New York: An Illustrated History

This lavish and handsomely produced book captures all the beauty, complexity, and power of New York--the city that has seemed, from its beginnings, the very embodiment of ambition, aspiration, romance, and desire, the city that epitomizes, more than any other place on earth, the entire parade of modern life, with all its possibilities and problems. Chronicling the story of New York from its establishment in 1624 as a Dutch trading post to its global preeminence today, the book is at once the biography of a great city and a vivid exploration of the myriad forces--commercial, cultural, demographic--that converged in New York to usher in the contemporary world.

Weaving the many strands of the city's sweeping history into a single compelling narrative, New York embraces nearly four centuries of turbulent change and growth--from the first settlement on the southern end of the island of "Manna-hata" to the destruction wrought by the Revolutionary War; from the city's stunning emergence in the nineteenth century as the nation's premier industrial center to the waves of early-twentieth-century immigration that transformed forever the city and the nation; from New York's transfiguration as the world's first modern city--pioneering skyscrapers, subways, apartment houses, and highways--to its emergence as the supreme laboratory and testing ground of American popular culture. And we witness the building of the city's celebrated landmarks and institutions, from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building and the United Nations, from Wall Street and Times Square to the Lower East Side, Harlem, and SoHo.