is [inaudible conversations] good evening. welcome. i'm the vice president of the public programs here at the library. it is a privilege to host tonight's program celebrating the new book. they pick up the story at the turn of the last century, the period when the experience of unparalleled growth expansion and consolidation is a special

us to host this program not only because of the importance of the book and the subject matter but also because the fellow in the library for scholars in residence at the allen room research a good deal of the book right here in the library archives, the archival holdings on the new york city history are of course that can't include such collections as the record of the history and the collection called new york city miscellaneous 1614 to 1975. [laughter] that is the painstaking work of historians and scholars that bringsch the content of those

collections to light and into public discourse through meticulously researched books like greater gotham and so we are thrilled to welcome you back to the library to share your research with us and to moderate the conversation, we are honored to have another distinguished historian writer and scholar with the pieces of the new yorker where he's a staff writer he provides a steady stream of intellectual and emotional nourishment to many of us seeking to understand today's political climate putting the historian's perspective to help place current events in the context and i just have to say that h the piece you wrote yesterday on what happened in las vegas was my morning nourishment today, so i have to thank you for that. that. he's also graced the library stage on many occasions interviewing people. last spring he gave an outstanding pair l of lectures.

for us at the new york public library, programs but this one are an extension of the mission to provide the people of the city of new york speeten we are here to help you learn

more and gain a deeper insight into the issues that matter to you. download the afghan people find hundreds of thousands of books available to download for free or simply channel and make use of the research collection here or online or an for any of the research libraries. there is a list of upcoming ones in and out. after the event we will be signing copies of the boo book o the library shelf is offering a 25% discount so i encourage you all to pick up a copy. all book purchases benefit the new york public library. i want to end with a special thank you to the library managers of public programs with many others he offered to the public and now please join me in welcoming mike wallace and

[applause] i want to start i guess on a slightly somber note. to enjoy something that has been taken away from the large number of people in las vegas.

thehe. there is an equally interesting story of how you came to be involved in writing a.

of the 60s was a moment of. i don't want to malign the decade, but the 50s take on the narrative of a american history was unrecognizable now and.

there was no significant violence because there were no significant tensions across the ethnic lines. the view about the u.s. position and world affairs was totally benign and then came the civil rights movement is.

it limited its definition of membership is. social history. it's here and there and everywhere they were protesting their absence is a. it began to insert. it is now racism as a major

force in american life, the contradiction between the declaration of independence and all men created equal. so just about going on the massive transformation at work there had been this before, but the gdp tthe geb dupuis talked e construction in 1935. they forgot half the population from the historical narrative. let's start filling in the blanks. you have to have the possibility of thinking about the domestic life and a whole range of thin things. stonewall, this hadn't even been an issue before and now he is

putting on the table agai againe particularly large-scale dynamic forces and this was in the middle of the resistance of the vietnamn war that seemed not as clean as they would profess. i was a child of the 50s and very nervous. my mother convinced me j. edgar hoover was watching my every move. [laughter] i was very shy about getting involved in student movement. there wasn't much in 1960 but i was cautious beyond belief and on the periphery i did go down after selma to partake possibly

in the students wer that were gg to mississippi and replaying and 65 the freedom summer of 64 bit.

the political parties from the now different perspective and a that became a collective phenomena. there was a group of students at columbia in the history department and graduate department of her colleagues in harvard and and we call last and signed onto a project of redoing american history.

everything was up for grabs and we did a lot of organizing around this i had a sense of that we had rewritten the narrative but nobody knew it was a plus accessible in plain language for ordinary folks to

the. i had done a long essay on the american revolution and we set out to do this in a narrative style on the footnotes are giving and explaining the debate into the discussions that. it looks like we hadn't go hadnn of the 17th century. it was the framework that you have to understand happened in

the u.s. and this would take about 11 lifetimes but we only had to despair. i thought let's decant all this stuff into something more manageable, new york, an important city in the context. so we did and it took a while to change course and a lot of the work we have done was available to what a lot of new work to be done and now we have an affect gotham two and the question immediately arises where is volume three going to be and

somebody said it would be 2042 before you get around to it and mildly reassuring to say that in fact it we had or i have now because it was a civil operation, i had thought that the second would go to the second world war in 1945 and it became clear. there is an avalanche of work that has been done but i've tried to keep up.

