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.¹

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.

At the heart of Scobey's study is an extraordinarily dynamic real estate market, which attracts a number of competing efforts both to capitalize on it and to direct it. Scobey avoids describing the contestants in the struggle to shape the resulting new urban landscape simply in terms of partisan or class affiliation. Instead, he reveals an essentially cultural struggle in which one side seeks to maximize returns in the form of profits and patronage while the other pursues direct development in ways that can inform and civilize the masses. This latter effort, which he labels “bourgeois urbanism,” embraced a kind of “moral environmentalism” as the means through which to educate taste, inculcate virtue, and refine sociability (161). Like virtually all New Yorkers, this element of genteel Victorians wanted to foster the city's capitalist energy. At the same time, it sought to harness that energy to advance civilized order. By the mid-1970s that effort had failed, but that is hardly the point of Scobey's book. It is the ride though the mid-nineteenth century that he wants to take his reader on, and what a ride it is.

New York in this period sought to exploit new capital opportunities to establish its national dominance, or empire as the title suggests, and to a considerable degree it succeeded through the creation of new circuits of communication and monetary exchange. Market forces remained volatile, however, bringing with them stunning contradictions of status and wealth and creating a cauldron that could explode at any time. The goal of fashioning a physical city that could both enhance monetary values and enforce moral ones thus gained particular urgency. Among a number of important figures engaged in this struggle was Frederick Law Olmsted. As he does so often in the book, Scobey deepens the assessment of a landmark in urban design, both by unveiling the uneasy political alliance that made the creation of Olmsted's Central Park possible and the underlying recognition on all sides, as he says, that “its value was simultaneously moral and pecuniary” (240). Though additional visual analysis, he guides the reader through a virtual tour of Olmsted's creation, revealing further in the process how subtle elements of design were intended to convey a moral message.

Throughout this volume, Scobey's lively verbal as well as incisive visual talent animate a story that, much like the modern comic book, threatens to burst its frame for sheer energy. In his hands, statistical tables become a “kind of capitalist erotica,” Brooklyn Bridge, with “its gateways, vistas, and gigantic scale” transforms “an apparatus of urban mobility into an allegory of metropolitan grandeur” (165), and a Harper's Weekly depiction of a crowded streetcar becomes “a Dantesque scene of moral, class, and sexual danger . . . ” (147). Heated language suits Scobey's dynamic subject, and despite the tensions he creates as a writer, he manages always to maintain the frame. Valuable for its deft methodology and its ability to draw conclusions from material and visual as well as written artifacts, Empire City deserves a wide audience of those drawn not just to the subject of city building, but the nation building process to which Scobey links his subject. Most significantly, readers of this book will never look quite the same way at New York in particular, or the process of urbanization more generally.