To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe.
"Like the city itself,
Gotham is a magnum opus, a multi-layered, wildly divergent, energetic, and rollicking adventure through New York, from its modest beginnings to its grandiose expansion in 1898.
Weighing in at seven-plus pounds, and twenty years in the making, Gotham is New York's definitive history. This first of two volumes skillfully fuses epic and minor themes, the words and deeds of disparate contemporaries, and minor themes, the words and deeds of disparate contemporaries, and the scholarship of myriad urban historians with the authors' own insightful and provocative views into a literate and celebratory tome."
- Barbara Cohen
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