there is an appropriate way to say i spent decades. it was the pipeline into the great material that's here. the thing is i tried to avoid doing primary research as much as possible because the idea was if you got stuck on research with anything as opposed to waiting for other people or at least integrating it with grand larceny, so then came google which swept through and digitized everything.

in the old days i would not have gone to read the biography on one of the revolutions of this period's temptatioperiod said to primary research was overwhelming and at any rate, it was clear the second world war was done before the firstod pary because nobody had any grasp of the experience during the second world war and i was board with the 30s so i jumped and there's been a great deal of material written down so while i won't go on record predicting when volume three m-mik by goino

play, it will take 20 years because a lot of it is done alreadyte. >> this book in 1898 which is a pivotal year for the consolidation and the tremendous change and implication of that and i wonder if you can talk about the dynamic of how this incorporation happened and who were the primary movers dedicated to making this happen? >> you would have thought with this being a political merger,

plus many communities there were an essence not at new jersey so it, that was a screwup by king james somebody that still hasn't recovered. [laughter] it was a political consolidation sought out through the process but it wasn't initiated by the political elite, it was a phenomenon that corresponded with the economic decision to reconstruct american capitalism un this, you havecan capitalism to understand that this is an area ofoc jpmorgan etc.. these two really didn't like each other at all, but they were as one of being convinced that the capitalism was the pits.

you had competition between firms and if you have competition between firms and cutthroat price wars, the profits would go down and to build them up again he would get the labor wages into unions and irise up to defend this which leads to the socialist movements as far as the corporate elite was concerned, this was madness. but in this short space and time, thousands of competing firms emerged into the corporations of which united states steel is the preeminent example. this philosophy that -

consolidation was a progressive move, you've got to understand this, the morgans and the rockefellers were convinced without reason that this would allow a more rational economy and it would get above the small stuff and allow for long-term planning and not making an awful lot of money for the people that oversaw this corporate movement that it was almost an ideology culture that emerged in argued that this would be in a variety of arenas and one of them was the lunatic competition in new york and other towns around the harbor when they should be concentrating on combining to deal with problems and to deal with the challenge of chicago

that might become the new economic capital and that they would bypass new york and go downhill so they oversaw the consolidation of the political units into greater new york. that's why the volume is called greater new york. the cultural correlate of that is to do many consolidations again, using as an example one xasked and told a in libraries r the new york public library and

can houslibrary andhouse themsee splendor, but there was a movement to turn the consolidation on paper intond a reality and it was an explosion of energy and creativity that has been rarely matched in our history. >> talk about that a little bit because there are two different things with a kind of political act of consolidating brooklyn and manhattan and then the other actual physical structure that has to go into this actual city. >> there are several things that happened. one better connects new york to the global arena so the tunnelss were built under the hudson and

allowing penn station with a link to the mainland that is strengthened and the docs are built which are now for the titanic sized shipping operations to complete the circuit on the other side and then there's's internal ligamens that our construc construct andn across the rivers and the subways and throughout the entire arena. populations are free now to move about without boundaries of any sort,ou so the subway system miraculous with the remnants of the old colonial gentry and they are rapidly replaced and soars up all along the subway lines

and by the end of this period it's considered as an independent sixth largest city in the united states in brooklyn the process as it is forgotten now but it was a huge breadbasket and national basket the city and now they have these elevated lines and housing subdivision is. there is this sense that you can bind this on paper entity into a reality if you build in a hand developed the system and

electrical grid. thisru is an enormous infrastructure operation that makes this possible and it is near bird in the private sector by the explosion of skyscrapers. these are in fact that the corporate organization. they ran represent themselves and so hairy black and get together and create an institution in which collects and pulls the capital and puts them into the bursts of the .hem into the bursts of the >> one of i the things that is notable to me about s the book like you're telling this story of the physical geography of new york i thought of a it as kind f

an adolescent or you can begin to see what the adult version of the entity will look like and at the same time that is one of the political defeat and physical landscape and social and cultural landscape in the populations and their experience of this gigantic metropolis is and i wondered if we might talk a little about that. you say very well that new york looks to the plan to create better new york looks one way to the architects and another way to the people that are living in the midst of all these changes. >> i've tried tous break it out

into sections focusing on aspects of the struggle in the provision of social justice, public goods, housing, healthcare etc., and it appears to me that there are these big dog classification schemes you can look at. one of them is race, gender and class. this is a period of staggering integration flow and it is not entertaining to country in the city dropped [inaudible] but the newcomers, particularly jews, african-americans from the south and caribbean are flowing

into existence like enclaves and other places [inaudible] what is new in that spirit is that there is a new appreciation for this which used to say don't go to the five points that's worth youbut forpure light for g to town and we would've a police

escort now thi but now this ands part of town and understand that the multinational character of new york city is one of itss greatest strengths and even more than that, others argue that although this is unplanned into the great contribution to society to the possibility for the first time in i human histoy living next door to each other in a relatively peaceful of clashes at the border that extend through the marketplace for violence so it's not lovey-dovey. but anybody that tries to

reverse this multi-nationality is doing this at the end of the cloture in the country and injustice in the there are people that were doing this particularly the anglo protestant community who felt data privacy and place o in plae city'sty social order. one of the tensions that happened in this period is the ethnicity and the desirability there is an extreme dimension that emerges out of the

community largely and that is the eugenics movement that argues not just some immigrants are less than others by virtue of those which can be transformed if you pressure than enough, but rather they are biological these people are inherently inferior with a capability of dragging down to contaminating the gene pool of people like us and this tension is extremely visible and growing more so towards the first world war.

there is applications of violence deemed necessary to. there's ththere isthere's the ce best west side competing for spatial territorial control and

they dragged off streetcars etc. and then the police show up and drag them back to the police station and make them run a gauntlet. the community has an investigation into the grand jury finds nothing happened at the police department and they have an internal d investigation which not surprisingly so this is the norm in its heightened by the debate about the post-confederate p statutes from this period as is mentioned, so

new york is nestled into this larger racial repression moment intogu the worst period arguably in american history for race relations. there are, however, two things that emerge and one of them is in fact collective movements by african-americans in the city, to kick off the names, w. e. b. du boise is writing ferocious editorials at the crisis magazine, the black socrates over the city including wall street, marcus garvey is just getting off to start and thinking in terms of the africanism m. you make mention of one of my personal favorites a. philip

randolph. we associate them with different periods of the story but he's still on the board in this point of the game. the things that have the greatest impact in this situation is viewed by the looked like harlem. harlem is white, middle-class, depends on exactly where you were. it's the reproduction of a lot of lower manhattan and all of its authenticity. but then in the aftermath and the arrival of the subway that comes right up the west side in san juan hill where the struggles werego taking place ad then goes up the next avenue and there's a mass migration. blacks have never had a locale that they could call their own.

there were a few streets, there was a small area, but they were vulnerable to the south side -- this outside area dot to the village and now to harlem, but now the numbers are phenomenal into some of this is accelerated by depending story. once in a relatively small space ibut 70,000 african-americans, o white crowd in its right mind were even in its wrong mind is going to think about invading particularly after the first world war when they've come back from having killed large numbers of germans are.

the clerks used to be all male and are now turned female department stores expanded export especially as they move up from sixth avenue to the luxurious fifth avenue. they need sales girls, restaurants need waitresses, the fashion industry as creative

possibilities, journalism in fact is open to female employment and in addition to this general state of affairs there are collective movements most famously the suffrage movement and the degree of organization that marks the ten-year struggle for the suffrage which means getting an old mail electorate to approve granting the rights to their sisters, children etc.. and there is an enormous push in 1950 and they lose big-time and they come back again in 1917. again, it's a complicated story. i'm trying to map it out but in

fact, they win on election day november 6 or whatever it is and it will be 100 years since the referendum passed giving women the right to vote in new york state which by all accounts was the critical factor in the passage of the amendment but this is also the beginnings of a movement to have women allowed to control their own bodies and this is the rival on the stage together with emma goldman who combats the comstock law that's not only made birth control a crime, but even talking about birth controlth was criminal and the struggle over the issue in

the entity a little later down the road. the last item is class conflict. some of this is relatively familiar. the organized labor movement and people that are german, irish, skilled workers whose withholdings give them some muscle as the organizer of the enterprise but it's a tiny handful of the population, the great majority of it is unorganized and then comes the arrival of the italians and the jews and industrial unions in the district in particular and in addition the industrial unions are the backbone of the

socialist party that is a force in this period, and it calls for the public profession of healthcare and housing and specifically it is clear that it's divided into three sections and overall macroeconomic terms there is the boom years are gone to the formation of the corporations 18981907, then there is the panic being called market correction in those days which leads to the period in the seven years recession, homelessness, unemployment which is ended by the arrival of the cascade of the buy order ordersf weaponry coming from a combat

since company, so with the recession requires some response given unemployment and you get varying perspectives on this. socialists argue that programs of public works, highways, bridges should be built at the publicin financing. middle-class progressives it's a very complicated and there are economic forces in this area but the progressive movement argues as they have in a variety of reforms at the new york state in particular shoulstage inparticue european movement for social

insurance and in the case of the recession there should be unemploymentmp insurance is a. of this seems to the powers that be the most outrageous thing they've ever heard of, let the market work its way, then there is the anarchists and industrial workers of the world and they believe in direct action. frank tenenbaum at that point is working in the hotel and mobilizes the arm army of the unemployed to march 100 strong from one church to another asking, sort of demanding shelter for the night and food for the hungry.

so it is a vast canvas if you shift from the elite and the skyscrapers and board rooms it is a fascinating story and it isn't simpleminded, to the immigrant working class which is exploding out into the subway lines and you try to access the tensions between them, it's not easy. >> i think you do that amazingly well. you used the word epic excessively now in call-in place but it is an epic story thinking about the cast that's involved in this and the socialist

suffrage architects, immigrants, philanthropists, politicians, police, crime bosses, reform politicians, business elite, laborers, university presidents, anthropologists, so i'm going to go through. before the indexing is done if i were conjuring up an index of my own rating it would have this sprawling cast of people who are all integral to the way the city looks to us even right now at this moment so i know we can talk about this a lot and i want to have timeme for questions and so there is a microphone if you

can ask your question as quickly as possible we can get to as many as we can [inaudible] [laughter]l i will ask you this. there is a question right here. please use the microphone. >> i wonde wonder both of you yr reaction to the novel.

>> it's been a long time since i've read the book, and i enjoyed it greatly. i would have to comment again after having gotten up to speed in the historical literature but it struck me as pretty on target that i would make a bigger point. in a sense in this colloquy we've produced the academics necessarily approach an entity like this. these can develop a fairly arcane set of terminology and language and iinlanguage and int

is important a that probing into deepening our understanding both real life doesn't happen like that. it happens all d at once and i think the only people who can do it justice are the novelists. now admittedly, my wife is one of mexico's preeminent novelists, so i get the inside scoop on this process. that's what they do is integrate all of these things because what they are looking at are not women and blacks but the relationships between them, the images people have of another and how it helps support

movements i. i offer as much as possible telling this as a story. i am sympathetic to people who pick this up. many have died although less so now with e-books and it is a daunting interface. i am here to tell you why to let his true there are these tracks that run through and tie together the various chapters lookingha at the city's changing position on the planet and its

changing relationship withry the country and explained in the ups and downs cycle. all of these things are carried over from the first volume to the second and will continue. but the chapters are modular construction, even the sections that make up the chapters which are paid enough to the chapters themselves, they can be read independently, so my advice to the potential reader is to look at the table of contents, look at the chapter names, pick something that interests you and you will see if you come back later and read it again there

are all these filaments that run horizontally but it's an independent read on its own but this is the intention. can i beue heard on that? want to make sure we get other questions and. [inaudible] i thought it was an interesting way to approach history but i won't go further than that. we have another one and then two. >> i was wondering if i could ask your comments on another factor at seems to underlie much of the growth of the city. you can't really have skyscrapers without elevators or

the brooklyn bridge without the technology to leave cable. it seems to be th the timeless r major changes in science and engineering which kind of undermines all of this. and i wondered if you know anything about that. >> what was the pneumatic case [inaudible] [laughter] engineering plays a tremendous role in both engineers and professional schools and graduates and those that are digging through the tunnels and electrical engineers and mechanical engineers in the way that the buildin building builds refracted through the various labor positions, i spent a lot ospend a lotof time on that bece

right they are building the city and there is a tradition dating back at least to the erie canal of being willing to undertake b enterprises for which engineering that is just emerging so they figured out how to build the canal which is the most spectacular in its roman days as they went along and they wind up becoming in the next generation engineers moving into different territories optical, mechanical, etc.. and yes, they are first used in the rich buildings but then applied to theheil skyscraper ad engineering of 20.

>> i know we are close on time, so ask the question. shee had her hand up and then there was someone else. >> in your presentation at the beginning you were mentioning how if you go there you need police protection to you know what you should check out these books. many throughout new york city are going through the transition and if you like your out of sync for people who live in those communities. as historiansew who studied new york what would you say to people in the communities to ensure that an app it is okay and part of the fluidity and the dynamic of new york city?

>> i have to confess that of all of my various failing faculties [inaudible] [laughter]

whatever community if it's williamburg or another that people have idea about whether or not you should go there as a tourist? >> yeah, it's -- it's a difficult business. on the lower east side there were tourist that is would come and a number of people would say, get out of my face, you're turning us into objects.

thrafs -- there was a particular struggle in chinatown which was notoriously considered a dangerous spot which it wasn't, but professional -- tourism emerges is a major industry in this period. there's an outfit called seeing new york which runs bus tours and they have a special night-time chinatown bus tour. they arraigning for you to visit a real open opioid den. [laughter] >> by real police officers just as you happen to arrive there. [laughter] >> there's a movie. i think griffin about great exposure. >> that's right. >> chinatown tourism.

so it's a complicated business because when at one point the police institute a curfew, there was a murder where a woman was killed, not in chinatown, in fact, but associated with the chinese issue and the police impose a curfew and the restaurant, which are getting defined in this period as vice, are outraged. you cut off supply of tourists. so when you get into any one of these and i do get into several of them because i'm looking at tourism as a phenomena, it's very complicated. it's varies from one to the

other. >> i think a jewish colleague of mine kind of summed up neighborhood change in a way that i found amusing. he said his family was an american success story because it was lower east side to lower others -- east side and it only took three generations. [laughter] >> one more question. >> in all these hours and day that is you spent in the archive, you must have discovered some character that was absolutely phenomenal or a person that we have never heard of that you discuss in the book, somebody that came out that you never heard of, phenomenal or most failure? >> niagara falls amazing. there are 1,631 entries in the names index for this volume.

>> wow. >> and the great majority of them nobody has ever heard of and i wouldn't know where to begin although i must say the thing that i find remarkable is the degree to which even the famous and powerful are unknown. how many people have heard of -- >> who? >> that's pretty good. [laughter] >> you're not demographic -- >> can i add one thing to this, though? i did learn things about root that i didn't know previously. so even though i had heard of root and read about root i didn't know involvement. >> he arguably was the most single, most-powerful man in new york during this period. teddy wanted him to be as

success or. he was jpmorgan's attorney. he was at the center of the incorporation movement. he remade the american military because he felt it would come in handy as the corporate world expanded particularly into the caribbean. he was secretary of defense, he was secretary of state, he was the head of the -- the organization and he was a political activists on the local scene, the guy operates on all three levels, local, national and international and truthfully i had the notion of who he was.

he very much for completing this this. it was informative and engrossing and i'm looking forward to really reading the next volume in that year. [applause] [inaudible conversations]