Wallace's fabulous new work of encyclopedic nonfiction gives readers delightful glimpses of madness, feigned or otherwise, along with other kaleidoscopic aspects of turn-of-the-last-century New York ... Dip your bucket anywhere and you will find something engaging. Every reader will have their favorite passages. Mine ran the gamut, each one making me want to go find a friend and share ... It is this combination of the scholarly and the pop that makes it such a compelling read. The average reader will find herself eager to pick up the book — and not just for bicep curls.
Early-twentieth-century American society was on the verge of a reshuffling of values and power relations in which the rich would come out just fine. And New York City was where that new synthesis would be worked out, in all its messy and contradictory details. Mike Wallace knows this. In fact he knows nearly everything worth knowing about New York during the years leading up to World War I...Wallace packs these and a multitude of other fascinating details into his enormous book, Greater Gotham, which somehow remains astonishingly readable. But he also gets the big picture right—the balance of cultural tensions, the centrifugal exuberance vs. the new forms of power and control … One could not ask for a more thorough or thoughtful guide to the emergence of New York as the Empire City.
[Wallace] tells the story of those two decades with encyclopedic sweep and granular detail, but with enough verve and wry humor to make this doorstopper immensely readable. Even weathered aficionados of city lore will find moments of revelation. Newcomers will be fascinated by how it all came to be. What makes the book so entertaining is that it is not a conventional chronicle of how government leaders handled that era’s crises. Rather the book is as much a social and cultural history as it is a political narrative ... My one major quibble is TMI: too much information. The book’s volume of detailed material at moments makes it like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick, possibly trying some readers’ patience. Do we need a hundred crowded pages on the stories of a dozen strikes? A little bit of Wallace’s own consolidation would have made for a less draining reading experience ... New York has always been a work in progress. But the particular years recounted in this essential, absorbing and mostly sprightly history went a long way in shaping the pulsating city we know.
In long stretches of evocative prose that serve in part to illustrate the author's own love of the place, Wallace brings this 'magnificent profusion of traffic' to life in all its moving parts, showing readers the chaos of moving up the Narrows into the Upper Bay at the turn of the 20th century ... Thousands of builders and strivers and shirkers and connivers hustle through Wallace's pages, some pausing for only a paragraph, others staying for a few pages. The effect of all this as a reading experience is uncannily akin to living in a big, buzzing city ... Wallace covers everything in this immense and compulsively readable volume: art, architecture, music, politics, finance, theater, civil rights, and, as this part of his story winds down, the odd effects of World War I on the city. The resulting mosaic is as loud and boisterous as the city it describes, a city pushing and lunging and rushing into a new century it fully intended to dominate.
Through the same meticulous research and ability to bring facts to life that he demonstrated in the first book, Wallace has written a glorious and notable sequel. Open randomly to any page, and you will be immediately drawn into the world of the early 20th Century (or the two years before) with all its vigor, optimism, energy, and struggle.
Miraculously, Wallace shapes this sprawl into a coherent, engrossing narrative that’s nicely balanced between historical sweep and colorful detail. The result sets a standard for urban history, capturing both New York’s particularities and its protean dynamism.
...this massive second installment explores themes of business consolidation, construction, and the backlash that would accompany such intensive growth—e.g., labor unrest through World War I. This is a huge undertaking, and Wallace organizes the work tidily ... The author captures the frenetic mood of the time, as many New Yorkers were 'gripped by a Promethean frenzy' ... True to its subject, a monumental work of myriad vantage points.
