The best beer in the world is brewed in Belgium. To be certified as a brewmaster in that country, one must pass a rigorous test. As part of this test, the would-be brew-master must replicate the American Budweiser. Why, one may reasonably wonder, would the brewing of the thin, pallid Budweiser be a test in a country renowned for its rich., complex ales? The reason is that the creation of a beer so characterless as Budweiser actually requires such a degree of accuracy--in, for example, getting one flavor to cancel out another--that it is indeed a test of the brewers craft.

One suspects that some similar process resulted in the prose of The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson and recently published, to much fanfare, by Yale University Press and the New-York Historical Society. The encyclopedias credits list twenty-six "project editors" and four "copy editors," in addition to various other kinds of editors, and so it is difficult to know exactly how the line-editing chores were divvied up. Whats for sure, though, is that the words of the some 650 contributors have been thoroughly processed into a homogeneously bland pabulum. That process must have been so painstaking that one can only surmise that the editors were asked to endure some bizarre and exacting test.

Now, one does not go to a reference book of this sort in quest of sparkling prose. Such prose in such a work, rare as it is, is a bonus when encountered. I dwell on it, however, because its the first of several things the reader encounters that point to this books curious lack of richness and depth, of the multi-layered usability that elevates a reference book from a brick on a library shelf to an intellectual adventure. This elevation can be the result of the prose. When it is not, it can be the result of other things: cross-referencing, organization, choice and emphases of subjects, appendices, annotated bibliographies, graphic composition, and the like. In each of these areas, The Encyclopedia of New York City comes up short. It is, in the end, a dogged but pedestrian affair, a book one who is interested in New York history cannot afford not to own and consult, but, alas, a reference book of the type that elicits no special frisson each time one hauls it from its shelf.

Not that under ordinary circumstances such lack of frisson would be cause to be disappointed by a reference book. But the circumstances of The Encyclopedia of New York City are anything but ordinary. For this is one of the most eagerly anticipated, not to say hyped, reference books of our time. The tales are legion of the vast and impressive resources lavished upon this project, of the thirteen years, the million dollars, and the 650-plus contributors. Having followed the gestation of this encyclopedia nearly from its conception, I can say that it would be nothing less than disingenuous of this books makers and partisans to suggest that it not be judged against its expectations. For those expectations were consciously crafted. There was a buzz about this project, louder in some years than in others, but never inaudible. At various points over these past thirteen years one has been led to expect something gargantuan, a kind of Grove Dictionary of New York City. The word "definitive" has been used in the books publicity. One may, in this context, recall David Lodges character Professor Morris Zapp, whose goal once was to write a book about Jane Austen that would say everything that could conceivably be said about Jane Austen, thus making it impossible for anyone ever again to write about her. Well, one wondered at times if this project werent of Zappian dimensions. Sometimes the operative analogue was not Morris Zapp but Cecil B. DeMille.

At some point--later I believe than is indicated in the introduction to the book--it was decided to make this an encyclopedia for everyman: to keep its price as low as possible, its bulk trimmed, its entries elementary. Was this a wise decision? Thirteen years, a million dollars, 650 contributors later, and what we have--I do not exaggerate--is a book that a few skilled free-lance writers could have knocked together in a couple of years, with brisket prose and better cross-referencing (the editors of the present encyclopedia seem unaware of the existence of some of the excellent scholarly software which has greatly aided the making of reference books). Again, this is not to knock the books absolute value as an alphabetized compendium of raw data. It is to consider the book against its own hype--and against its ostensible subject.

That subject is, of course, New York City. Yet one wonders, in perusing this tome, what "New York City" means. The preponderance of this volumes contributors are academics, either professors or graduate students engaged in some degree in a field, of recent vintage, called urban history, of which New York history may be said to be a branch. Unfortunately, urban history, because of its youth but more because it is being nurtured in our present, scandalously confused academic environment, is a kind of Humpty-Dumpty discipline, meaning whatever a particular practitioner wishes it to mean. Its academic antecedents seem to me to stem from two sources. One is the pan-disciplinary "cultural history" pioneered by such geniuses as Jacob Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga. The latters magnum opus, The Waning of the Middle Ages, remains to date our best object lesson in how to write about a place and time so as to show the interrelations among its people, events, beliefs, aspirations, creative impulses, and so on. Another academic source of urban history is the urban sociology practiced in Germany by Max Weber and Georg Simmel and in this country by Robert Ezra Park and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. One would think that any discipline spawned by the magnificent studies of men like Huizinga and Weber could not fail to prove exciting and enlightening. One would be wrong.

