Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape

Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape. By David M. Scobey. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. xi + 340 pp. Index, notes, appendix, illustrations. Cloth, $40.00. ISBN 1-566-39950-5.

This is an excellent book: it is meticulously researched, full of insights, and beautifully written. In Empire City David Scobey sets out to provide an alternative reading of the history of landscape change in New York City to what he terms the "classic modernization model" (p. 5), with its stress on successive waves of technological change. Scobey concentrates on the "metropolitan real-estate economy," thus avoiding the conventional emphasis on "infrastructural …