reading the sequel that takes us to the prsent. But not till next year. BUT I learned it is the same length and only goes through World War I, or about 2 decades. Oh, hell no.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is THE definitive history of New York. As with a few other rare books I put this in a category all it's own. An enriching masterpiece for everyone who reads it.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just flat out an outstanding history book. Reading this book has been a labor of love that has taken a few years because there is so much information and analysis packed into it. It may seem to cover a limited topic, New York City to 1898, but the authors cover a lot of topics in great depth and there are connections to broader trends in the US and the world.
I appreciated how much I learned about New York City - the loco-focos, the b'hoys and so on. I think what was most interesting was how much of the history parallels current events - the debate over whether assistance should be provided or people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps; the similarities between the Italian immigration of the late 19th & early 20th Century and the current Hispanic immigration; even Teddy Roosevelt's experience with zero tolerance policing and some of the surprising outcomes - this book is really remarkable for the depth of the research by the authors and numerous connections that are made.

[Joseph De Rege · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a monster to get through. But well worth it. Everything from the minute details to the broad historical context was interesting.

I went into this book with only high school level history knowledge. The amount of US history covered just to give context to New York history felt like it’s own book. Which made the rest of the information more compelling.

I really appreciated the comparisons of class and race as well. New York has a complicated history with both, so giving readers that context chapter after chapter drive home the point of “how the other half lives” from both up and lower class perspectives.

The parallels to modern New York are also interesting: Manhattan being the center of industry (though that industry has changed) with Brookyln not far behind; New York State being influenced massively by New York City; how New York shapes national and international politics. It all comes across in ways that I saw in the modern day.

All in all a massive undertaking that I might revisit to take more from it. Though not for many years. And not with the rush to “get through it.”

[Joseph Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an absolute mission… I honestly can’t believe I finished it.

That said, what a fascinating read. Having moved to New York a few months ago, I felt I’d be able to better appreciate this city if I knew its history. I was right. In my day to day, as I walk around the city, I view it totally differently than prior to reading this book.

There is too much information to summarize: race, politics and corruption, gender, fashion, infrastructure, immigration. The history of NYC is a reflection of American and global history. Over the last two hundred years, every significant historical event has, in some way or another, moved through and been touched by powerful individuals in New York.

Additionally, I was surprised how much progress was dictated by a select few number of exuberantly warthog individuals. Stuyvesants, JP Morgan (in the late 1800s), Van Wyck, Peter Cooper, Astors, and more. These people, in the decisions they made, moved the needle. I tend to believe that progress will move irrespective of individuals, regardless of how powerful. After reading this book, though, and understanding the development of New York City (albeit before WWI), I’m not so sure.

Awesome read. So glad I read this - planning on sending volume 2 and The Power Broker (about Robert Moses, an influential NYC politician) this year.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The better part of six months later... I feel a little like I've survived a siege, and a little less like having finished a book. A 1236-page siege. This was the first book I read primarily on my Kindle. It was a significant reason for buying the Kindle. If I had to haul the book around on airplanes I wouldn't have gotten done nearly as fast as I did. Definitely a good investment.

The history itself was comprehensive, repetitive, and altogether corrupt. One political party to another. Prosperity to depression. Never-ending squalid poverty and repugnant wealth. Labor versus capital. Immigrant versus nativists. Tammany Hall versus reformists. So many times it felt like the same story being told but with new characters and in new decades.

I will say this. I've made my peace with New York City. As a graduate student in Syracuse, I'd go down for work every few weeks, stay in Tribeca, and work in Brooklyn. I hated it. Loud. Dirty. Smelly. Lonely. Crowded. The two times I've been back in the past seven years made me realize my feelings haven't changed. Yet, for as detailed as this account of the city's history is, it was pretty interesting. I was in a hotel across the Hudson River just a week ago, staring at the skyline, and didn't feel disgust anymore. It was more like looking at a museum artifact - curiosity, maybe?

Had this not been on my Pulitzer reading list I likely never would have read it. Since it was, I gritted my teeth and went at it. I'm glad it's over and will bask in having survived.

