Overview

The history of New York City’s urban development often centers on titanic municipal figures like Robert Moses and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered boldly shifts the focus to the city’s geographic edges—the coastlines and waterways—and to the small-time unelected locals who quietly shaped the modern city. Kara Murphy Schlichting details how the vernacular planning done by small businessmen and real estate operators, performed independently of large scale governmental efforts, refigured marginal locales like Flushing Meadows and the shores of Long Island Sound and the East River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a synthesis of planning history, environmental history, and urban history that recasts the story of New York as we know it.

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9780226613024

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Reviews

This volume is detailed and well researched, with extensive coverage of individual players, groups, economic and social forces for land-use change, and the explosive outward movements of urbanization away from the initial core of the city. It is well supported by many maps, diagrams, and panoramas of the areas being discussed, and it has an extensive and complex bibliography of primary and secondary resources. It is also clearly written and without writing and printing mistakes. It should be on the bookshelves of those interested in New York City, urban growth and development studies on the United States, and those who just want to read an interesting account of an important episode of America's past. --Thomas A. Rumney, Plattsburgh State University Historical Geography In this perceptive addition to literature on the history of urban planning and development, Schlichting shifts attention from the downtown core of New York City to show that the urban periphery was not so peripheral after all. . . . Highly recommended. -- Choice New York Recentered takes into account the twin dynamic of New York as an island city and as a regional entity. This is a welcomed change in perspective that allows the author to examine metropolitan growth and development from the relatively unstudied, but important, vantage point of the periphery. Goodbye to center city-heavy perspectives on Gotham! --Martin V. Melosi author of The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present New York Recentered is an important work in urban history because it will force us all to look beyond Manhattan and take in New York as a regional city united by water. I don't know of another book that attempts to look at the regional city in this way, and I commend Schlichting for the originality of her approach, the thoroughness of her argument, and the success she has achieved. --David Schuyler author of Embattled River: The Hudson and Modern American Environmentalism 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. -- New York History

In this perceptive addition to literature on the history of urban planning and development, Schlichting shifts attention from the downtown core of New York City to show that the urban periphery was not so peripheral after all. . . . Highly recommended. --Choice New York Recentered is an important work in urban history because it will force us all to look beyond Manhattan and take in New York as a regional city united by water. I don't know of another book that attempts to look at the regional city in this way, and I commend Schlichting for the originality of her approach, the thoroughness of her argument, and the success she has achieved. --David Schuyler author of Embattled River: The Hudson and Modern American Environmentalism New York Recentered takes into account the twin dynamic of New York as an island city and as a regional entity. This is a welcomed change in perspective that allows the author to examine metropolitan growth and development from the relatively unstudied, but important, vantage point of the periphery. Goodbye to center city-heavy perspectives on Gotham! --Martin V. Melosi author of The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present

New York Recentered is an important work in urban history because it will force us all to look beyond Manhattan and take in New York as a regional city united by water. I don't know of another book that attempts to look at the regional city in this way, and I commend Schlichting for the originality of her approach, the thoroughness of her argument, and the success she has achieved. --David Schuyler, author of Embattled River: The Hudson and Modern American Environmentalism New York Recentered takes into account the twin dynamic of New York as an island city and as a regional entity. This is a welcomed change in perspective that allows the author to examine metropolitan growth and development from the relatively unstudied, but important, vantage point of the periphery. Goodbye to center city-heavy perspectives on Gotham! --Martin V. Melosi, author of The Sanitary City

Author Information

Kara Murphy Schlichting is assistant professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York.

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