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The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea

Throughout American history, cities have been a powerful source of inspiration and energy, nourishing the spirit of invention and the world of intellect, and fueling movements for innovation and reform. In The Unfinished City, nationally renowned urban scholar Thomas Bender examines the source of Manhattan’s influence over American life.
The Unfinished City traces the history of New York from its humble regional beginnings to its present global eminence. Bender contends that the city took shape not only according to the grand designs of urban planners and business tycoons, but also in response to a welter of artistic visions, intellectual projects, and everyday demands of the millions of people who made the city home. Bender’s story of urban development ranges from the streets of Times Square to the workshops of Thomas Edison, from the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
In a tour that spans neighborhoods and centuries, The Unfinished City makes a powerful case for the enduring importance of cities in American life. For anyone who loves New York or values the limitless possibilities intrinsic in all cities, this book is an unparalleled guide to Manhattan’s past and present.

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The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea

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The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea

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The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814799963
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2007
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	287
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History.

Preface
Introduction: The Unfinished Metropolis
Part I: Icons of Transformation
1. Washington Square in the Growing City
2. Brooklyn Bridge
3. Skyscraper and Skyline
Part II: Art, Intellect, and Public Culture
4. Public Culture and Metropolitan Modernity
5. Democracy and Cultural Authority
6. Metropolitanism and the Spirit of Invention
7. Modernist Aesthetics and Urban Politics
8. The Arts and the World of Intellect
9. The University and the City
Part III: Politics
10. Cities and American Political Culture
11. New York as a Center of Difference
12. Cities and Citizenship
13. The New Metropolitanism
14. Cities, Nations, and Globalization
Credits
Notes
Index
About the Author

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Offers a thought-provoking perspective on the city’s historical development and the continuing efforts to finish the place.”
-The New York Times

“Bender has an omnivorous intellect, and, whether he’s writing about Thomas Edison, the history of Washington Square, or modernist conceptions of the city, he has a knack for finding the telling anecdote and putting it in context. . . . This is a nuanced, convincing history, attuned to the difficulties and pleasures of city living.”
-The New Yorker

“Bender’s essays are deeply engaged and committed to his project of reasserting a general public role for historians. . . . Many of the most arresting observations in this book derive, however, from close reading of particulars, notably the physical particulars and artistic representations of selected bits of New York City streetscape and architecture.”
-The American Historical Review

“One of the strengths of this book is the way it uses photographs and illustrations as integral parts of the argument. . . . A learned, thoughtful, and incisive analysis of metropolitan culture.”
-The Journal of American History

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Editorial Reviews

"One of the strengths of this book is the way it uses photographs and illustrations as integral parts of the argument. . . . A learned, thoughtful, and incisive analysis of metropolitan culture."

The Journal of American History

"Offers a thought-provoking perspective on the citys historical development and the continuing efforts to finish the place."

The New York Times

"Bender has an omnivorous intellect, and, whether hes writing about Thomas Edison, the history of Washington Square, or modernist conceptions of the city, he has a knack for finding the telling anecdote and putting it in context. . . . This is a nuanced, convincing history, attuned to the difficulties and pleasures of city living."

The New Yorker

"Benders essays are deeply engaged and committed to his project of reasserting a general public role for historians. . . . Many of the most arresting observations in this book derive, however, from close reading of particulars, notably the physical particulars and artistic representations of selected bits of New York City streetscape and architecture."

The American Historical Review

Bender’s essays are deeply engaged and committed to his project of reasserting a general public role for historians. . . . Many of the most arresting observations in this book derive, however, from close reading of particulars, notably the physical particulars and artistic representations of selected bits of New York City streetscape and architecture.”
-The American Historical Review

From the Publisher

This collection of essays takes as its central theme the idea that New York is a city whose "very essence is to be continually in the making." New Yorkers have tended to resist elaborate city planning, and yet top-down decision-making has been responsible for some of the city's great treasures (like Central Park). The tension between those two approaches to urban life -- between, as it were, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses -- has shaped New York since the eighteenth century. Bender has an omnivorous intellect, and, whether he's writing about Thomas Edison, the history of Washington Square, or modernist conceptions of the city, he has a knack for finding the telling anecdote and putting it in context. The political essays at the book's end are disappointingly vague, but on balance this is a nuanced, convincing history, attuned to the difficulties and pleasures of city living.

The New Yorker

Bender (history, New York Univ.; Rethinking American History in a Global Age) examines the political and cultural story of New York City from its creation as a Dutch trading post in the 16th century to its present status as a world-class metropolis. In Bender's account, the city seems "unfinished" when compared with such classic urban models as Paris or Vienna, but its comparative lack of physical and institutional completeness is also its strength: New York is famously a home of skyscrapers but "nonetheless prizes small brick and brownstone houses"; it is known for its midtown grid but also its grid-confounding "greensward" of Central Park. It is a center of money-making and reform. "There is not and there is not to be a final truth about itself," Bender observes. Not necessarily following the path of the European models, New York was unwilling to pursue any single line of development, whether in its physical shape or its social organization. As an icon of modernity, New York necessarily must always be changing, "re-inventing itself," and therefore incomplete. Unlike recent fuller histories such as Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace's Gotham, Bender's is a thematic history of the city that argues powerfully for the importance of the American urban ideal. The writing is dense but also inspired. Recommended for urban studies collections in academic libraries.-Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Bender (history, New York U.), in a series of 14 essays, explores issues of metropolitan culture as it developed in New York City. He discusses how places and built features of the city such as Washington Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the skyscraper reveal key transformations in the scale of metropolitan space and the character of culture. The social organization of metropolitan life is examined through explorations of art, intellectual pursuits, and public culture. Finally, the political history of cities and New York is discussed with reference to relations between cities and regions and the nature of cities in the era of globalization. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Collection of distinct but companionable articles by Bender (Humanities/NYU) assessing New York City as a multiplicity of public places and institutions in flux and very much sui generis. New York, the author finds, sits outside the metropolitan idea. Unlike Paris or Vienna, it has not assumed national centrality and leadership in political and cultural matters; it doesn't realize and standardize the best hopes for the American polity. This, he figures, is because the city is continually in the making: unresolved, or resolved only temporarily. In its physical development and social organization it refuses a single logic, preferring a self-fashioned pluralism that is pragmatic, unpredictable, nonhierarchical. "The center has never held firmly in New York," Bender writes. "It has been continually undermined by fragmentation of the elite and by manifold rebellions." That has consequences for better and worse. Aspiringly democratic, polyvalent, and vibrant in architecture, politics, and art, the city is a place where, as Virgil Thomson observed, one group could argue "esthetics with intelligence and politics with a passion" while the other discussed "esthetics with passion and politics with intelligence." But New York lacks an image of itself as a collectivity; it has no representative institutions and lacks a civic culture in which "the public space is the terrain of the public as visual representation, while institutions provide a place for representative political deliberation." Bender (Intellect and Public Life, not reviewed, etc.) brings wide-ranging curiosity, literacy, and experience in urban matters to the question of New York, from the iconography of the Brooklyn Bridge and its rolein urban reconfiguration to the dialectical relationship between the city's horizontal, civic impulses and its vertical, corporate ones. There are persistent issues, including the city's racial divisions, but "New York's character is to be incomplete." A meaty and satisfying look at a great city, its multiple environments, and their unending transformations. (b&w photos throughout)

Kirkus Reviews

The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea

The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea

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About the Author

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About the Author

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What People are Saying About This

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