This is the second edition of a book that fi success, and it inspired similar eff ence excellence, had been through seven printings, and had sold more than 70,000 copies. orts in many other cities. At last count, it had received four awards for refer- rst appeared in 1995. At that time, it was both a critical and commercial
But that was before the Internet revolution and before third graders could Google anything or turn to Wikipedia fora reference on millions of topics. What, then, is the justification for hundreds of expensive pages of paper bound between
two hard covers? Is this volume the literary equivalent of a livery stable in the 1920s?
The Encyclopedia of New York City may be an old model, but it is an enduring and necessary one. When Denis Diderot
invented the genre of the encyclopedia in the middle of the eigh teenth century, he offered what was then a novel and
radical idea: bring all the knowledge of the world to anyone who wanted to discover it. Such easy access then was considered an affront to the establishment of the time, which tried to ban the book. Opposition crumpled in the face of support
by progressive Enlightenment thinkers, who were delighted by the prospect of sharing knowledge. Diderot’s genius also
lay in his idea of assembling experts in different areas who would prepare authoritative entries that were both thorough
and accessible to the reading public.
Like Diderot’s project, The Encyclopedia of New York City provides the distilled knowledge of hundreds of experts
and presents their entries in that same accessible way. In the twenty- fi rst century, when books compete with electronic
sources, there is still an important niche for reference materials such as this. Although third graders may know how
to use an Internet browser, browsing a book is a very different experience. There is a joy in leafi ng through the pages
to make unexpected discoveries about topics in which you did not think you had an interest. You look up Malcolm X,
and your eyes fall also to the Malbone Street wreck, a train disaster in Brooklyn that claimed at least 93 lives in
1918. Or you look up tenements and also happen to read about the Tenderloin, a Manhattan neighborhood that
once contained the city’s greatest concentration of saloons, brothels, gambling parlors, and dance halls. On the Internet you cannot look up something that you do not know exists. Serendipitous discoveries are often the best kind. In
New York City, there are mysteries on every block, and this encyclopedia is similar, with new mysteries on every page.
Furthermore, this book has been created by experts who have spent de cades specializing in specific areas, and the reader
is able to identify these authors, whose entries cannot be changed by other people who may not have the same knowledge and expertise.
But why bother with a second edition? To put it simply, New York City is always evolving, and especially so in the past
two de cades. When the first edition was written, B. Altman was a department store, the World Trade Center dominated
the city’s skyline, J. P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan Bank were separate companies, crime was going up, and the worst
day ever for the New York City Fire Department was 17 October 1966, when 12 firefighters were killed at 23rd Street and
Broadway. We have eliminated several hundred entries and added almost a thousand new ones, from Kareem AbdulJabbar to the Ziegfield Follies. The new entries greatly expand the story of New York City: arson, bricks, the Central Park jogger, Compstat, Joe DiMaggio, E-ZPass, High Line, house numbering and street naming, Hudson
Square, Archbishop Iakovos, Kleinfeld Bridal, Mickey Mantle, Evelyn Nesbit (the Girl in the Red Velvet
Swing), public order, sidewalks, the Subway Hero (Wesley Autrey), and synagogues. We have also updated virtually
every retained entry. In a city that has grown by a million people since 1990, the 450 neighborhoods have also grown and
changed, with new ethnic groups continuing to make New York City the most diverse spot on the planet. And we have
added hundreds of new illustrations, both historical and contemporary, to help bolster the reader’s understanding of
people and places. But even with all of the revisions, it remains impossible to capture all of New York City in one book,
or to be flawless in every entry.
Preface xiii
How does one take the mea sure of New York City? Even casual visitors can see and feel and sense that it is different from
other places. Its buildings are bigger, its pace quicker, its streets noisier, and its sidewalks more crowded than those of other
communities. It often overwhelms tourists from around the world, who are typically told that New York City is the least
“American” of cities and that they must travel far from it if they are to understand and know the “real” United States.
In this case the ste reo type is correct: New York City is different. For one thing, it is older than virtually every other
American city. Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, Newport, and Williamsburg come to mind when one thinks
of historic places, yet New York City is older than all of them. As for the settlements that were already established when
Dutch traders first landed at the southern tip of Manhattan — St. Augustine, Jamestown, Fort St. George, Hampton,
Plymouth, and Santa Fe — Jamestown, Plymouth, and Fort St. George disappeared, and the other three failed to prosper
for the first three centuries of their existence.
New York City is also unusual because of its high population density. In 1900 the Lower East Side was the most densely
inhabited place in the world. As late as 1960 Manhattan contained half of all the world’s skyscrapers of 50 stories or higher.