[Michael Hattem · Rating 5 out of 5]

No other history of NYC even comes close to this. And I don't just mean in thoroughness. The writing is so easy and smooth while at the same detailing complicated events and casts of characters. Those who write often know that to be able to write this way is extremely hard. If it weren't written this way, no one could slog through it. Also, the structure of the book could not have been better. To write something this huge it is necessary to compartmentalize, but keeping the compartmentalization is one of the strengths of the book. It means one can jump around in it from place to place and still be able to enjoy the book. Burrows, who wrote most of the pre-industrialization part of the book, teaches a class on the History of NYC at Brooklyn College and, as you can probably tell from the book, is a fantastic teacher.

[Valerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three main thoughts:
1) This book was incredible but I'm fucking exhausted,
2) I love my city so much,
3) In the time it took me to read this book, 171,000 Americans died from covid-19. 20,000 of them were my neighbors. I don't know how to process this.

[H]

Note for own reference: Roughly 62% onwards (Kindle edition) is the index.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that you find on everyones shelf but which few have actually read. I'll tell you a secret, the way to get through this is to get the audiobook. It's 67 hours and fifteen minutes long but only one credit on the audible subscription or $16. So, for $0.50/hr you can hire a scribe to follow you around all day and read this book to you in your spare time. It will still take you weeks, but you'll be much much richer for it.

If you live in or are interested in New York City it is pretty much impossible to imagine a more thorough history of the City, from the geographic formations that created its outline, to its inhabitation by Native Americans to the arrival and colonization by the Dutch and the Conquest of the English the work flows extremely well. Despite capturing the arc of history there is also an extreme level of detail, both personal as well as economic, cultural, political, social. The breadth and depth of this work cannot be exaggerated.

It is relatively neutral though the structural marxian analysis of the authors does come through fairly strongly. While this was a major weakness in "Empire of Cotton" where to prove his case about the evils of capitalism the author had write an entire book of economic history without reference to price or profit, it comes in quite handy when trying to explain political movements in a major urban area to refer to class struggle as the democratic political system lends itself to this kind of analysis quite easily. The marxian framework is only really notable in the adulation the book lends to Henry George. But, as I defer to their expertise, perhaps he really was the most important political figure of the final quarter of the nineteenth century.

I highly recommend this book. It's probably a very good read and it is a truly excellent listen.

[Glen Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

New York City has had such a vast impact on the country as a whole as to make this a must read for anyone interested in the history of the United States. I’ve never been to New York and I still very much enjoyed listening to this book.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me quite a while to read this book - several years, in fact. I was determined to read it through to the end, primarily because it was co-written by my second cousin. I am proud of my association with this Pulitzer Prize winning historian, and I am proud to have read the length of this book, a panoramic overview of the history of New York City from its earliest times up until the 20th century, and the creation of the metropolis out of what were formerly independent communities.

I am at a loss of what to say about this book, because it says it all. The authors present a complete, and not overly detailed, account of New York's growth and development. The emphasis is on power and politics, as in most histories, but there are side trails taken into various cultural situations. The diversity and ever-evolving nature of the place, as well as its sometime brutality, are displayed well. The knowledge imparted here is so full as to make it impossible to summarize, and the work itself is in the nature of a summing up of the work of other historians. There were numerous fascinating anecdotes and quick sketches of complicated situations, some of which will stay with me. For example, I recall reading with surprise about the free Black folks of NYC, who were here long before the Emancipation Proclamation, rubbing shoulders with their white neighbors. There is a lot about old, old New York and some of its fascinating characters and leaders, such as Dutch populist Jacob Leisler, someone who deserves to be better remembered. And it is not easy to forget the unsung tragedy of the draft riots that occurred during the Civil War, once one has read about it. Political corruption, particularly under Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall organization, and the fight against it is discussed at some length. Also interesting to learn about are the numerous devices that make modern life possible which were invented in NYC, such as the elevator and the steam engine, the creation of New York's excellent public water system, and some of the entertaining and partying that went on in the 1800s.

