A history of New York in 101 objects

Delineating a subject's history in so many objects is not a new concept. Roberts uses as his model the British Museum's History of the World in 100 Objects. An outgrowth of a column in the New York Times that solicited readers' opinions, this profusely illustrated book constitutes an anecdotal take on the city's history. Although New York lends itself to this approach, and Roberts (Grand Central, 2013, about Manhattan's iconic train station) knows and loves his subject, it amounts finally to a novelty, though an entertaining one. While he departs from his definition of object as not much bigger than a breadbox by discussing the city's bedrock Fordham gneiss and Manhattan schist, he sticks to his criteria that the objects be enduring and transformative, even if only a bagel or a spaldeen, and proceeds more or less chronologically. There have been (in the Times) and will continue to be (in response to Roberts' request for them) new offerings and ongoing disagreement about the items listed; that is the fun with books of this sort. So enjoy it; anybody can play. (This reviewer would add pastrami on rye and, surely, Cel-Ray soda.)--Levine, Mark Copyright 2014 Booklist

A diverting presentation of objects encapsulating nearly 400 years of New York City history.New York Times urban affairs correspondent Roberts (Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America, 2013, etc.) offers another installment in the recent spate of "a history of x in x objects" books, this one an expansion of a popular feature he created for his newspaper. Such endeavors are inevitably superficial; it is impossible to adequately present the history of anything through a few dozen objects without committing vast sins of omission. The best that can be expected is some illuminating glimpses of that history as revealed by objects left behindwhich is, after all, one of the major purposes of museums. This book might best be viewed as a portable virtual museum. Since it is virtual, it can contain small items (a black and white cookie), very large ones (the Cross Bronx Expressway) and an item that probably no longer exists (the baseball from the "shot heard 'round the world" in 1951). The author explains that the 101 choices, while "highly subjectivehad to have played some transformative role in New York City's history or they had to be emblematic of some historic transformation. They also had to be enduring, which meant they could not be disproportionately tailored to recent memory or contemporary nostalgia"though 60 of the selections are post-1900. Still, Roberts delivers an entertaining stroll through the history of one of the world's great cities. Each item is illustrated with a photograph, most in color, and described in two or three pages of sprightly text. While some selections are necessarily obviousthe Times Square New Year's Eve ball, for examplemost are delightfully surprising, from the city's iconic rooftop water tanks to Rosie Ruiz's New York Marathon certificate. It's not scholarly, but it certainly is fun. Recommended for even casual fans of Big Apple history and culture. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

9781476728773text_eb_r2 ? 1 ? Fordham Gneiss Where the Skyscrapers Are Dense, dark green to black, banded, grainy-textured, it punctuates the unseen underbelly of Manhattan. It was formed hundreds of millions of years ago in a crucible of immense heat and pressure, a tectonic upheaval as volcanoes erupted and the continental plates of Pangaea, the supercontinent, ground against each other. They divided, creating a vast gulf that would separate the Eastern Seaboard from North Africa. It is a rock. It is an island. •   •   • Manhattan is a geologist's dream. But sophisticated on-site analysis of what lies beneath the surface is a relatively recent phenomenon. Construction of Water Tunnel No. 3, as deep as six hundred feet below street level, the Second Avenue Subway, the Flushing Line Subway Extension, and the Long Island Rail Road's East Side Access project to Grand Central Terminal under Park Avenue opened a basement window for geologists to confirm their vision of how Manhattan was formed and why skyscrapers sprouted downtown and in midtown but not in between. Depending on where you live in Manhattan, you can't honestly say it's not your fault. What geologists found was a wide variety of metamorphic rock--formed as tectonic plates collided--and distinct geological fault lines along Dyckman Street, 125th Street, Morningside Drive, and Canal Street, suggested by water coursing through the paths of least resistance, fractures and fissures that reached across the spine of Manhattan between the East and Hudson Rivers. While Manhattan schist is the best known of the rock formations that form the city's subbasement, the island is also defined by amphibolite, by Inwood marble farther uptown, and by Fordham gneiss, which predominates in the Bronx, on Roosevelt Island, and on the Lower East Side (and protruding on "C-rock" opposite the Columbia University athletic complex). Gneiss (pronounced "nice") dates back a dazzling 1.2 billion years, when earth-shattering continental collisions caused sedimentary rock to recrystallize into contorted black-and-white-banded metamorphic rock. It is the oldest natural New York object. (The oldest objects in New York are 4.6-billion-year-old meteors and 10-­billion-year-old stardust--actually, presolar grains in primitive chondrites--at the American Museum of Natural History. The oldest handcrafted object in Manhattan is considered to be the obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle, dating from 1450 B.C. and installed in Central Park in 1881.) The interlayered rock formations belowground are analogous to the intermixed neighborhoods on the surface. The granites are folded into tunnel walls exposed by monstrous rock-boring machines. The undulating formations are the bedrock that defines Manhattan's skyline. In midtown, bedrock is just below the asphalt. To build the World Trade Center, seventy-five feet of fill, glacial till, and muck had to be excavated until bedrock was reached. In between downtown and midtown, the bedrock surface dips into a deeper trough and the ground is relatively squishy, which means that a century or so ago, building a skyscraper there would have been too challenging for contemporary engineering. Today, while it may be prohibitively expensive, such construction is technologically possible. Good rocks, geologists like to say, make good foundations and good tunnels. Underground Manhattan is laced with unseen, taken-for-granted tunnels, the latest of which is the East Side Access, 170 feet below Park Avenue. It stretches from the East Sixty-Third Street tunnel under the East River, which it shares with the subway from Queens, and terminates at East Thirty-Sixth Street, just below the Union League Club. (A Manhattan portion of the sixty-mile-long third water tunnel, which has been under construction for four decades and is scheduled for completion around 2020, opened in 2013; the Long Island Rail Road's direct East Side Access is now expected to start around 2020.) Legally, landlords own the land beneath their property to the center of the earth, so tunnels require easements, which, in the case of government agencies, can be obtained through negotiation or by exercising the right of eminent domain. An advance team of geologists mines the excavations to verify topographical details of the original shoreline and underground water courses still derived from the pre-development 1865 map of Egbert Viele (a civil engineer and congressman), to adjust engineering specifications to the conditions that are discovered, and to leave a geological record for posterity. Finding amphibolite and similar rock formations migrating like baked taffy--one geologist likened the pattern to a Charleston Chew--in both Manhattan and Morocco provides evidence substantiating Alfred Wegener's once ridiculed theory of continental drift. Excerpted from A History of New York in 101 Objects by Sam Roberts All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.