One measure of how long this project has gone on is that so many of the people we most wanted to read the finished product are no longer around to do so.
For EGB that list includes my grandmother, Eleanor Gary Lemon, as well as my grandfathers, Prof. Millar Burrows of Yale University and the Rev. William Philip Lemon, scholars as well as men of faith, each of whom had set aside a place on his shelves for such a book as Gotham. I am sorry that Gerard Mutsaers, a Dutchman who took such pride in escorting friends around the Netherlands, did not live long enough to read about the role of his native country in the city’s early history.
Among the family members whose absence I (MW) most regret are my mother, Margaret Wallace (I miss her joyful curiosity and unflagging support), my father, Aaron Wallace (I miss his wit and political empathy), and my uncle, Sol Isaacs (who, until his death at ninety-five, was still sharing laser-sharp memories of life as a New York garment presser and union man). Among mentors and friends I wish were here to share the satisfaction are Richard Hofstadter, a man who asked big questions and answered them with artistry and authority; Joe Murphy, former CUNY chancellor, crusader for working class educational opportunity and a strong supporter of this book; Herb Gutman, Raphael Samuel, Warren Susman, and Edward Thompson—model activist intellectuals all; and Tony Lukas, David Varas, and Elliot Willensky, who were looking forward to Gotham but departed way before their time.
Happily, there are vast numbers still around to share our delight and receive our thanks, beginning with those closest to us, those who’ve endured The Book, helped us to survive it, and—mainly—shared and enriched our lives.
There is no one to whom I (EGB) am more beholden for firm anchorage and steady encouragement than my wife, Pat Adamski. Our life together began more than two decades ago with a rollicking late-night jaunt up Fifth Avenue, and it was during one of our many subsequent urban reconnaissances that I decided to launch a course at Brooklyn College on the history of the city. I am humbled by the thought that even while building her own distinguished career as a legal scholar and educator, she also found the time and energy to bear with me during the years that followed, as Gotham struggled toward completion. There are no words to encompass my wonder at the loving patience of our children, Matt and Kate, who have waited their entire lives for “daddy’s book” to be done, unaware of how many times their presence revived my spirits and kept me going until it was, in fact, done. My parents, E. G. Burrows and Gwenyth L. Burrows, not only brought me up to value good books and good writing but seemed to understand why Gotham required so long to finish. I am much obliged as well to Eric McKitrick and Richard Hofstadter, my teachers at Columbia University, whose guidance, praise, and friendship made all the difference to a young graduate student.
My (MW) wife, Hope Cooke—wise counsellor, historical compeer, voluptuous playmate (for the full encomium see my Mickey Mouse and Other Essays on American Memory)—shared my love of the city and pleasure in exploring its past and present. Hope also provided me with a new family—Hope Leezum, Palden, and Kesang, and now our grandchildren, Khendum and Diki. My sister, Penny, offered sibling love and helped keep me laughing. Anne Leiner was my wise, caring, and transformative counsellor. Marion Skelly and Lauree Wise were skillful healers when mind-and-body flagged. My old friend Bob Padgug has been waiting for this book as long as he can remember. Finally, some long overdue thanks to a trio of teachers—Eric McKitrick, who among other lessons taught me I didn’t yet know how to write; Jim Shenton, who through example and exhortation got me into the history business; and Walter Metzger, who one day, without realizing it, broached the concept of a life project.
It’s quite insufficient to thank Frances Goldin for being our “agent.” She is as much a “principal” in this project as we are—third paddle in our canoe. Frances is, to be sure, a superb literary representative, but her personal steadfastness and politically principled support were as important as her skillfulness. Without her deep caring, astonishing patience, and resolute determination this book would not likely have seen the light of day.
Many mavens helped us negotiate the churning currents of the big city’s publishing industry. Vincent Virga, novelist, historian, and photo editor par excellence, was our crucial pillar and counsellor during many critical moments. The late Jerry Kaplan understood immediately what we wanted to do and opened the first of what would be many doors. Andre Schiffrin and Peter Dimock provided wise tactical and strategic advice. David Klein, Robert Youdelman, Leon Friedman, Bardyl Tirana, and Kellis Parker helped steer us through some legal rapids. Eddie Ellis offered the fruits of his encyclopedic labor and much of his library. Marty Duberman pointed us to Frances, and Sydelle Kramer, Frances’s associate, pointed out a productive path at a fork in the road. We thank too those in the publishing world who had faith in us at an earlier stage—Jim Silberman, Dominick Anfuso, Michael Denneny, Aaron Asher, Philip Pochoda, Arthur Samuelson—and we thank those who didn’t, for spurring us to greater effort.
