Empire City cover art

Empire City

The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape

Preview

Try for $0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Empire City

Written by: David M. Scobey
Narrated by: Jim Feldman
Try for $0.00

$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $33.01

Buy Now for $33.01

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Tax where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

For generations, New Yorkers have joked about “The City's” interminable tearing down and building up. The city that the whole world watches seems to be endlessly remaking itself. When the locals and the rest of the world say “New York”, they mean Manhattan, a crowded island of commercial districts and residential neighborhoods, skyscrapers and tenements, fabulously rich and abjectly poor cheek by jowl. Of course, it was not always so; New York's metamorphosis from compact port to modern metropolis occurred during the mid-19th 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 process careening between obsessive calculation 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 mosaic 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 ideal of landscape design and a politics of planned city building. Perhaps such an ambitious project for guiding growth, overcoming spatial problems, and uplifting the public was bound to fail; still, it grips the imagination.

©2002 Temple University (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks
Politics & Government Sociology United States
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What the critics say

"This is an excellent book: It is meticulously researched, full of insights, and beautifully written." ( Business History Review)
"Scobey has written a brilliant, evocative account of New York on the brink of economic and social chaos." ( Journal of American History)

What listeners say about Empire City

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.