Reviewed by: New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore by Kara Murphy Schlichting Robert Chiles (bio) New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore By Kara Murphy Schlichting . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 319 pages, 6″ x 9″. $40.00 cloth, $10.00 e-book. "If the skyscraper symbolizes Manhattan, the greater metropolis is captured by a more subtle yet nevertheless equally salient feature—its coast" (1). In this compelling new study of the growth of New York, Kara Murphy Schlichting offers a critical reorientation of scholarly focus, eschewing linear notions of city expansion in favor of a nuanced consideration of "the regional city as an evolving series of temporary environments with different users who had their own visions and practices" (6). Schlichting makes the case by engaging in environmental history at its most comprehensive—revealing "New York City's waterways and tides, islands, and estuary system" as "the parameters that shaped the form and function of the regional city" (12); and by presenting political history at its most dynamic—narrating "interaction between citizens, governments, and professional planners," that often proved most potent at the local level (7). This empowers the author to reframe "growth as a complex political process in part shaped by the litany of modest choices by local actors and filled with compromises, incremental accomplishments, and unanticipated consequences," and flowing from "the complexity of human interactions" with the natural world (8, 12). Schlichting deftly navigates those wonderful complexities, elegantly synthesizing the environmental with the [End Page 394] economic, the political with the social. The result is a masterfully crafted revisionist exploration of the making of modern New York. Schlichting challenges the traditional notion that "professional planners and the powerful administrative center that Manhattan represented" masterminded a "unidirectional" growth "radiating outwards from an urban core" to "transform" formerly "undifferentiated and unimportant" peripheral regions (2). Instead, the author reveals "the unpredictable dynamism of localism" that made "the periphery into a richly populated and politically contested territory rather than a space defined solely by official plans" (9). Modern New York was therefore "the civic heart of a great system of industrial and commercial centers and suburbs" representing "the culmination of a century's worth of regional projects" and unified by a shared environment into "a discernible geographic region best identified as the coastal metropolitan corridor" (1, 14). While New York Recentered is a multifaceted revisionist work, the book never loses focus and does not get bogged down in arcane jargon. This is a credit to the author's skills as a writer and instincts as a historian. Theoretical terms are defined clearly and deployed seamlessly, and the writing is graceful and lively. Notwithstanding the analytical profundity of her work, Schlichting always elevates the human element—systematically demonstrating that generations of diverse local interests exacted a "cumulative influence" (9) that "made possible the realization of a modern regional city by the mid-twentieth century" (14). In telling those stories, as much as in her critical interventions, Schlichting makes significant contributions to New York history. Indeed, like the author's conceptualization of the regional metropolis itself, her monograph's powerful totality is the worthy sum of its fascinating parts. The book presents a chronological series of case studies, interconnected through their protagonists' evolving economic aspirations for connection with Manhattan and their localities' dynamic ties to the unique coastal geography north and east of the city. The first is an absorbing consideration of nineteenth-century "benefactor planning" by P. T. Barnum in Bridgeport and William Steinway in Long Island City. Schlichting evokes the often ad hoc nature of Gilded Age growth: both Barnum and Steinway foresaw that their cities' advantageous position along New York's water and rail corridors could allow them to benefit from Gotham's growth (20), but they also recognized the dysfunction of inept local government and took matters into their own hands—turning "themselves into city builders by privately initiating public works" (19, 26, 33, 38). These entrepreneurial builders discerned that "the periphery was a unique place to experiment in urban form because it could be at once accessible to regional patterns of urbanization yet distinctive" (17). The author furnishes an important addendum to conceptions...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Apr 22, 2021
+ 2
