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Gotham Book Club Chat Transcript

Mike Wallace and Edwin Burrows joined Gotham Gazette in an online chat to discuss their Pulitzer-prizewinning book Gotham: A History of New York to 1898 on Wednesday, August 18, 2004. Read a transcript below.


Gotham Gazette: Welcome to Gotham Gazette's online chat with Mike Wallace and Edwin Burrows, the authors of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.

Welcome to our guests.

Edwin Burrows: Hello.

Mike Wallace: Hi.

Gotham Gazette: We're all really proud of ourselves for having read such an enormous book; we didn't realize what reading 1,236 pages really meant when we began. When you started writing Gotham, did you think you would be getting yourselves into such a commitment -- 20 years of your lives, 1200 pages, and still over a hundred years left to write about?

Mike Wallace: I think we had some inkling this was a big wad to chew.

Edwin Burrows: Nope. We originally envisioned a much shorter book, covering the whole story.

Mike Wallace: If we had grasped full dimension of the lunacy involved, we might never have proceeded.

Edwin Burrows: Amen to that.

Gotham Gazette: Why did you think the time was right for a sweeping history of New York?

Edwin Burrows: Among other things, a proper history of the city hadn't been written in 100 years; the time was ripe.

Gotham Gazette: What do you mean by proper?

Edwin Burrows: Comprehensive in scope, up-to-date, well-written.

Mike Wallace: It seemed obvious to us that our generation of historians had collectively written a new history of the city, and beyond that of the US. The problem was so much of it had been written piecemeal - necessarily so. That is, much had been done on immigration, banking, sexuality, communication, etc. etc. etc., but nothing had pulled all that together, and made it accessible to a general audience. We set out to weave together the various scholarly strands into a popularly accessible tapestry.

Edwin Burrows: That's partly why it took so long to do -- we had so much to read first.

Gotham Gazette: You mention this in the book's afterward, but can you describe how you split up the responsibility?

Mike Wallace: As we said in the book, we passed stuff back and forth endlessly, so that every page bears the mark of mutual collaboration.

Edwin Burrows: Basically, we each took responsibility for first-drafting chapters in the areas we felt strongest, then passed them back for rewriting. Lots and lots of rewriting.

NYC: EXCEPTION

Gotham Gazette: A lot of Gotham is devoted to showing how New York was always a trendsetter among American cities. The city invented Christmas, was home to the first steamboat and the first comprehensive building zoning code, and can take credit for the sport of baseball and the word "hooker". Is New York really such an exception, or would a Bostonian historian find just as much material if he or she were to write a similar book about that town?

Mike Wallace: With due respect to Boston, I doubt it.

Edwin Burrows: Sure, Boston invented baked beans, Philadelphia invented the cheese steak.

Mike Wallace: But NYC, of course, has been constituted by out-of-towners. So many Bostonians and New Englanders came south to launch both our commercial and cultural revolutions. And this place, more than Boston, remained open to such newcomers, which in turn reinforced our reputation and drew subsequent generations.

Edwin Burrows: And given the city's primacy in the production and distribution of information since the early 1800s, it doesn't really have any rivals.

Mike Wallace: Also because it has been composed of such a variegated group of people, its been a cultural crucible, producing new inventions, cultural products, etc. etc., out of the clash and interactions of innumerable former strangers.

FROM EDGE TO CENTER: NEW YORK AND THE WORLD

Gotham Gazette: There are several major themes of New York being an exception that carry through your book. One is the way that New York's close relationship to the global economy has affected the city, both economically and culturally. How did New York become so plugged into the world economy?

Mike Wallace: One of the great constants for most of our history is that we have been a critical link between the North American continent and Europe/Africa/Latin America.

Edwin Burrows: One answer to that question is that New York has always been plugged into the world economy, ever since the Dutch arrived in the early 17th century. What's changed is its role in that global economy.

Gotham Gazette: How has that role changed?

Edwin Burrows: As we say in the introduction, it has gone from the remote fringes to the very center.

Mike Wallace: We have been the place through which great currents of capital, labor, culture, commodities have flowed. The direction of flows has also altered over time. So that for much of the early periods, we were the port through which entered European, chiefly English, capital, to underwrite first canals and banks, then the rails, mines, factories of an industrializing continent.