The city's growth from being a city with about the same population and influence as Boston and Philadelphia in the late 1700s into America's leading metropolis and business center is the real main theme of this book, and of course, New York's growth went hand in hand with America's. There is also much here about the waves of immigrants, from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe, and about the ongoing conflicts between the upper crust and the working class, and between the proper and the licentious. Gotham is pretty well illustrated too, with numerous drawings and (mostly from the New York Historical Society) that add a great deal to the overall effect.

This will sit on my shelf, a Christmas gift from my father (I got him the exact same thing that year), and I will dip into it from time to time when I feel the need to understand New York City a little better, and I will reflect on this amazing achievement of my kinsman and his fellow historian.

[Jason Bergman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, so let's get this out of the way up front: this book is very, very large and intimidating. It took me over twelve years to muster the courage to read it. I picked it up in 2003, wanting to read a really good history of New York City, and for all that time it sat on my shelf, taunting me.

So I finally read it. And it is indeed great.

Here's the thing about Gotham - while there are almost certainly more comprehensive histories of the founding of New Amsterdam, the Revolutionary War, the New York Civil War draft riots, the creation of the Brooklyn bridge, the rise of Boss Tweed and Tammany hall, the Railroad barons and financiers like J.P. Morgan, and the 1898 unification of the boroughs that ultimately created what we call New York City, it is safe to say that there is no single book that covers all of these events (and much, much more) with as much detail as this one. It's really quite remarkable, and well deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it won.

Having said all that, I knocked a star off because good lord is this book dense. I never take a break from a book, but I had to stop halfway through to read something else. It was just too much for me. This book is so impossibly comprehensive it just boggles the mind. Every labor dispute, every street, every major building, the founding of every church, they're all in here. Plus every newspaper, all the big name citizens...if it happened in NYC from its earliest days all the way up to 1898, it's in here.

The fact that this is called Volume 1 is a bit ominous, but I'm up for the challenge of a second volume that covers the 20th century. I'm even looking forward to it. Although given that this book took over two decades to write, I'm not expecting it anytime soon.

Bottom line is this: if you're up to the challenge, read Gotham. It's terrific. Just get comfortable, because you're not going anywhere for a while.

[Sammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

To the people who only gave this book two stars: I wish you would write a review and let us know why!

I read this book over a lazy summer, and have never been more fascinated by a work of non-fiction. Burrows and Wallace profile the city from its "discovery" by white men to the bustle of the 1890s. They discuss almost every conceivable aspect of the city with humour and insightful research, providing us with astonishing statistics, fascinating quotes from the time, and a comprehensive scope that reaches from the aristocracy to the slums. Individual readers will have their own areas that could have been further researched, but truthfully this is a truly absorbing read. (And, since the book at least touches on every aspect of the city's history, it's a good starting point to find areas for more specialised reading.)

More so than just the history of one city, this book is a history of trade, urban life, culture and really America as a whole. It is filled with colourful personalities, uplifting stories and tragedies. In some areas, it can be quite academic with its catalogues and investigations of history, but I'm the kind of person who loves that. Better to be ambitious than lazy, I say!

I can't wait for the promised sequel to this book (chronicling the 20th century).

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am I crazy for reading a 1300+ page on the history of NYC only up till 1898? Maybe, but this is so going on my resume.

Update: I finally finished this book. One word: Mindblowing!!

[Danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Gotham” by Mike Wallace and Edwin Burrows is an impressive work of history. I had fully expected it to read like an encyclopedia, and it did at times, but it was overall highly informative and engaging. The history of the city during its Dutch colonial days (when it was known as New Amsterdam), the American Revolution (New York surprisingly was an important battlefield), the postbellum period (the Gilded Age), and the Referendum of 1894 were some of the best chapters.

I also enjoyed the several pages on Theodore Roosevelt’s life and career in Manhattan before being catapulted for ever into glory as William McKinley’s Vice President.

Reading about the invention of electric bulbs, electric elevators, escalators, boiler pipelines for indoor heating and how all that contributed to the surge of skyscrapers was especially fascinating. I witnessed “Manahatta” (the native Lenape people’s name for the island) go from an “island of hills” to a true Metropolis—the largest city in the country.