All praise to Laura Brown, publisher at Oxford University Press, for having the courage and enthusiasm to tackle such a massive project and for doing so with such gusto and expertise. Sheldon Meyer, a richly experienced editor of the old school (long may it prosper), helped us slim down our manuscript from preposterous to merely gargantuan proportions. The artistry and commitment of India Cooper added luster to the copyediting profession. Susan Day, Brandon Trissler, Adam Bohannon, Pat Burns, Joellyn Ausanka, Mary Ellen Curley, and Russell Perreault formed the team that took Gotham from hard drive to hard copy.
Both of us work in a great if currently beleaguered institution, the City University of New York, and we would like to thank our respective colleges and colleagues for their many years of support.
At Brooklyn College, EGB has had the good fortune to share an office with an old friend, Don Gerardi, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s religious history proved indispensable on more than one occasion. Teo Ruiz and Tim Gura, eminent teachers as well as deep-dyed New Yorkers, have been generous and loyal comrades, off campus and on. During his year as a visiting professor at Brooklyn, Peter Charles Hoffer read the first half of the manuscript with uncommon diligence and kept reminding me to let go of it. As a graduate student, Sara Gronim untangled some puzzling aspects of Kieft’s war; as a new colleague, she has willingly shared her work on Jane Colden and the study of science in eighteenth-century New York. Thanks, too, to Christoph Kimmich, former chairman of the History Department, Provost of the College, and now interim Chancellor of the University, who has been a sturdy advocate of this and other scholarly projects. A tip of the hat, finally, to the many hundreds of students who have joined me over the years in History 44 (“Burrows on the Boroughs,” as one of them called it): your boundless curiosity about the city’s past and your steadfast belief in its future should be an example to us all.
I must also pay my respects to a small coterie of Gothamites who, though not at Brooklyn College, vetted great blocs of manuscript and responded with such good grace to my appeals for additional assistance that they might as well have occupied offices just down the hall: Charles Gehring of the New Netherland Project in Albany; Milton Klein, prolific doyen of early New York historians; Howard Rock, who also freely shared his collection of New York pictures; and David Voorhees, editor of de Halve Maen and the Jacob Leisler Papers.
At MW’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, President Gerald Lynch has been a staunch backer of this enterprise and over the years has put the resources of the College behind it. Former Vice President John Collins was long a beamish supporter. In recent years Provost Basil Wilson, an ardent sponsor of intellectual enterprise at the College, arranged crucial time off for writing. My heartfelt thanks to them and to former Dean John Cammett and once-and-future Chairman Isidore Silver (for bringing me to Jay a quarter century ago) and to colleagues past and present who buoyed me up over the long years of Gothamizing: Bob Banowicz, Paul Brenner, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eli Faber, Dan Gasman, Mary Gibson, Carol Groneman, Ann Lane, Jacob Marini, Gerry Markowitz, Joe O’Brien, Bill Preston, Jay Sexter, and Howard Umansky, among many others. I want in particular to salute my students, who in their extraordinary diversity and their determined pursuit of education (often under the most difficult of circumstances) truly represent what’s best about New York. In teaching them, I learned a great deal about our city and discovered new and better ways to tell its story.
We have been jointly and severally fortunate in receiving financial assistance, which afforded us that most precious of resources, time. In this project’s long foreground, MW was assisted by a 1976 Victor Rabinowitz Foundation grant, and in 1980 the authors together received a Research Fellowship from the National Institute for Humanities— another beleaguered and worthy public institution. In Gotham’s latter days, the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College gave EGB a year off in 1992–93; the N.E.H. gave MW a College Teaching Fellowship in 1993, and the American Council of Learned Societies awarded him a fellowship in 1994. The authors and Oxford University Press would like to thank Furthermore . . ., the publication program of The J.M. Kaplan Fund, which helped leaven our texty loaf with a grant to enhance its graphics component. A special thank-you to Joan Davidson of Furthermore. . . .
