New York is a city of continual immigration, and its people have been documented by artists and photographers from the earliest settlers to the present. This illustrated history sees the arrival of the first Dutch and English settlers in the 17th century. From there the book progresses through the Irish and German immigrations in the late-19th and early-20th century and the arrival of Italians and Eastern European Jews as well as Greeks, Slavs and African-Americans moving from the southern states after World War I. As the 20th century comes to a close, Caribbeans, Latinos, Africans and Asians have become the dominant New Yorkers. This book brings together images and documentary accounts from diaries, letters, news articles and other sources to explore the texture of the city and its inhabitants.
"Exactly seventy years after Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes completed his retrieval of the visible evidence of the emerging infrastructure of New York City, and forty-five years after John Kouwenhoven gave us the graphic revelation of its developing form and features, Allon Schoener has put before us nothing less than the picture of all New York's people. What a great historical portrait. Schoener, inspired by the design scheme of Massimo Vignelli in
Harlem on My Mind, gives us page after page of new-found images that bubble with informative detail and bolsters them with quotes and observations, illuminating the side-ways of population growth. "
- Joan K. Davidson
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