Speaking of which, “Gotham” is Anglo-Saxon for “Goats’ Town,” first coined by Washington Irving to describe New York’s population of “silly,” “self-important,” “foolish” and therefore goat-like people. I thought that was pretty interesting.

The book did get bogged down considerably towards the end in the most minute descriptions of various social movements like the socialists, feminists, labor unions, the robber baron class, etc. And unfortunately, according to several reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads, it appears the sequel “Greater Gotham,” which covers just 21 years but is nearly the same length of this book covering 500 years, continues this trend. It is simply not possible to remember all the names and organizations unless you are a serious scholar of urban history.

But the book concluded superbly with the 1894 referendum in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Bronx, and of course Manhattan that consolidated all the different cities/towns into a “Greater New York,” effective January 1, 1898. Brooklyn, then the 4th largest city in the country, voted affirmatively by a margin of just 277 votes.

“Gotham” deserved its Pulitzer Prize. I don’t know yet if I’ll read its sequel.

[Mike Scholl · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is comprehensive, and it is long, very long. New York is a great world city and this book provides a interesting background into how it became a center of commerce, finance and culture. This examines how New York City benefited mightily from the slave trade and how unscrupulous businessmen built the railroad with Wall Street capital and established our financial markets. I am fascinated by cities and how they evolve and grow, which is why I enjoyed the book, even though it is dense and sometimes gets bogged down in a lot of detail.

[Artyom · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you haven't read anything on NYC, this will be your all-in-one source. Very readable and interesting. But boy, is it heavy and cumbersome to hold. If you get a choice then read it AS AN E-BOOK!

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

good god, man

[Matthew Warchal · Rating 4 out of 5]

An epic of macro history ( because of NYC's global connections) made into acceptable micro history!! The authors have many strong points: Dutch colonial history, urban planning or lack thereof, politics all around but especially of the Tammany Era, reform movements crazy and all and their failures, and especially social history especially of women and the "new immigrants" at the end of the 19th century. Parts of this should be required reading for urban planners, sociologists, political scientists, and even health majors for the role of diseases in cities. It may be too dense for most, but the contribution to history because of this synthesis is important.

[Andrew Canfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story of New York City’s first two and a half centuries is told in sweeping fashion in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. This ambitious book goes over Gotham’s culture and history from the 1600s through 1898 with a fine tooth comb, informing readers of the good and bad in a Pulitzer Prize-winning tome which seemingly leaves little out in the way of detail.

The story begins with New Netherland's seventeenth century foundation by the Dutch East India Company. The municipality of New Amsterdam would eventually become New York City, while New Netherlands would become the state of New York. This was unfortunate for the tribes on the middle/upper east coast; the Mohawks “People of the Flint” as well as the Mohicans “People of the Waters That Are Never Still” did not always get along with one another, but they were displaced in a big way by the arrival of the both the Dutch and English.

Peter Stuyvesant’s 1647-1664 governor-generalship of the colony figures prominently in the opening chapters of the book. Early drivers of the colony’s economy, which was based around trade in everything from furs to wheat to iron ore to timber, made its desirability as a target for acquisition by other empires an obvious layup. Authors Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows did a fantastic job researching New York City's colonial economy and communicating its intricacies to their readers.

New Netherland’s 1664 passage to the British, when it was subsequently renamed in the Duke of York’s honor, kicked off a new phase in management of the colony. As evidenced by its 1,400+ pages of length, Burrows and Wallace do not speed through any aspect of the city’s development in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.

The story of New York’s early Jewish presence is told through the story of Asser Levy. Working at one point as a butcher and at others as a trader in tobacco, grain, and salt during the mid to late 1600s, Levy did his best to undo the perception of a group which Stuyvesant at one point referred to as “repugnant.”

Before Emancipation Day in 1827, New York had a sizable slave population.

According to the book, 15 percent of the city’s population was enslaved in 1712, the year in which an April rebellion caused a clash between slaves and militia. Another rumored 1741 uprising in the city, alleged to be a plot between poor whites and slaves, ended up with over thirty slaves and the supposed white linchpin of the planned uprising, John Hughson, put to death.