Later, especially during and after WWI, the flow shifted; we became a creditor capital exporting nation.

CITY AND COUNTRY

Gotham Gazette: You are talking about NYC's economic relationship to the rest of the world. What about its political relationship to the nation?

Edwin Burrows: That's a crucial component of the story, of course. For a year or two we were the national capital. Then, thanks to Alexander Hamilton, the government moved to Philadelphia, on its way to DC. After that, the country has really had two capitals -- one for political power, the other for everything else.

Mike Wallace: If the trend globally was from edge to center of world, our relation to nation was more parabolic. In beginning, we were largely irrelevant, an protourban bump on edge of a rural continent. That swung upward over time to the point where New York was the de facto capital of the US. It was the premiere financial, cultural, media, and in large measure political center as well, given weight of New York State in electoral college, an amazing number of presidential candidates came from Gotham. As late as WWII we had two subway series campaigns.

Then, during the New Deal and the war years NYC had gone down to Washington and enormously expanded its power. But this in effect undercut its own position. We helped build up the sunbelt/gunbelt, and suburban world, which had the tax resources that we, as a mere city, eventually couldn't compete with.

The downward slide in national esteem -- though we had always been envied and hated even as emulated and loved -- of the 1924 Democratic Convention and 1928 election culminated in 70s crisis: "Ford to City: 'Drop Dead.'"

BOOMS AND BUSTS

Gotham Gazette: Another trend you write about extensively is the boom-bust cycle. New York, it seems, is always soaring, then crashing. There's the 1820s boom, then the Panic of 1837; the great booms of the 1840s and 1850s, and then the Panic of 1857. The list goes on. Why is New York's economy so prone to extremes?

Mike Wallace: Its not NYC's economy, its the nature of capitalism.

Edwin Burrows: That's a feature of capitalist economies, of course, and given the city's central role in the national economy, we experience those ups and downs first and often more severely.

Mike Wallace: For a long time however we were less vulnerable to such ups and downs as we had a more broad based economy. Now, we've become so reliant on finance, that those crises have an inordinate impact here; we're hit harder and recessions last longer.

Edwin Burrows: Mike has a good point: our vulnerability to the ups and downs on Wall Street is arguably greater than it has ever been.

Gotham Gazette: Mr. Wallace, when you say we had a more broad-based economy, what period of time are you speaking of?

Mike Wallace: As late as the 1950s we were the biggest industrial city in the US, and had the premier port. Both are history.

Gotham Gazette: But it was in the 1800s that we had depression after boom after depression. If we were more diversified then, why did that happen?

Edwin Burrows: Diversification doesn't innoculate you against the business cycle, it helps cushion the effects.

Mike Wallace: A) diversification isn't proof against depressions happening, just can make them easier to bear. B) Check out the 1900s story on the boom-bust front: 1907, 1929, 1974, 1987, to mention only the bigger numbers.

Lauren Kunis: Speaking of the boom-bust cycle, what do you think city officials involved in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan could learn from a study of New York's historically volatile economy?

Mike Wallace: I've tried to argue in my little book A New Deal for New York that we should not be trying to revive a 'financial center' that in large measure hasn't existed since its heyday in the 1910s.

With the emergence of midtown, lower Manhattan had an unbeatable rival, despite bursts of construction of skyscrapers in the 20s, 60s, and 80s. Since then, it's stopped dead -- even during dot.com boom, nothing got built.

And since the downturn starting before WTC attacks there has been a huge oversupply of commercial office space. Bloomberg and Co. have to some extent realized this in their master plan calling for a diversification of Lower Manhattan's economy. This is especially important given outsourcing and decentralization, which will continue to undermine the financial sector not only downtown but throughout Manhattan.

Edwin Burrows: Maybe what city officials thinking about Lower Manhattan could learn is not to put all their eggs in one basket (Wall Street)?

NEW YORK'S MOST IMPORTANT MOMENTS

Gotham Gazette: Okay, moving away from the present day for a moment: Mr. Burrows, what are the half-dozen or so events during the time of this book that someone has to understand to be literate in the history of the city?

Edwin Burrows: I'd prefer "questions" to "events." For example, why is New York on Manhattan? Or why did New York become a magnet for immigration in the 19th century? Those are Big Questions, and you can't answer with a fact or two. I like questions that open up things we take for granted: why does New York incorporate part of Long Island but not New Jersey?

