Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [1085]
We have been jointly and severally fortunate in receiving financial assistance, which afforded us that most precious of resources, time. In this project’s long foreground, MW was assisted by a 1976 Victor Rabinowitz Foundation grant, and in 1980 the authors together received a Research Fellowship from the National Institute for Humanities— another beleaguered and worthy public institution. In Gotham’s latter days, the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College gave EGB a year off in 1992–93; the N.E.H. gave MW a College Teaching Fellowship in 1993, and the American Council of Learned Societies awarded him a fellowship in 1994. The authors and Oxford University Press would like to thank Furthermore . . ., the publication program of The J.M. Kaplan Fund, which helped leaven our texty loaf with a grant to enhance its graphics component. A special thank-you to Joan Davidson of Furthermore. . . .
Libraries! Treasuries of source material and constellations of knowledgeable and helpful souls. Wayne Furman, who runs the Allen Room—the New York Public Library and Frederick Lewis Allen’s superlative gift to authors—provided us with our indispensable home away from homes and a direct pipeline into the NYPL’s magnificent collections. Mark Piel, spirited director of an even more venerable local institution, the New York Society Library (1754), repeatedly extended himself, and his material, on our behalf. The New-York Historical Society—yet another threatened scholarly institution and indeed one that nearly foundered during the course of this project—offered invaluable resources. So did the Brooklyn Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York. EGB is grateful to the staff of the Brooklyn College Library, past and present, who have so often extended themselves to retrieve obscure materials. MW offers special thanks to the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College, whose superb staff over the years—including Marilyn Lutzker, Eileen Rowland, Bob Grappone, Tony Simpson, Bonnie Nelson, Kathy Halloran, Janice Dunham, Marvie Brooks—assembled a deep and rich collection of metropolitania.
The authors have also drawn upon scores of specialized libraries and of history museums as well. Among them are the Abigail Adams Smith Museum, Bronx County Historical Society, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Engineering Societies Library, Fort Wadsworth, General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Library, Harbor Defense Museum, Historic Richmond Town, Jewish Museum, King Manor Museum, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Masonic Hall Library and Museum, Merchants’ House Museum, Morris-Jumel Mansion, Museum of Chinese in America, New York Transit Museum, New York City Fire Museum, Police Academy Museum, Queens Historical Society, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Skyscraper Museum, South Street Seaport, Valentine-Varian House, and the Weeksville Society.
We have been helped in accumulating primary and secondary source materials by David Paskin, Kesang Namgyal, Marcia Caro, Jacqueline Talamas, and Nuria Agullo. Thanks also to Marilyn Atkins-Nelson and Ana Argueta.
Our greatest debt—apart from that we owe the legions of scholars upon whose work we have drawn—is to those friends, colleagues, and family members who took out often inordinate amounts of time to read portions of this opus as it issued from our computers. In the beginning there was Roy Rosenzweig, himself a scholar of the city and a preeminent practitioner of public history. Roy read reams of our earliest prose, offered first-rate criticism, and gave