As is the fate of most good ideas in our day, "cultural history" and "urban history"--the very disciplines that have made it possible for us to consider "New York City" as a subject--have been infected by all manner of politically correct obliquities. Not that the encyclopedia is thumpingly PC: it is not, and that is a major relief. Indeed, Professor Jackson has been nothing less than courageous in speaking out against the excesses of multiculturalism. Owing, I suspect, to Professor Jacksons native good taste, theres precious little trace here of the gnostic urbanism practiced by such fashionable pseudo-scholars of New York City as Richard Sennett and Marshall Berman. Whats happened, though, is that in our time cultural history has been "deconstructed" into something ever more vague and tendentious, namely something called "cultural studies: My reason for these metahistorical lucubrations is to try to arrive at some understanding, however imperfect, of the fact that there is, in Professor Kenneth Jacksons Encyclopedia of New York City, an entry for Barbra Streisand.

I swear that hers was the first entry I saw upon opening the encyclopedia. Its not so much that I regard Miss Streisand as one of the most odious public personalities of our day that bridles. I think that had the entry been for a popular singer and actress I enjoy, Id still have been appalled. Barbra Streisand? It was thus only natural that I should next look up another of our vastly overpublicized "entertainers," and I flipped through the Ls till I came to, yes, David Letterman. Is this the fate of cultural history? It alone is enough to make one understand why the very greatest practitioners of the discipline have chosen to concentrate their studies on the remote past. Let me say what, apparently, none of those twenty-six "project editors" managed to say: there is not now nor will there ever be a person who will need to consult or think to consult The Encyclopedia of New York City in order to learn who Barbra Streisand is or was.

The game was afoot: who was left out to make room for Streisand and Letterman? For starters, Jane Jacobs. Yes, Jane Jacobs. There is no entry for Jane Jacobs. Its not that planning theorists and critics were left out as a whole. Lewis Mumfords here, so is Charles Abrams, even Thomas Adams. When I mentioned to a friend that Jacobs was missing from the book, she said, "Well, you know, the academics hate her." Could this be it? And since Barbra Streisand lectured at Harvard Law School, are we thus to infer that the academics love her and thats why shes in the book?

Cultural history and urban sociology may have been the academic antecedents of the urban history that begat the New York history of which this encyclopedia is the would-be summum bonum. But there were non-academic antecedents as well. Indeed, until only forty or so years ago the entire field of New York history, which was born and grew with the city itself, was the preserve of "amateurs." These amateurs were the antiquarians and the custodians of local lore, traditions, natural and topographical history, and genealogy. The academics have made and continue to make important contributions, particularly in the meticulous identification and cataloguing of primary materials, and in the nailing-down of apocrypha. The art historian Francis Haskell, in his illuminating book History and Its Images, shows how older "amateur" --antiquarian, mainly--traditions fed the creation of the more formalized cultural-historical practices of men like Burckhardt and Huizinga. This process can be viewed in especially high relief in the matter of New York history.

It was thus with some interest that I was anxious to see the extent of hommage paid by the editors of The Encyclopedia of New York City to their "amateur" antecedents in the writing and compiling of historical and reference works on New York history. One would think that the history of New York history is a subject well within the purview of the present book. Such, alas, is not the case. There are no entries on the principal nineteenth-century historians of the city: not Mary Booth, not Henry Stiles, not even the redoubtable Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, who with an amateurs passion created hefty works which remain founts of accurate data and graceful prose. Missing are Reginald Pelham Bolton, Maud Wilder Goodwin and the City History Club, James Riker, the mapmakers George and Walter Bromley, and Issacher Cozzens, who wrote the first (and still useful) geological history of New York City. There is no mention of William Loring Andrews and the Society of Iconophiles, and distressingly scant mention indeed of one of the Societys august members, New Yorks greatest historian, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes. To be fair, there is an entry for Stokes, by Deborah S. Gardner, and it is not bad. What bridles, however, is how, in the books introduction, following a mannered encomium to the worth of Stokess achievement, the reader is apprised: "But Phelps Stokes concentrated on the natural environment." Did the author of that sentence--Professor Jackson? it is not clear--ever read Stokes? (And whats with the "Phelps Stokes"? The surname is Stokes.)

