Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880-1935

by Alexander Wood

Overview

A sweeping history of New York that chronicles the construction of one of the world’s great cities.
 
Between the 1880s and the 1930s, New York City experienced explosive growth as nearly a million buildings, dozens of bridges and tunnels, hundreds of miles of subway lines, and thousands of miles of streets were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling population. This landscape—jagged with skyscrapers, rattling with the sound of mass transit, alive with people—made the city world-famous.
 
Building the Metropolis offers a revelatory look at this era of urban development by asking, “Who built New York, and how?” Focusing on the work of architects, builders, and construction workers, Alexander Wood chronicles the physical process of the city’s rapid expansion. New York’s towering buildings and busy thoroughfares aren’t just stylish or structural marvels, Wood shows, but the direct result of the many colorful personalities who worked in one of the city’s largest industries. This development boom drew on the resources of the whole community and required money, political will, creative vision, entrepreneurial drive, skilled workmanship, and hard physical labor. Wood shows this to be an even larger story as well. As cities became nodes in a regional, national, and global economy, the business of construction became an important motor of economic, political, and social development. While they held drastically different views on the course of urban growth, machine politicians, reformers, and radicals alike were all committed to city building on an epic scale.
 
Drawing on resources that include city archives and the records of architecture firms, construction companies, and labor unions, Building the Metropolis tells the story of New York in a way that’s epic, lively, and utterly original.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226836973
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/29/2025
Series:	Historical Studies of Urban America
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Alexander Wood is a historian of American architecture and urbanism. He was the Helen and Robert Appel Fellow in History and Technology at the New-York Historical Society from 2021 to 2022.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I. 1880–1898

1. Building a Skyscraper

2. A Season of Strikes

3. The Business of Public Works

Part II. 1898–1920

4. The Skyline Is Our Byline

5. A Great Mining District

6. The Art of Wrecking

Part III. 1920–1935

7. The Machine Age

8. Building Up the Boroughs

9. The Crack-Up

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Building Statistics, 1880–1935

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

“Wood shifts the lens of the typical architectural and urban history away from the architect and toward the construction industry and, significantly, the workers themselves. He imaginatively and aptly describes the city as an ongoing, continually unfolding scenario in which wrecking, making, and remaking have resulted in the remarkable urban phenomenon that New Yorkers and visitors appreciate today. The reader is left with a new depth of understanding in seeing the city as a built artifact, along with an appreciation for its sheer immensity and grandeur.”

— Gail Fenske, author of The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York

“The creation of modern New York required the construction of not just hundreds of thousands of buildings to provide housing and workspace for millions of people, but streets, roads, bridges, mass transit, and more. This kind of transformation cannot be adequately described in architectural and engineering terms, however important those aspects may be. It touched on every aspect of society within the city, specifically including governmental organization, and labor relations. Building the Metropolis is a closely researched history of how the New York we know came to be, in which Wood puts the physical environment in the foreground.”

— Donald Friedman, author of The Structure of Skyscrapers in America, 1871–1900: Their History and Preservation

“Building the Metropolis is quite simply one of the best and most important books ever written about New York. The big story is that Gotham shot past London to become the greatest city on earth in the half century between 1880 and 1935. But Wood tells us so much more. Who actually built the subways, schools, bridges, and streets, and a million new structures for six million new people? The result is a must-read for anyone interested in the mystery and wonder of the most historic spot in the United States.”

— Kenneth T. Jackson, editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City

“An impressive and absorbing account of the origins of New York’s modern cityscape.” 

— Kirkus Review

“Across more than three hundred lucid, densely researched pages (excluding endnotes and other back matter), Wood vividly recounts three ‘building booms’ that made, unmade, and remade the metropolis . . . While we still reflexively understand architects to be the authors of their buildings, eliding the labor of myriad other actors, Wood exhaustively reconstructs how New York City’s built environment was shaped not just by designers but also by bosses and workers engaged in struggle, by rent-seeking property owners and power-seeking Tammany Hall officials, and by all manner of contractors and subcontractors trying to build as lucratively as possible.” 

— New York Review of Architecture

From the Publisher

2024-10-12
How New York City reached great heights.

Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writes Wood, historian of American architecture and urbanism, New York City “grew into one of the world’s largest, most important, and dynamic cities.” Roughly 1 million buildings—an astonishing number—went up in the city during that period. In his deeply informed and informative account, Wood describes how population growth and a robust economy gave rise to a large and sophisticated construction industry. He deftly describes the numerous and complex arrangements that provided much-needed office buildings, homes, factories, railway stations, bridges, streets, and subway lines. We read, often in detail, about large construction firms, building trade associations, the mechanics of tunnel construction, labor unions, architectural offices, and wrecking companies. Wood introduces us to government workers and officials such as Thomas F. Gilroy (head of the city’s Department of Public Works in the 1890s) and labor organizers such as Morris Rosen. After the city consolidated in 1898, Wood extends his gaze beyond Manhattan’s skyscrapers to the lower-density outer boroughs. Throughout, he attends to the many conflicts between business and labor over the length of the workday, safety, and wages; contractor competition for private commissions and lobbying for public works projects; and city government efforts to manage the corruption, labor unrest, noise and disruption, and the regulatory demands of building activity. For those fascinated by urban development (particularly construction and particularly in New York City), reading this substantial history is time well spent. What primarily matters to Wood, however, are facts. Consequently, he refrains from any attempt at a more general understanding of building construction. In the last chapter, after a brief summary, the story simply ends.

An impressive and absorbing account of the origins of New York’s modern cityscape.

Kirkus Reviews