Another anecdote from this era involved the conflict between Governor-General William Cosby, appointed by Britain to run their New York colony, and Supreme Court Justice Lewis Morris. Their disagreements resulted in New York Weekly Journal printer John Peter Zenger taking the side of the justice, producing a libel trial which provided an early test of free speech measures in colonial America.

Zenger would be found not guilty in this highly publicized trial, and it is one of many recountings which Wallace takes time to flesh out in the pages of his voluminous book.

New York City was not, as was Boston and its environs, at the epicenter of rebellion against Britain in the 1770s.

While it is accurately presented as the largely Loyalist stronghold that it was in the early days of Lexington and Concord, the book nonetheless shifts its focus to the Battles of Long Island and Fort Washington which temporarily centered fighting in Gotham. Revolutionary era Federalist New York luminaries such as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay appear in these sections.

The 1777 fire (of still dubious origins) which leveled much of the city during the Revolutionary War is one of several blazes which find their way into the narrative.

Following the war and independence, Gotham regales readers with the sort of interesting stories that make it such an immensely readable book.

Politicos like George Clinton, the first governor of independent New York, as well as James Duane (who was the first mayor of post-Revolutionary War New York City) appear alongside looks at more pulpy aspects of life in the Big Apple.

The 1788 Doctor’s Riot was one such offbeat tale; this fatal riot stemmed from a mob of New Yorkers attacking doctors and medical students who were digging up corpses from graves for purposes of experimentation.

Shortly after this, the Buttonwood Agreement among the metropolis’s high fliers went a long way toward ensuring that, from the last decade of the eighteenth century onwards, New York (and Wall Street) would be, as the authors put it, a city of capital long after it ceased being the nation’s governmental capital in 1790. While it did not pioneer the idea, the existence of the ‘confidence man’ in the confines of New York City was taken as a given by the first half of the 1800s.

Societal groups like the Knickerbockers and Yacht Club brought an almost old-style European form of snobbery to Gotham. Snobbish though they were, the Knickerbockers helped to popularize and mainstream baseball on the east coast, a base from which it quickly spread to the rest of the country.

‘The 400,’ the nickname given to what were believed to be the four hundred individuals out of a million plus who “really mattered,” did in fact have an outsized influence in the economy and culture of the area.

The populist attacks on Nicholas Biddle’s Philadelphia-based Bank of the United States-and its subsequent dissolution at the hands of Andrew Jackson’s administration in the 1830s-had the unintended effect of further cementing New York, and not the City of Brotherly Love, as the nation’s banking and financial capital. This portion of Gotham tied into a broader look at the long-running battle against Tammany Hall and its corruption.

William ‘Boss’ Tweed was a fixture of Tammany’s Democratic control of New York City, and the Locofoco movement which emerged to oppose Tweed’s political machine got a good look from the authors. This movement, a populist one against Tammany, would battle against patronage politics and the suspicion that much of New York City’s ruling class was bought and paid for.

The 1822 yellow fever outbreak and subsequent cholera outbreak of 1833 underscored how far the city had to go in advancing sanitary practices and dealing with epidemics. Bellevue Hospital had the quite unenviable role as a repository for New York City’s extremely ill.

The chapter on New York City’s growth as a newspaper and literary hotspot was particularly well-written by Burrows and Wallace. It looks at the city’s legendary newspaper editors ranging from Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. Although he entered the newspaper scene later on, Joseph Pulitzer’s publishing of the New York World marked a huge moment in the industry. Its headquarters, the World Building would, at 309 feet tall, be the largest building in the world when it was completed in 1890.

The early growth in publishing thanks to organs like Harper’s was also delved into, as was the 1836 Helen Jewett murder trial and the manner in which this supercharged the sort of coverage provided by Gotham’s penny press.

The writers who spent substantial time in New York City were granted a lot of analysis by Burrow and Wallace. Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, and Edgar Allan Poe all make guest appearances in Gotham’s pages.

The Young American writers of mid-century, among whom was counted John O’Sullivan of “Manifest Destiny" term coinage as one of their numbers, went a long way toward romanticizing the American West then being in the process of being founded.