The city’s midtown office district in 1960 had more office space per acre than any other central business district on earth;
in fact, only lower Manhattan and the Chicago Loop were even half as dense. In recent years Hong Kong and Shanghai
have matched New York City’s skyscraper total; and Tokyo, Mexico City, and São Paulo have populations and densities
that match or exceed those of New York City. Suburbanization has greatly reduced the worst overcrowding in the United
States. But the city remains far more crowded than any other in the country, with twice the population density of Chicago
and many times the density of Houston and Los Angeles.
New York City has long been unusual because of its sheer size. Even before 1775, when its population was never more
than 25,000, it ranked with Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Newport as one of the five leading cities in the colonies.
It had surpassed Philadelphia by 1810 to become the largest city in the United States, and Mexico City by 1830 to become
the largest in the western hemi sphere. By 1900 it was the second- largest city in the world (after London) and by 1930 the
largest. It remains the only U.S. municipality ever to exceed four million residents. And in 2010 each of its five boroughs
is large enough to be an important city in its own right, with Queens having more inhabitants than Philadelphia or
Phoenix, Brooklyn several times as many as Boston and San Francisco, the Bronx far more than Detroit, and Staten Island
more than St. Louis.
Figures for the metropolitan area are even more impressive. When the Regional Plan Association in 1930 defi ned the
metropolitan region as comprising the city and 31 adjacent counties in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, the region
was already the first in the history of the world to exceed 10 million residents, and in 1970 it became the first to exceed
15 million. Although eventually surpassed by Tokyo and a few other places, the New York City metropolitan region still
counted 22 million people in 2010, or as many as lived in all the cities of the earth combined in 1700.
Unlike other urban encyclopedias, which typically include suburbs in their coverage, this one is about the city of New
York and its five constituent boroughs. No disrespect to the suburbs is intended, but to include all 1500 such places would
have made the book so huge as to be unwieldy. However, New York City is inextricably linked to its suburbs, and the
reader will note that we occasionally refer to Greater New York or to the metropolitan region. In such cases, the definition
used is that of the 31- county area defined by the Regional Plan Association.
Capturing the essence of this vibrant and still- growing metropolis has not been easy. More than 10,000 books have
been written about the city, with new ones appearing yearly. In the nineteenth century, guidebooks proliferated to ser vice
the booming tourist industry, and they provided a de facto history of the city. I. N. Phelps Stokes’s six- volume The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498– 1909 remains unsurpassed. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Gotham is a beautifully
written interpretive narrative of life up to 1898. Specialized studies address everything from prison ships to police to prostitution to public order. The Encyclopedia of New York City is the rare publication that addresses all aspects of life in the
Big Apple (and this book explains where that term came from).
xiv Preface
The format of this second edition is similar to that of the first. Its alphabetical entries range from prehistory to the
present and cover all five boroughs, although most of the boroughs did not become part of New York City until 1898.
Entries reference people, places, neighborhoods, ethnicities, events, generic and thematic topics, and time periods. This
edition includes more than 5000 entries by more than 800 authors. The length of the entries ranges from 50 to nearly
7000 words, with most entries running about 200 to 800 words.
Like the first edition, this one adheres to principles of reference publishing, which is to provide basic information and
a place to begin research, not to end it. As a synthetical work, it aims to gather existing information rather than present
research on new material. Many entries have brief bibliographical citations to help the reader who is interested in more
information. While the editor in chief has aimed to keep the entries as factual and impartial as possible, some interpretation has crept in, and this reflects the view of the individual author, not the editorial staff. The encyclopedia also has some
useful cross- referencing. In addition to 750 illustrations, half of which are new, there are also more than 100 charts and
tables, which show, for instance, which tele vi sion shows were filmed and set in New York City, how many ticker- tape
parades the city has or ga nized, how tall the tallest buildings are, and a host of other fascinating aspects of the city. Certain
entries have not been included for pragmatic reasons; city agencies, for instance, are covered in thematic entries, and
advertising and law firms are shown in tables. Some of the entries are not only new, but they exist in no other encyclopedia: railroads, songs, armories, tele vi sion shows, public executions, newspapers, and squares are examples
of these.
New York City has never been a static entity, and neither is The Encyclopedia of New York City. An electronic edition of
this print one is planned, with updates that will mirror the vibrancy of the city it reflects. And although every word in this
book has been read by the editor in chief and many other editors, the encyclopedia no doubt includes errors. The editor
accepts responsibility for them and asks that suggestions, criticisms, and comments be e-mailed to ktj1@columbia.edu.
These thousands of entries are meant not only to convey the history of this great metropolis, but also its spirit. A fi nal
word comes from E. B. White, connoisseur of New York City: “New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement
of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual . . . against all enormous
and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”
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