Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [3]
63. The New Immigrants Jews, Italians, Chinese.
64. That’s Entertainment! The Broadway stage, Pulitzer, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, boxing, baseball, Coney Island. New York generates cultural commodities, hawks them to the nation.
65. Purity Crusade Henry George militancy and burgeoning immigrant quarters rouse middle-class reporters, writers, ministers. Genteel reformer suphold decency, oppose sin—-particularly prostitution and saloons.
66. Social Gospel Salvation Army, Crane, Charity Organization Society, the institutional church, YWCA, ethical culture, settlement houses, Howells and Crane, Jacob Riis.
67. Good Government Collapse of the economy in 1893. Genteel and business reformers capture City Hall in 1894. Eastern sound-money forces, headquartered in NYC, beat back western challenge to corporate order in 1896 presidential campaign.
68. Splendid Little War Teddy Roosevelt, José Marti, William Randolph Hearst, and Empire as Rx for depression.
69. Imperial City Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island consolidate—not without acrimony—-forming Greater New York.
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Indexes
Introduction
The origin of many a great city lies swaddled in myth and legend.
In Nepal, so the story goes, there was once a mountain valley filled with a turquoise lake, in the middle of which floated a thousand-petaled lotus flower. From it emanated a radiant blue light—a manifestation of the primordial Buddha—and the devout came from near and far to meditate upon the flower. At first they had to live in caves along the shore, but then the sage Manjushri flew down from the north and sliced through the southern valley wall with his flaming sword of wisdom, draining the lake and allowing the city of Kathmandu to rise upon the valley floor.
In Meso-America, according to another urban origin myth, the Aztecs departed their ancestral home and wandered south for centuries, searching for the sign priests had prophesied would reveal their new homeland. Finally, guided by Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird God, they reached Lake Texcoco, where, as foretold, an eagle perched on a cactus was devouring a serpent. There the Aztecs built Tenochtitlán, the precursor of Mexico City.
Many European metropoles also traced their beginnings to wandering and divinely guided heroes. Aeneas, Virgil tells us in the Aeneid, led a group of Trojan War survivors to the mouth of the Tiber. There he founded Lavinium, parent town of Alba Longa, from whence Romulus and Remus—offspring of the war god Mars—would later go forth to found the city of Rome. Londoners, too, long believed their metropolis had been established by a group of exiled Trojans and called their ur-London Trinovantum (New Troy). Lisbon, according to Portuguese tradition, was begun by Ulysses himself. The citizens of Athens were thus unusual in believing themselves autochthonous—sprung, as Homer claimed in the Iliad, from the soil itself. “Other cities, founded on the whim of the dice, are imported from other cities,” the playwright Euripides had one of his characters say pridefully, but Athenians “did not immigrate from some other place; we are born of our earth.”
“THE THRICE RENOWNED AND DELECTABLE CITY OF GOTHAM”
These origin stories celebrated the founding of urban civilizations as epic acts. Each narrative provided its city with a symbolic bedrock, conferring upon the citizenry a sense of legitimacy, purpose, identity. The cities Europeans built in the New World, however, were of too recent a vintage to allow for legendary beginnings, a fact Washington Irving bemoaned when he sat down to write A History of New York (1809). Irving regretted that his town was bereft of the imaginative associations “which live like charms and spells about the cities of the old world, binding the heart of the native inhabitant to his home.” Indeed Irving found New Yorkers sadly disconnected from their past; few of his fellow citizens