The performances of ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody also helped to spread a not-always-factual presentation of western life to the denizens of the metropolis. P.T. Barnum’s initial forays into entertainment took place in New York City, and the extension of this into the first American three-ring circuses made it natural that this would have been where Barnum got his start.

In accordance with its growth as a publishing and literary capital, the rise of Broadway as a lodestar of the theater and consumerism also takes up a lot of paragraph space. From Brooks Brothers to Tiffany and Young Company to A.T. Stewart’s department store trailblazing at the Marble Palace (280 Broadway), this book pulls out all the stops in creating a well-rounded analysis of Gotham.

A frequent theme in this era is New York city’s role as a haven for both the elite and for immigrants. The arrival of large numbers of German and especially Irish immigrants during the middle of the nineteenth century forced the city to deal with this dichotomy on numerous occasions.

By 1855, over fifty percent of the city’s population was foreign born.

This loomed especially large during the 1860s. With the outbreak of the South’s secession and the Civil War, New York City’s ties to the cotton economy were placed front and center. The authors catalog just how torn New Yorkers were in the early days of the conflict, with Mayor Fernando Wood briefly considering pulling the city out of the Union and giving it a Hanseatic-like independent status so trade could be maintained with the southern plantation economy.

Thankfully, this course was not taken.

But Gotham goes on to recount in vivid detail the draft riot of July 1863, a violent multi-day outbreak led by enraged New Yorkers who did not want to be drafted into the Union army. This section pulls no punches in describing the horrific violence meted out to African-Americans and Republicans in particular. The rioting was largely led by what had become a sort of immigrant underclass, led by Irish who had long since become disenchanted with Lincoln and the war effort.

This immigrant-based urban disorder would flare up constantly during the second half of the nineteenth century.

With areas like The Bowery, the Tenderloin, and Five Points, New York more than once found itself in riotous conditions. The 1857 Dead Rabbit Riot featured a clash between the Dead Rabbit and Bowery Boys gangs, while the bizarre Astor Place Riot, which took place eight years earlier and left over twenty dead, was set off due to an odd rivalry between stage actor Edwin Forrest and his British counterpart William Macready.

Feats that changed the physical landscape of course loom large in Gotham. John Roebling’s construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which proved a mammoth feat of engineering, was recounted by Burrows and Wallace. Frederick Law Olmstead’s selection to design Central Park also fell within the book's purview, and the creation of this oasis within a concrete urban jungle was one of numerous compelling aspects in its pages.

Tensions between reformers influenced by contemporary European socialist thought defined much of the 1880s and 1890s. Progress and Poverty author and mayoral candidate Henry George certainly made the propertied class uncomfortable, while reformers such as Mayor William Strong and his Police Chief Theodore Roosevelt sought to be responsive to the calls for change without going as far as the likes of George and his followers.

The 1880s also saw a large influx of eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia. They often did not mesh well with the currently established Jewish population in the city, a friction the authors looked at toward the end of Gotham.

The relationship between the five boroughs of New York was an unsettled one through much of the book, and the smaller Brooklyn often looked on the larger Manhattan as the bullying next door neighbor. But the final portion of Gotham (and the reason it ends in the year it does) analyzes how the five boroughs combined into a three million resident strong Greater New York in 1898.

Gotham was certainly deserving of its 1999 Pulitzer Prize in History. Burrows and Wallace put together an outstandingly detailed dive into New York City and seemed to leave few stones unturned in their quest to fill readers in on its complex past.

The characters, controversies, and tales of Gotham which it reveals are richly told within the context of a book which sets out to cover nearly three hundred years of history. It brings in a huge cast of individuals, groups, and organizations and weaves them together in a story that never becomes bogged down despite the huge array of New York City-based topics it hits.

It is difficult to find fault with the book, and owing to this it is hard to justify not giving it a five star rating.

Readers should not be intimidated by its 1,400 plus page length. The writing style is ideally suited to an enjoyable walk through New York City’s history from colonial times through 1898.


-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado