The history of New York has become, in the last decade or so, an academic cottage industry. It has also become a popular phenomenon. As Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (not the Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes, I hasten to add) note in their mammoth new book, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,  

One of our ongoing avenues of inquiry follows New Yorkers as they slowly developed the conviction that their past was worth knowing, even worth preserving. Indeed, we believe there is a greater degree of interest in Gotham’s history today than was ever the case before. We hope to nourish this ripening historical sensibility by telling the city’s story in a spirited way—a relatively easy task given that it’s intrinsically dazzling, a claim we think transcends both the fond boasting of all historians for their subject and the legendary conceitedness of New Yorkers (we notorious braggarts).

It is therefore surprising that many years have passed since there has been a proper narrative history of New York City.

William Smith’s History of the Province of New York, published in London in 1757, is generally regarded as the first such attempt. (A revised edition came out in 1792 from Matthew Carey of Philadelphia, the young republic’s leading publishing house.) A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by Washington Irving was published in 1809. It was a tongue-in-cheek mock-epic of the city’s founding. The authors of Gotham pay an obeisance to Irving in the title of their book: New York’s well-known sobriquet was first applied to the city by Irving in his Salmagundi essays in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Gotham, Anglo-Saxon for “goat town,” is an actual village in Nottinghamshire. Burrows and Wallace tell us that, from the Middle Ages on, Gotham and Gothamites were the butt of jokes that were something like the idiotic “Polish” jokes with which we are all familiar. (Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham was published in England in the early sixteenth century.) Gothamites were cast as a dim lot. But they also proved cagey: according to legend, to forestall the entry of King John into their town in order to declare a valuable swath of its land a public (king’s) highway, the villagers feigned insanity, which apparently, for reasons not altogether clear (pity? fear?) dissuaded the king from entering the town and implementing his plan. Thus the legend of the “Wise Fools of Gotham”—whose imaginative and concerted action to block urban renewal sounds like it would have earned the favor of Jane Jacobs. In any event, Irving’s use of the term was largely pejorative.

Throughout the nineteenth century, there were many attempts, some awful, some quite sophisticated, at general histories of New York. But it is another kind of work altogether that stands at the pinnacle of New York historiography: I. N. Phelps Stokes’s Iconography of Manhattan Island (published in six volumes between 1915 and 1928), that improbably ornate collation of documents and graphical materials that remains the single best resource for historians on the topographical development of the city. Of that other nineteenth-century genre, the narrative general history in unadorned prose, our century’s pickings have been meager indeed.

That the history of New York has become an academic cottage industry has its good and its bad points. The good is in the thorough plumbing of primary materials. For example, Timothy J. Gilfoyle’s City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (Norton 1992) is an amazing feat of scholarship, making use of source material few of us even suspected existed. (The history of prostitution, appealing at once to feminism and to prurience, is a hot topic these days.) The bad is in the use to which the unearthed material is put: to buttress what are, in most cases, deeply flawed premises about the nature and history of the city. There is, in academia, a powerful presumption, born of decades of academic leftism and reflexive anti-capitalism, that the story of New York is that of labor pitted against capital, or of oppressed minorities yearning to breathe free but beaten down at every opportunity by entrenched oligarchies.

In spite of their obeisance to Irving in the title of their new history, Burrows and Wallace do not turn in a very Irving-like performance. Instead, they have given us a sure and supple summa of recent progressivist writing on the history of New York. On the plus side, I should note that Gotham is crisply written and wide-ranging. In many respects, it is an impressive achievement— informed, erudite, amusing—and it will receive, I am certain, glowing reviews. But since other reviewers will probably not focus on its shortcomings, I would like to take the opportunity to note a few things that I find disturbing.

In their introduction, Burrows and Wallace state:

Our book will journey along through time, taking each moment on its own terms, respecting its uniqueness. We adopt the perspective of contemporaries as we relate their experiences, remaining mostly in their “now.” Yet, like all histories, Gotham is not the simple reflection of an underlying reality, but a construction. The narrative embodies our selections, our silences. It is organized around patterns we discern amid the swirl of events.

The English language is a marvelous thing: note that “Yet,” a three-letter monosyllable that allows its users plainly, flatly, and without missing a beat to contradict themselves. It is the part on the nearer side of “Yet” that seems accurate: this book is, “like all histories,” heavily constructed. As for the far side of “Yet,” it strikes me that the authors’ tone throughout the book belies their assertion of respecting the uniqueness of anything. It is a sardonic tone, for the most part. Anyone with whom they deal who does not share their opinions and attitudes is clearly made out to be a ridiculous figure. This, indeed, is another one of those books out of academia where the authors automatically assume that anyone who reads it will share their opinion that to speak against abortion or contraception or premarital sex or masturbation is the height of stupidity. (The book is therefore quite multicultural in its animadversions: observant Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims alike will find much here that is offensive.)

Burrows and Wallace, highly educated and sophisticated academics, obsessed by issues of class, have no more nuanced a view of class dynamics (indeed, no real conception of class dynamics at all) than does James Cameron, writer and director of the technologically stupendous and almost unbelievably simple-minded film Titanic. Indeed, Gotham is much like the film: remarkable resources and long, hard work lavished upon simplistic premises. As in Cameron’s film, Burrows and Wallace’s book posits a working class that is morally and aesthetically superior to the middle and upper classes. Where the “lifestyles” of the middle and upper classes are the result and the reflection of ill-gotten gains, of exploitation, expropriation, and a preening, hypocritical moralism, the working class, by contrast, is unpretentious, natural, unaffected, unhypocritical, authentic.

An example: Writing about bourgeois home life in the 1820s, the authors note that upper-class women “utilized the parlor, for Bible readings, charity meetings, after-church teas, and the formal ‘morning calls’ that maintained class boundaries by defining the people to whom one was, or was not, ‘at home.’” (The authors, presumably, allow anyone into their homes who knocks on the door.) Working-class women, on the other hand, “did not dress up and pay each other formal parlor visits—they had no parlors—but they socialized through open windows and dropped in at one another’s kitchens, children in tow, to exchange gossip and information. Neighbors intervened in quarrels, sat up with sick infants, swapped news of market bargains, and helped out in crises (removing goods and furniture in case of fire, or rallying to block evictions).” And on the Titanic they danced and whooped it up in steerage, while in first class they had to sit through suffocating formal dinners.

This is, as close as I can make out, the basic value system that informs Gotham. The glaring fact that the hoveled hordes of Five Points became golf-playing suburban Republicans must either be ignored or explained away. The economist Thomas Sowell has written eloquently of the fate of nineteenth-century New York’s poorest and most “oppressed” group: Irish Americans, who “today have equalled or exceeded the American national average in income and I.Q., and their family size and voting patterns are very similar to those of other Americans. Historically, it represents one of the great social transformations of a people.” (See The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective, Morrow 1983.) It seems to me that you could tell the story of, say, the Irish in New York principally in terms of an almost unimpeded material progress. But that would require a dynamic approach to the subject, not the static approach that most of our urban historians favor.

The authors do present a vast panorama. The only way to judge the accuracy of so large a treatment is to zero in on those aspects about which one feels oneself relatively expert—in my case the 1820s and 1830s. New York had not yet grown Brobdingnagian. “Republican virtue” was not a phrase so easily scoffed at. The growing prosperity of the city; the architecture of the Greek Revival; the literary culture of the Bread and Cheese Club at Wiley’s Bookstore on New Street; the nearness of countryside and the sweep of grand country estates that so impressed Tocqueville and Beaumont along the East River from Kips Bay to Hell Gate (of which only Archibald Gracie’s mansion remains)—there was a golden little moment when the city had attained, however provisionally, something like a coalescence of urban form together with a crystallization of nationality. Fate determined that this antebellum gentility was insupportable.

So what do Burrows and Wallace have to say about my favorite period? Quite a bit. Take for example chapter 28, “The Medici of the Republic” (the phrase is Mrs. Trollope’s). In twenty pages, the authors adroitly limn the outlines of the city’s nascent bourgeois culture. The range of topics is typical of all the book’s sixty-nine chapters. Here are the conflicting elites, the Episcopal Knickerbockers vs. the Puritan Yankees. The former went in for playgoing, horseracing, and Freemasonry, the latter for temperance and observing the Sabbath. The authors write of the fashions in clothing inspired by neoclassical taste (the origin, for men, though the authors don’t say so, of the buttoned-down Brooks Brothers look). They write of bourgeois fashions in home furnishings, of dining habits, of vacations and summer resorts (the Catskill Mountain House, the Coney Island House). They write of art (the birth of the Hudson River School) and literature (the bucolic romanticism of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant). There’s John Trumbull’s Academy of Fine Arts, the hauteur of which begat the rival National Academy of Design, whose first president was Samuel Morse. There’s the neoclassical architecture of Ithiel Town and A. J. Davis and Martin Thompson. There are the shifting boundaries of fashionable neighborhoods, from the Battery to Park Place to St. John’s Square to Bond Street to Lafayette Place to Washington Square, thence to the country mansions along the river. There’s the mania for the Greek, inspired by contemporary European taste and by the cause célèbre of the Greek War of Independence (in 1823 a Greek Committee composed of wealthy New Yorkers was established by William Bayard to raise money for the cause).

