Designing Gotham: West Point Engineers and the Rise of Modern New York, 1817–1898 by Jon Scott Logel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Designing Gotham: West Point Engineers and the Rise of Modern New York, 1817–1898 by Jon Scott Logel Gerard Koeppel (bio) Designing Gotham: West Point Engineers and the Rise of Modern New York, 1817–1898. By Jon Scott Logel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. 280. $45. Occupying a sizeable portion of a wall in my office is a framed original of perhaps the second-most important map—after the 1811 plan for Manhattan's future street grid—in New York City's history: the Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York Prepared for the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens Association under the direction of Egbert L. Viele, Topographical Engineer. It has rightfully been called "a very beautiful full color map occasioned by a not so beautiful subject" (www.davidramsey.com). First published by Viele in 1865, the map shows with remarkable detail and accuracy the island's surface and subterranean watercourses and drainage routes. Viele intended his map to guide healthy urban development by preserving natural waterways and drainage. The map has indeed remained essential to this day, though not as Viele intended: it primarily shows real estate developers where those now entirely buried waters are threats to new building foundations. Though its creator would be little gratified, developers proceed at their peril without consulting the "Viele map." I have written about Viele in several books, not only in his role as a sanitary engineer but also an important figure in the development of Central Park. Though I had noted Viele's West Point training (class of 1847), I had never made much of it. I was intrigued by the possibility that Jon Scott Logel's book might reveal much more than I knew about Viele and his fellow West Point graduates. I wondered if "West Point-trained New York [End Page 796] City engineer" was a group that I, and other New York historians, had somehow missed as essential in the city's history. I take no pleasure in reporting that we haven't. And there are numerous indications that Vogel, an earnest and honest writer, knows it. George B. McClellan, second in his 1846 West Point class but "as inept in [1864] presidential politics as he had been while leading the [Civil War] Army of the Potomac" (p. 139), failed some more as the early 1870s chief engineer of the city's Department of Docks: his "engineering legacy in New York would remain less than memorable" (p. 143). Fitz John Porter, class of 1845 and court-martialed for the Union defeat at the Battle of Second Manassas, was "not … spectacular" as the city's police commissioner (p. 170) and did "as best he could"—that is, without distinction—as the city's commissioner of public works (p. 160). Henry W. Slocum, class of 1852, was "a secondary player" in New York, his conservative military training emblematic of "a general limit to what former West Pointers achieved in Gotham" (p. 137). George S. Greene, class of 1823, was more successful in war and New York but still ranks as a member of the cluster of West Point New Yorkers who "fell short" of expectations (p. 185). "West Pointers," Vogel writes in his conclusion, "were effective at mitigating the obstacles and hindrances to the city's development from 1833 through the 1880s" (p. 190), which is faint praise and three decades short of what his subtitle promised. The stars of Vogel's narrative are mostly a dim bunch, which is not to criticize Vogel's extensive and useful research and eminently readable style. It's just that he's drawn the wrong conclusion. This book ought to have been titled something like, Designs on Gotham: West Point Engineers Try and Fail to Make It in Nineteenth-Century New York. Vogel's excellent bibliography suggests, correctly, that no one has written a proper biography of Egbert Viele. A "sketch of the life" by son Herman Knickerbocker Viele appeared in an issue of the New York Genealogical & Biographical Record in 1903. The New York Times Book Review ran an author's query in 1970 by Chase Viele—relationship...