NYC BOOK AWARDS 1995
The Encyclopedia of New York City
Kenneth T. Jackson
On Monday, June 3, 1996, at the Library, William J. Dean, chairman of the Library's Board of Trustees, presented the $2500 award to the editor of
The Encyclopedia of New York City, Kenneth T. Jackson. "As New York's oldest library and its first public library, we are proud to honor
The Encyclopedia of New York City
with our New City Book Award." Mr. Dean said. "It is a reference work of range and depth that celebrates the cultural wealth of this great city."
With 680 illustrations and more than 4000 entries by 650 experts, The Encyclopedia is a portable archive and portrait of the City in one 1350-page volume.
Elihu Rose, chairman of
The Encyclopedia's advisory committee, said, "In addition to being a superb work of reference, it has a high degree of browsability, and any encyclopedia that has it in an entry for 'alternate-side-of-the-street parking' promises to be a book of compelling interest."
Open at random and one finds fascinating information: New York's grid plan was approved by the state legislature in 1881 and the one great change was setting aside Central Park in the 1850s; Ice harvesting from rivers and lakes was an important part of the City's economy until the 1920s (in 1882 the City's annual consumption was estimated at 1,885,000 tons sold by 1500 icemen in horse-drawn carts); Lotteries were official in 1721; As much as 300,000 tons of ire ore was mined out of deposits on Staten Island, and granite-like rock, quarried there between 1841 and 1896, paved the streets of Charleston, South Carolina.
The six members of the book award selection committee were: Jacques Barzun, cultural historian, critic, and author of more than 40 books; Joan K. Davidson, civic leader and past commissioner of New York State Parks, Recreation, and Historical Preservation; Christopher Gray, architectural historian and writer for The New York Times; Alfred Kazin, critic, educator, and author; Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, former administrator of Central Park and president of the Central Park Conservancy and, presently, executive director of Cityscape Institute; and the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.
The selection committee stated, "The probability is that we shall never again have the opportunity to signalize to the reading public a work containing so much that is new, varied, often picturesque, and authoritative."
Editor Kenneth T. Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences and chairmen of the history department at Columbia University, devoted much time to the project over the last eight years. Among the problems he ran into along the way was having to leave out whole topics. "We didn't put in novels or TV series or movies that focused on New York -- it would have been a bottomless pit."
Another major issue was deciding who was a New Yorker and who was not. Woody Allen, Arthur Miller, Leontyne Price, and Leona Helmsley are among the 153 entries of living New Yorkers. Then there were experts who couldn't agree, particularly on the water system and Central Park. "And the most difficult problem overall was having to make the articles shorter and cut things we didn't want to cut."
Originally from Memphis, Dr. Jackson has adopted the City, which he calls "a powerful engine of creativity and commerce and human interaction that is essential to America." He is working on a CD-ROM version and a second edition, planned for early in the next century. "Send me your revisions," Dr. Jackson urges.
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