Gotham unbound : the ecological history of greater New York / Ted Steinberg

Smithsonian Libraries and Archives

Object Details

Author
Steinberg, Theodore 1961-
"June 2014"--Title page verso.
Contents
Part 1. Under water, 1609-1789. Entrepôt ; George Washington stepped here -- Part 2. The great transformation, 1790-1920. The reticulation ; Adventures in drainage ; The revenge of Thomas Dongan ; The open loop ; The exploding metropolis ; Two-dimensional Gotham -- Part 3. Night comes to the marshes, 1900-1980. The road to Hermitville ; The landscapers of Queens ; The wilds of Staten Island ; The massifs of Fresh Kills ; The great Hackensack disappearing act -- Part 4. The green colossus, 1960-2012. The age of limits ; The Big Apple biome ; The future of New York
Summary
From Henry Hudson's discovery of Manhattan to Hurricane Sandy, Steinberg provides a sweeping ecological history of one of the most man-made spots on earth. He recounts the four-century history of how hundreds of square miles of open marshlands became home to six percent of the nation's population. You will see the metropolitan area anew, not just as a dense urban goliath but as an estuary once home to miles of oyster reefs, wolves, whales, and blueberry bog thickets.
"When Henry Hudson dropped anchor in 1609, Mannahatta was a vast forest inhabited by the Lenape Indians...Over the years it gave way to an onslaught managed by thousands, from Governor John Montgomerie, who turned water lots into land, and John Randel, who imposed the grid plan on Manhattan, to Robert Moses, Donald Trump, and Michael Bloomberg...Here, in full, glorious detail is an epic 400 years in the making. It is the story of New York's struggle with the natural world, of the lives and decisions that transformed waterscape and landscape so as to accommodate 6 percent of the nation's entire population. It is the story of Gotham Unbound." -- Book jacket.
2014
Type
Books
Physical description
xxii, 517 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Place
New York (State)
New York
New York Region
New York (N.Y.)
Smithsonian Libraries
Topic
Ecology
Human ecology--History
Natural history
History
Record ID
siris_sil_1023744
Metadata Usage (text)
CC0