Libraries! Treasuries of source material and constellations of knowledgeable and helpful souls. Wayne Furman, who runs the Allen Room—the New York Public Library and Frederick Lewis Allen’s superlative gift to authors—provided us with our indispensable home away from homes and a direct pipeline into the NYPL’s magnificent collections. Mark Piel, spirited director of an even more venerable local institution, the New York Society Library (1754), repeatedly extended himself, and his material, on our behalf. The New-York Historical Society—yet another threatened scholarly institution and indeed one that nearly foundered during the course of this project—offered invaluable resources. So did the Brooklyn Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York. EGB is grateful to the staff of the Brooklyn College Library, past and present, who have so often extended themselves to retrieve obscure materials. MW offers special thanks to the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College, whose superb staff over the years—including Marilyn Lutzker, Eileen Rowland, Bob Grappone, Tony Simpson, Bonnie Nelson, Kathy Halloran, Janice Dunham, Marvie Brooks—assembled a deep and rich collection of metropolitania.
The authors have also drawn upon scores of specialized libraries and of history museums as well. Among them are the Abigail Adams Smith Museum, Bronx County Historical Society, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Engineering Societies Library, Fort Wadsworth, General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Library, Harbor Defense Museum, Historic Richmond Town, Jewish Museum, King Manor Museum, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Masonic Hall Library and Museum, Merchants’ House Museum, Morris-Jumel Mansion, Museum of Chinese in America, New York Transit Museum, New York City Fire Museum, Police Academy Museum, Queens Historical Society, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Skyscraper Museum, South Street Seaport, Valentine-Varian House, and the Weeksville Society.
We have been helped in accumulating primary and secondary source materials by David Paskin, Kesang Namgyal, Marcia Caro, Jacqueline Talamas, and Nuria Agullo. Thanks also to Marilyn Atkins-Nelson and Ana Argueta.
Our greatest debt—apart from that we owe the legions of scholars upon whose work we have drawn—is to those friends, colleagues, and family members who took out often inordinate amounts of time to read portions of this opus as it issued from our computers. In the beginning there was Roy Rosenzweig, himself a scholar of the city and a preeminent practitioner of public history. Roy read reams of our earliest prose, offered first-rate criticism, and gave encouragement and enthusiasm when it counted most. Roy was followed by many others who contributed advice, information, and many other kinds of support. We’ve been helped by outstanding academics from a wide variety of fields and by tour guides, history buffs, political activists, architects, lawyers, engineers, journalists, union leaders, and historic preservationists, among many others.
With regrets for lacking space to give them adequate personal recognition, we salute and thank Jean-Christophe Agnew, David Amram, Jeanie Attie, David Birnbaum, Dan Bluestone, Pat Bonomi, Steve Brier, Josh Brown, Ric Burns, Paul Byard, Barbara Cohen, Page Cowley, Jacques D’Amboise, Bruce Davidson, Susan Davis, Gloria Deak, Vicki DeGrazia, Kanak Mani Dixit, Joe Doyle, Edward Robb Ellis, Jason Epstein, Liz Fee, Joe Fried, Deborah Gardner, Marvin Gelfand, Eugene Genovese, Brendan Gill, David Gordon, Christopher Gray, Carolyn Grimstead, Herb Gutman, John Halpern, Erich Hartmann, Susan Henderson, Ken Jackson, Brooks Jones, Alfred Kazin, Derek Keene, Thomas Kessner, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Jeff Kroessler, Richard Lieberman, Tony Lukas, Harry Magdoff, Pedro Mateos, David Melville, Mike Merrill, Simon Middleton, Jane Miliken, Sandy Miller, John Mulligan, Charles Musser, Palden Namgyal, David Nasaw, De Nederlandsche Bank, Peter Neill, Paul Otto, Chimie Pemba, T. T. Pemba, Mike Pertschuk, the members of the Radical History Review Collective, Paul Resnik, Dick Roberts, Dan Schiller, Dinitia Smith, Deborah Solbert, Peter Solbert, Paul Sweezey, Bill Tabb, Walter Thabit, Danny Walkowitz, Margaret Wallace, Suzanne Wasserman, Jon Wiener, Sean Wilentz, Bill Wise, Alan Wolfe, and Sally Yarmolinsky.
In the home stretch, supplementing Sheldon Meyer’s sharp-eyed rereadings, three people plowed through the entire manuscript. Eric Foner brought his wide-ranging historical expertise to bear and provided a sweeping and reassuring assessment. Betsy Blackmar, a penetrating scholar of the city, gave the manuscript a brilliant, cranky, loving, and tough-minded going over—exactly what it needed. For Hope Cooke, herself a virtuoso metropolitan historian (see her Seeing New York), this was but the latest journey through these pages, having read every preceding draft, and her final insights were as invaluable as all her earlier ones.