David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. 344 pp. $59.50 cloth; $24.95 paper.

Extract

New York City's great importance has necessarily attracted exceptional scholarship, including recently a Pulitzer Prize-winning history as well as widely acclaimed studies of the city's physical and social dimensions. Viewed from virtually every angle, the great city's history might appear to have been pretty well exhausted. With the publication of David Scobey's Empire City, however, New York may have received its most innovative and important study to date. Viewing the city's mid-nineteenth century boom as a crucial point in its development, Scobey manages both to infuse familiar subjects with new meaning and to invest them with broad national consequence.