Overview

In one generation, New York was transformed into one of the great cities of the modern world. The causes and results of this change are emphasized by Edward K. Spann in The New Metropolis. This book is a brilliant evocation of the years when a seaport town was lost and a great metropolis gained. It is the happy story of American ingenuity, achievement, and urban success, but it is also the story of urban wretchedness and failure. Above all, it is the drama of a major city and its confrontation with the problems and opportunities of a modernizing world.

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Few scholarly historians have attempted to present a thorough account of the evolution of all the diverse forms of life and endeavor in the city during a given period. Few have moved from the preparation of detailed sketches to the creation of a sweeping portrait encompassing all the contrasting colors and tones of a metropolis. In The New Metropolis Edward K. Spann has attempted this challenging task and has produced a rich and rewarding history. Politicians and merchants, rich and poor, do-gooders and thugs, all inhabit the pages of Spann's volume. It is an encyclopedic view, a work ambitious in conception and masterly in presentation. -- Reviews in American History

A huge, old-fashioned chronicle that is one of the more entertaining and informative books ever written about the history of New York City - though not necessarily in the way intended by Professor Spann (History, Indiana State). He begins by proclaiming that in the two decades before the Civil War. . . New York completed the essential phase of its metropolitan development and became the nation's dominant urban center. But this is hardly a major revelation - no one has ever seriously argued otherwise - and it is quickly apparent that Spann doesn't intend to be bogged down in any event by the responsibilities of orderly, sustained argumentation. New York in these years, he tells us, was too complex and unfinished to be understood by any single approach or methodology, and what he means is that he will have to tell all, more or less as it occurs to him. He does, too. Trade and commerce, immigration and nativism, wealth and poverty, housing and slums and parks, disease and sanitation and street-cleaning and water-supply, clubs and theaters and opera houses, prostitution and abortion, schools and colleges, horsecars and omnibuses, Common Council politics, ward bosses and reformers, ministers and missionaries - it's all here, no stone left unturned, one subject spilling and tumbling into another with a mesmerizing disregard for rhyme or reason. In one chapter, The Age of Gold, Spann starts out describing the effects of the California Gold Rush on the city economy and then - typically - free-associates his way into such topics as traffic congestion, transportation improvements, municipal franchising, stock watering, Tweed, Tweed's father-in-law, the winter of 1854/55, and so on. Such a hodge-podge explains absolutely nothing, of course - certainly not how New York became modern - yet it does manage in the process to be remarkably evocative of what life was like in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century. That alone is no mean achievement, even though it leaves untouched the hows and whys. A good book despite itself. (Kirkus Reviews)

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