The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

Author: Edith Wharton

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2011-08-17

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 1590174364

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These 20 short stories and novellas offer an exquisite portrait of Old New York, spanning from the Civil War through the Gilded Age (New York Times). “Edith Wharton . . . remains one of the most potent names in the literature of New York.” —New York Times Edith Wharton wrote about New York as only a native can. Her Manhattan is a city of well-appointed drawing rooms, hansoms and broughams, all-night cotillions, and resplendent Fifth Avenue flats. Bishops’ nieces mingle with bachelor industrialists; respectable wives turn into excellent mistresses. All are governed by a code of behavior as rigid as it is precarious. What fascinates Wharton are the points of weakness in the structure of Old New York: the artists and writers at its fringes, the free-love advocates testing its limits, widows and divorcées struggling to hold their own. The New York Stories of Edith Wharton gathers twenty stories of the city, written over the course of Wharton’s career. From her first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” to one of her last and most celebrated, “Roman Fever,” this new collection charts the growth of an American master and enriches our understanding of the central themes of her work, among them the meaning of marriage, the struggle for artistic integrity, the bonds between parent and child, and the plight of the aged. Illuminated by Roxana Robinson’s introduction, these stories showcase Wharton’s astonishing insight into the turbulent inner lives of the men and women caught up in a rapidly changing society.


Robert Moses and the Modern City

Robert Moses and the Modern City

Author: Hilary Ballon

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2008-08-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0393732436

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A fresh look at the greatest builder in the history of New York City and one of its most controversial figures. “We are rebuilding New York, not dispersing and abandoning it”: Robert Moses saw himself on a rescue mission to save the city from obsolescence, decentralization, and decline. His vast building program aimed to modernize urban infrastructure, expand the public realm with extensive recreational facilities, remove blight, and make the city more livable for the middle class. This book offers a fresh look at the physical transformation of New York during Moses’s nearly forty-year reign over city building from 1934 to 1968.It is hard to imagine that anyone will ever have the same impact on New York as did Robert Moses. In his various roles in city and state government, he reshaped the fabric of the city, and his legacy continues to touch the lives of all New Yorkers. Revered for most of his life, he is now one of the most controversial figures in the city’s history. Robert Moses and the Modern City is the first major publication devoted to him since Robert Caro’s damning 1974 biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.In these pages eight short essays by leading scholars of urban history provide a revised perspective; stunning new photographs offer the first visual record of Moses’s far-reaching building program as it stands today; and a comprehensive catalog of his works is illustrated with a wealth of archival records: photographs of buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes, of parks, pools, and playgrounds, of demolished neighborhoods and replacement housing and urban renewal projects, of bridges and highways; renderings of rejected designs and controversial projects that were defeated; and views of spectacular models that have not been seen since Moses made them for promotional purposes.Robert Moses and the Modern City captures research undertaken in the last three decades and will stimulate a new round of debate.


Vanishing New York

Vanishing New York

Author: Jeremiah Moss

Publisher: Dey Street Books

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780062439697

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"ESSENTIAL READING FOR FANS OF JANE JACOBS, JOSEPH MITCHELL, PATTI SMITH, LUC SANTE AND CHEAP PIEROGI."--VANITY FAIR An unflinching chronicle of gentrification in the twenty-first century and a love letter to lost New York by the creator of the popular and incendiary blog Vanishing New York. For generations, New York City has been a mecca for artists, writers, and other hopefuls longing to be part of its rich cultural exchange and unique social fabric. But today, modern gentrification is transforming the city from an exceptional, iconoclastic metropolis into a suburbanized luxury zone with a price tag only the one percent can afford. A Jane Jacobs for the digital age, blogger and cultural commentator Jeremiah Moss has emerged as one of the most outspoken and celebrated critics of this dramatic shift. In Vanishing New York, he reports on the city’s development in the twenty-first century, a period of "hyper-gentrification" that has resulted in the shocking transformation of beloved neighborhoods and the loss of treasured unofficial landmarks. In prose that the Village Voice has called a "mixture of snark, sorrow, poeticism, and lyric wit," Moss leads us on a colorful guided tour of the most changed parts of town—from the Lower East Side and Chelsea to Harlem and Williamsburg—lovingly eulogizing iconic institutions as they’re replaced with soulless upscale boutiques, luxury condo towers, and suburban chains. Propelled by Moss’ hard-hitting, cantankerous style, Vanishing New York is a staggering examination of contemporary "urban renewal" and its repercussions—not only for New Yorkers, but for all of America and the world.


