New York Recentered

Historians of New York City's built environment typically highlight the contributions of a handful of individuals—Frederick Law Olmstead, Egbert Viele, Andrew Haswell Green, and Robert Moses are the usual suspects—and fixate on Manhattan. Kara Murphy Schlichting provides a much-needed corrective to these trends. Although she discusses each of these men, and explores Moses's reshaping of wetlands in Queens for the 1939 New York World's Fair, most of her book focuses on peripheral areas of the city and its suburbs. In a city where four out of five people reside outside of Manhattan, this approach is welcome. Schlichting is an environmental historian, and she views the development of New York City and its environs as a coastal story. Through a series of case studies of Queens, the Bronx, and areas along Long Island Sound, she rewrites the conventional story line in which powerful planners ran roughshod over local people and the environment. Schlichting documents numerous instances of racial discrimination and environmental destruction, but she adds a new dimension to our understanding of the built environment by emphasizing the role played by powerful members of the private sector in planning and building communities

Built environment · Shore · Sociology · Engineering · History · Urbanization and City Planning

• Bibliography of urban history 2020

  Open Access•Andrew McTominey•Urban History•2020

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