New York, New York: A History of the World's Most Exhilarating and Challenging City

New York City: no one - and that includes its residents - is neutral about this swaggering city, where everyone walks faster, pushes harder, argues louder, and yet where one and all are welcome. Fear, envy, loathing, or wonder - these are only some of the reactions New York City, with all its paradoxical charms and ills, provokes. New York, New York animates the unique and extraordinary history of New York City from Verrazano's first glimpse in the sixteenth century of its naturally perfect harbor - which would nurture the most powerful city on the globe, an economic colossus - to the election of the city's first black mayor in 1989. In a rare blend of social, architectural, economic, and political history, Oliver E. Allen captures the distinctive character of each period of the city's past. From the beginnings of the city - then New Amsterdam - in the early 1600s, when pigs wandered the main thoroughfare, a lane called Broadway, to the construction, in the 1970s, of the famed World Trade Center at the top of Manhattan, which rises from land that did not exist in Dutch times, Oliver E. Allen brings to life, through a series of gem-like tales, each era of the city's histoiry - the elegance and vulgarity of the Gilded Age, the Vanderbilts and Carnegies; Harlem, the Jazz Age and Prohibition; the influx of immigrants who flooded and enriched the city with their enthusiams and diversity; the founding of Tammany Hall by Aaron Burr, its strangehold on the city's politics for over one hundred years and its eventual demise under Little Italy's Carmine DeSapio in the 1960s. New York, New York explores the rich mosiac that is the history of the greatest city in the world. Amid an abundance of specialized books that deal with only one period or aspect of New York City, Oliver E. Allen's New York, New York stands alone, offering a crisp and fast-paced account of how New York City's exuberant and incomparable character was forged. -- From dust jacket.