New York 1880

New York 1880

Author: Robert A.M. Stern

Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC

Published: 1999-04-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1580930271

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This is the fourth volume in architect and historian Robert A. M. Stern's monumental series of documentary studies of New York City architecture and urbanism. The three previous books in the series, New York 1900, New York 1930, and New York 1960, have comprehensively covered the architects and urban planners who defined New York over the course of the twentieth century. In this volume, Stern turns back to 1880 -- the end of the Civil War, the beginning of European modernism -- to trace the earlier history of the city. This dynamic era saw the technological advances and acts of civic and private will that formed the identity of New York City as we know it today. The installation of water, telephone, and electricity infrastructures as well as the advent of electric lighting, the elevator, and mass transit allowed the city to grow both out and up. The office building and apartment house types were envisioned and defined, changing the ways that New Yorkers worked and lived. Such massive public projects as the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park became realities, along with such private efforts as Grand Central Station. Like the other three volumes, New York 1880 is an in-depth presentation of the buildings and plans that transformed New York from a harbor town into a world-class metropolis. A broad range of primary sources -- critics and writers, architects, planners, city officials -- brings the time period to life and allows the city to tell its own complex story. The book is generously illustrated with over 1,200 archival photographs, which show the city as it was, and as some parts of it still are.


The Promised City

The Promised City

Author: Moses Rischin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780674715011

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Rischin paints a vivid picture of Jewish life in New York at the turn of the century. Here are the old neighborhoods and crowded tenements, the Rester Street markets, the sweatshops, the birth of Yiddish theatre in America, and the founding of important Jewish newspapers and labor movements. The book describes, too, the city's response to this great influx of immigrants--a response that marked the beginning of a new concept of social responsibility.


Sidewalk Critic

Sidewalk Critic

Author: Lewis Mumford

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9781568981338

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Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) is best known for his Sky Line column in the New Yorker where he served as architecture critic for over 30 years. A man of letters and part of Manhattan's intellectual elite, Mumford wrote more than 20 books over 6 decades, bridging the seemingly disparate disciplines of architecture, technology, literary criticism, biography, sociology and philosophy.


The New York Nobody Knows

The New York Nobody Knows

Author: William B. Helmreich

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0691169705

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"As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever. Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs--an astonishing 6,000 miles. His epic journey lasted four years and took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Helmreich spoke with hundreds of New Yorkers from every part of the globe and from every walk of life, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former mayors Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch. Their stories and his are the subject of this captivating and highly original book. We meet the Guyanese immigrant who grows beautiful flowers outside his modest Queens residence in order to always remember the homeland he left behind, the Brooklyn-raised grandchild of Italian immigrants who illuminates a window of his brownstone with the family's old neon grocery-store sign, and many, many others. Helmreich draws on firsthand insights to examine essential aspects of urban social life such as ethnicity, gentrification, and the use of space. He finds that to be a New Yorker is to struggle to understand the place and to make a life that is as highly local as it is dynamically cosmopolitan."--Publisher's description.


New York Through the Lens

New York Through the Lens

Author: Vivienne Gucwa

Publisher: Ilex Press

Published: 2023-07-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781781579138

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Street photographers will never tire of New York as a subject. It is the perfect setting for the genre, the world's most evocative cityscape, against which candid, memorable moments play themselves out every day. Nearly a decade ago, Vivienne Gucwa began walking the streets of the city with the only camera she could afford a sub-$100 point-and-shoot and started taking pictures. Choosing a direction and going as far as her feet would take her, she noticed lines, forms and structures that had previously gone unnoticed, but which resonated, embodying a sense of home. Having limited equipment forced her to learn about light, composition and color, and her burgeoning talent won her blog millions of readers and wide recognition in the photographic community. New York Through the Lens showcases the stunning results of her ongoing quest. Filled with spectacular photographs and illuminated by Vivienne's own insightful commentary, NY Through the Lens acts as a beautiful travel guide to the city; it will be a must-read for her many fans and for any lover of street photography.


The Madonna of 115th Street

The Madonna of 115th Street

Author: Robert A. Orsi

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0300157525

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A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Robert A. Orsi's classic study of popular religion in Italian Harlem. In a new preface, Orsi discusses significant shifts in the field of religious history and calls for new ways of empirically studying divine presences in human life. "The Madonna of 115th Street has over the last quarter century become a classic of American religious history. There are few books that I have enjoyed teaching more over the years and even fewer that have taught me as much about American Catholic history."—Leigh E. Schmidt, author of Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment