Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape

New York's metamorphosis from compact part to modern metropolis occurred during the mid-nineteenth century. "Empire City tells the story of the dreams that inspired the changes in the landscape and the problems that eluded solution. Author David Scobey paints a remarkable panorama of New York's uneven development, a city-building and speculative excess. Envisioning a new kind of national civilization, "bourgeois urbanists' attempted to make New York the nation's pre-eminent city. Ultimately, they created a masaic of grand improvements, dynamic change, and environmental disorder. "Empire City sets the stories of the city's most celebrated landmarks--Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the downtown commercial center--within the context of this new ideas of landscape design and a politics of planned city building. Perhaps such an ambitious project for guiding growth, overcoming spatial problems, and uplifting public was bound to fail; still, it grips the imagination.