Gotham Gazette: Mr. Wallace, could you give us a list of what you think are the most important events in the city's history?

Mike Wallace: "Events" are important only if somehow emblematic of long and deep running trends, illuminating deeper structural forces at work that are in some degree constitutive of city at particular historical conjunctures.

Thus the 1741 slave conspiracy is important to know about, not so much in itself, but because it reminds us that NYC was a slave city, its fate closely tied up for much of its history in nexus between Southern slavery and European/Northern industrialization.

The 1825 the opening of the Erie Canal is a nifty moment, but also points to larger issue of city's developing crucial post-colonial base for itself by inserting itself between three most dynamic areas of 19th century global economy - the slave South, the small farmer Midwest, and the industrial British Midlands.

The 1863 Draft Riots and larger Civil War mark a crucial turning point; the link with slavery is broken, and the focus on industrialization and finance and western expansion are strengthened.

Then, there's the 1911 Triangle fire, a moment when the balance of political forces shifts. New York becomes a more "liberal" city as the Democratic Party moves left to ward off challenges from more radical groups.

The 1924 Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden -- with a tip of the hat to current events -- was an important moment in remaking of relations between country and its premiere city, virtually de facto capital. We were envied but also widely hated, and in 1924, and again in th 1928 campaign, NYC was itself virtually the leading campaign issue.

The 1932/3 LaGuardia elections were two key events pointing to the larger issue of NYC's centrality in creation and overseeing of the New Deal, which had profound impact on nation and city alike.

1946 is when the deal was done that brought the UN to NYC, but that in turn was simply ratifying the city's arrival at the center of the world, due in considerable part to centrality of city in the running of the war, particularly its nexus of Wall Street bankers, corporate lawyers, and media elite; the same crowd who envisioned a new postwar global order, a new kind of free trade empire, of which NYC, in tandem with Washington, would be the headquarters.

The 1975 Fiscal Crisis was a moment when the city's efforts to sustain the New Deal tradition in one city come a cropper [resulted in catastrophe]. Itself result of larger developments at global and national level: recession, oil shock, government underwritten suburbanization, net transfer of tax dollars to sunbelt, military strongholds move south and west, etc. etc.

EXTRA READING

Gotham Gazette: Mr. Wallace, you mention in the book that you will be writing the sequel alone. It seems like you've started some 20th century research. What year are you on?

Mike Wallace: Well I have to run up and down the keyboard -- I can't know what to say about the 1930s without knowing what's to say about the 1960s -- but at the moment I'm concentrated on the Second World War in Gotham.

Gotham Gazette: Is there a tentative date of publication?

Mike Wallace: "In due course" is the safest answer.

Gotham Gazette: Do you anticipate that this one will take less time than the first volume?

Mike Wallace: I sure as hell hope so.

Gotham Gazette: Well, this is the last question, and we'd like to pose it to both of you. While we are waiting for Gotham II, or whatever it will be called, what books would you recommend to readers who are interested in learning about New York City's history?

Edwin Burrows: A few that come to mind are: Russell Shorto's Island at the Center of the World -- a great up to date account of New Amsterdam; Tyler Anbinder's Five Points -- an excellent study of our first immigrant neighborhood; Jackson and Dunbar's, Gotham, a fine collection of stuff about the city; Craig Wilder's, A Covenant With Color -- race and race relations in Brooklyn. Really good.

It's a long list!

Mike Wallace: My best answer is to have a look at the Gotham Center's web site, www. gothamcenter.org. We've started a new feature of recently published books to read on NYC's history. There's only a token small selection up there now, but we'll be posting a very substantial bibliography, basically the one I compile as i go along. That should provide something on almost any subject for almost any interest. It will also include lists of recent articles and doctoral dissertations.

Gotham Gazette: Well, it looks like we have our work cut out for us. Thank you to both of our guests for joining us.

Edwin Burrows: A pleasure.

Mike Wallace: My pleasure.

Gotham Gazette: Come back to Gotham Gazette's NYC Books page for a transcript of this chat soon. And, join us in person to discuss Working Class New York by Joshua Freeman on September 29.

Mr. Freeman will be joining us at Borders bookstore from 6 PM to 7 PM to discuss his work.