Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape

New York's metamorphosis from compact part to modern metropolis occurred during the mid-nineteenth century. "Empire City tells the story of the dreams that inspired the changes in the landscape and the problems that eluded solution. Author David Scobey paints a remarkable panorama of New York's uneven development, a city-building and speculative excess. Envisioning a new kind of national civilization, "bourgeois urbanists' attempted to make New York the nation's pre-eminent city. Ultimately, they created a masaic of grand improvements, dynamic change, and environmental disorder. "Empire City sets the stories of the city's most celebrated landmarks--Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the downtown commercial center--within the context of this new ideas of landscape design and a politics of planned city building. Perhaps such an ambitious project for guiding growth, overcoming spatial problems, and uplifting public was bound to fail; still, it grips the imagination.

Product details

• Authors: David M. Scobey
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.05.2002
• EAN: 9781566399500
• ISBN: 978-1-56639-950-0
• No. of pages: 352
• Dimensions: 184 mm x 261 mm x 23 mm
• Weight: 839 g
• Series: Critical Perspectives on the P
• Subject: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous