Building Gotham
Subtitle: civic culture and public policy in New York City, 1898-1938
By: Keith D. Revell.
Publisher: John Hopkins University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 327
Subjects: City planning -- New York (State) -- New York; Urban policy -- New York (State) -- New York; City and town life -- New York (State) -- New York; New York (N.Y.) -- History -- 19th century
Description: "In this far-ranging study, Keith D. Revell shows how experts in engineering, law, architecture, public health, public finance, and planning learned to cope with the daunting challenges of collective living on this mammouth scale. Engineers applied new technologies to build railroad tunnels under the Hudson River and construct aqueducts to quench the thirst of a city on the verge of water famine. Sanitarians attempted to clean up a harbor choked by millions of gallons of raw sewage.

Economists experimented with new approaches to financing urban infrastructure. Architects and planners wrestled with the problems of skyscraper regulation and regional growth. These issues of city-building and institutional change involved more than the familiar push and pull of interest groups or battles between bosses, reformers, immigrants, and natives.

Revell explores the ways in which technical values - a distinctive civic culture of expertise - helped to reshape ideas of community, generate new centers of public authority, and change the physical landscape of New York City."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [285]-319) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. Conceiving the new metropolis : expertise, public policy, and the problem of civic culture in New York City; title: Private infrastructure and public policy : "The public be pleased". Railroad planning, engineering culture, and the promise of quasi-scientific voluntarism. Beyond voluntarism : the Interstate Commerce Commission, the railroads, and freight planning for New York harbor; title: Public infrastructure, local autonomy, and private wealth. Buccaneer bureaucrats, physical interdependence, and free riders : building the underground city. Taxing, spending, and borrowing : expanding public claims on private wealth; title: Urban planning, private rights, and public power. City planning versus the law : zoning the metropolis. "They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets' hair" : regional planning and the metropolitan dilemma. Conclusion "An almost mystical unity" : interdependence and the public interest in the modern metropolis.