And so on. Burrows and Wallace’s is a virtuoso performance—its occasional P.C. platitudes notwithstanding—typical of the authors’ clear exposition of vast mounds of extremely diverse material, ranging from personal hygiene to institution formation. (It is in this, though certainly not in its tone or politics, similar to the type of history at which Paul Johnson is the undisputed master.)

The following chapter, “Working Quarters,” carries the treatment through to the less-advantaged classes, and opens a bit distressingly: On New Year’s Eve of 1827 “several thousand workingmen” drunkenly marched through the streets of the city, through neighborhoods both rough and genteel, rich and poor, raising a holy ruckus, beating on pans, blowing horns, shouting, making “the most hideous noises,” breaking windows, harassing pedestrians. One expects some raucous behavior on New Year’s Eve, but such marauding bands were not limited to that night:

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New York’s propertied classes had more or less tolerated such instances of plebeian revelry because they were relatively harmless… . Even after the Revolution, “Callithumpian bands”—echoing ancient European traditions—had continued to parade about, beating on pans, shouting and groaning, mocking the powerful and overly dignified. Respectable opinion had grown steadily less tolerant of self-organized plebeian frolics, however, partly because they affronted genteel notions of correct behavior, and partly because every year they became more truculent, more defiant of authority. It was one thing for great throngs of working people to rejoice noisily at Lafayette’s visit or the opening of the Erie Canal, civic ceremonies orchestrated by gentlemen; it was quite another for rowdies to take over the streets, wantonly destroying property and terrorizing law-abiding citizens.

Leaving aside that only minds too genteel by half could come up with a phrase like “self-organized plebeian frolics,” one wonders, again: Why so sardonic a tone? Is it “overly dignified” not to want one’s sleep disturbed by a load of drunken louts banging on pans? At any rate, “Callithumpian bands” are one of the leitmotifs of Burrows and Wallace’s book. (By the way, it should be callithumpian uncapitalized.)

That the wilding bands were clearly not welcomed by Olmsted and Vaux to their new Central Park in the 1850s and 1860s is, from Burrows and Wallace’s perspective (chapter 44), one of many things that makes the park a symbol of unforgivable elitism. To make way for the park, “sixteen hundred or so Irish, Germans, and blacks who lived on the land—dismissed and disparaged as ‘vagabonds and scoundrels’— were evicted by 1857.” “Dismissed and disparaged” by whom? We are not told. That’s a case of ideological animus betraying the authors into incredibly sloppy writing. Burrows and Wallace write of Olmsted and Vaux’s vision of “a space designed to school both patrician and plebeian cultures by transmitting, almost subliminally, civilized values and a ‘harmonizing and refining influence.’” (To transmit civilized values is, of course, a euphemism for class oppression.) Olmsted and Vaux “called for exiling the normal business of urban life to beyond the park’s perimeter. Coal carts, butchers’ carts, dung carts, and fire engines that had to cross the park were to be diverted to sunken transverse roads (rather as servants and tradesmen were kept out of sight in genteel mansions).”

Since we know that keeping servants and tradesmen “out of sight in genteel mansions” is bad, are we to infer, from the authors’ sardonic comparison, that they would prefer Central Park to be filled with “coal carts, butchers’ carts, dung carts, and fire engines”? Actually, I think they would. Central Park, by being clean, kempt, and orderly, was obviously intended for the privileged, genteel classes. It “was far less welcoming to the working classes”—who, as we know, prefer the dirty, unkempt, and disorderly. The park’s design “banned not only their conventional recreations but their republican political culture.” My sense of outrage was getting fairly numb by this point.

But it is preferable to chapter 45, “Femme Decovert” (a pun on the legal term for a married woman), the second paragraph of which begins with this sentence: “New York provided many opportunities for same-sex encounters.” It goes downhill from there, including the ritual paean to the abortionist Madame Restell.

The promotional materials from Oxford University Press make much of the authors’ having spent twenty years on this and, presumably, its forthcoming companion volume (due in 2000), bringing the story up to date. The book is substantial and an achievement of which its authors should certainly feel very proud. After all, a Paul Johnson, who can knock out a volume like this once a year, is the exception not the rule. Gotham abounds in virtues, and its authors, I daresay, have probably assimilated more of the literature of New York than any other two men alive. Yet I get the strong feeling that the authors rarely allowed their material to suggest new ways of looking at it. That’s the real work of the historian, the part that takes time.

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