There is no entry for Moses King, whose Handbook of New York City is one of the essential New York City reference works, and none for Henry Collins Brown, who wrote or compiled outstanding works on New York history and who was the first director of the Museum of the City of New York. (There is, to be sure, a single entry on "Histories," by Harold Eugene Mahan, but it is inadequate and does not even mention most of the writers Ive just cited.)

Though entries abound on New York-based artists and art movements, those artists, chiefly printmakers, who took New York for their subject are given rather short shrift. There is an entry for Eliza Greatorex, but no mention of her sister Matilda Pratt Despard, and there are no entries for Samuel Hollyer or Charles E W. Mielatz. Yet The Encyclopedia of New York City makes sure we know who Keith Haring and the Guerrilla Girls were! And though there is coverage of New Yorks post-World War II ascendancy as an international art center, isnt it just a tad curious that there is no entry for Clement Greenberg, even if just to denounce him as a Cold Warrior? (There is an entry for Meyer Schapiro.)

I have already, in conversation, been accused of quibbling. Perhaps there is some merit to the accusation. After all, I am happy to own this book, and expect that I will refer to it often. But then, wheres Egbert Viele?

Viele was a surveyor and cartographer of surpassing gifts (if abrasive personality) whose many works include the 1865 Topographical and Hydrological Map of New York, one of the most fabled and important graphic documents to come to us from the nineteenth-century city (and a map, incidentally, still in use among civil engineers). Viele was surveyor of Central Park, and promoter of the Arcade Railway, one of the many fascinating unbuilt public works projects in New Yorks history. There is, in The Encyclopedia of New York City, no entry for Vide. Is this quibbling? Is it to quibble to be affronted that there is no entry for the greatest of the nineteenth centurys commentators on New York architecture, Montgomery Schuyler? (One senses, in the omissions of Van Rensselaer and Schuyler, not so much a bias against architectural critics, but a bias against New Yorks Knickerbocker families. Indeed, there is, amazingly, no entry for the word "Knickerbocker.") And so on.

Within individual entries, there are some strange omissions and errors. The entry for Herman Melville curiously fails to mention that he wrote Moby-Dick, with its opening passages marvelously evoking nineteenth-century maritime New York, or "Bartleby the Scrivener," which is perhaps the New York story par excellence. The entry for Edith Wharton claims that The House of Mirth was based on Mrs. Whartons own childhood, which is of course quite wrong, as any of the scores of this citys Wharton experts and fans would know. (The author of the entry must have been thinking of The Age of Innocence, but in a town lousy with Wharton pedants its a whopper of an error.)

If I seem a tad harsh in my appraisal of The Encyclopedia of New York City, I want to say again that it has largely to do with expectations. Had this work simply appeared without fanfare, one might have been thrilled to get ones hands on it. Even as it is, the book is a worthwhile investment for anyone seriously interested in New York history. Its thumbnail corporate and institutional histories should prove enormously useful, and its entries on matters political and governmental are judicious and informative. Two lengthy entries that stand out in my mind are Simon Baatz on "Science" and Henry Hope Reed on "Horticulture": each is an elegantly concise redaction of its vast subject.

New York is a great subject and would seem to demand a treatment that matches its depth and richness. Alas, "New York" as construed by academia is less a subject than an epistemological morass, a condition duly reflected by The Encyclopedia of New York City. Its makers apparent uninterest in the men and women who early on set an intellectually respectable agenda for the new discipline of New York history is but another of the sad examples of the academic arrogance that is a hallmark of our time.