In 1898, the New York state legislature created Greater New York, a metropolis of three and a half million people, the second largest city in the world, and arguably the most diverse and complex urban environment in history. In this far-ranging study, Keith D. Revell shows how experts in engineering, law, architecture, public health, public finance, and planning learned to cope with the daunting challenges of collective living on this new scale. Engineers applied new technologies to build railroad tunnels under the Hudson River and construct aqueducts to quench the thirst of a city on the verge of water famine. Sanitarians attempted to clean up a harbor choked by millions of gallons of raw sewage. Economists experimented with new approaches to financing urban infrastructure. Architects and planners wrestled with the problems of skyscraper regulation and regional growth. These issues of city-building and institutional change involved more than the familiar push and pull of interest groups or battles between bosses, reformers, immigrants, and natives. Revell details the ways that technical valuesdistinctive civic culture of expertisehelped reshape ideas of community, generate new centers of public authority, and change the physical landscape of New York City. Building 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.
Contents: 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
""Deeply researched, clearly written and argued... required reading for scholars of early twentieth-century New York City.""
