New York, New York

de Oliver E. Allen

New York City: no one--and that includes its residents--is neutral about this swaggering city, where everyone walks faster, pushes harder, argues louder, and yet where one and all are welcome. This book animates the unique and extraordinary history of New York City, from Verrazano's first glimpse in the sixteenth century of its naturally perfect harbor--which would nurture the most powerful city on the globe--to the election of the city's first black mayor in 1989. In a rare blend of social, architectural, economic, and political history, Oliver E. Allen captures the distinctive character of each period of the city's past. From the beginnings of the city--then New Amsterdam--in the early 1600s, when pigs wandered the main thoroughfare--a lane called Broadway--to the construction, in the 1970s, of the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan, on land that did not exist in Dutch times, Allen brings to life, through a series of gem-like tales, each era of the city's history--the elegance and vulgarity of the Gilded Age, the Vanderbilts and Carnegies; Harlem, the Jazz Age and Prohibition; the influx of immigrants who flooded and enriched the city with their enthusiasm and diversity; the founding of Tammany Hall by Aaron Burr, its stranglehold on the city's politics for over one hundred years and its eventual demise under Little Italy's Carmine DeSapio in the 1960s. This book explores the rich mosaic that is the history of the greatest city in the world.--Adapted from dust jacket.