Reporting on New York City: Books on New York City
Books on New York City
A selection of classic and useful books about New York City:
- Reference Books
- New York City History & Development
- Housing, Transportation & Infrastructure
- Essays & Culture
- The Five Boroughs: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island
The links lead to records for both print and ebook copies, when available. For more, browse all books with the Subject: New York, NY in CLIO, the library catalog (use the filters on the left to find books in dozens of languages, narrow by date, and more).
Reference Books
AIA Guide to New York City by Publication Date: 2010 (5th ed.)Hailed as "extraordinarily learned" (New York Times), "blithe in spirit and unerring in vision," (New York Magazine), and the "definitive record of New York's architectural heritage" (Municipal Art Society), Norval White and Elliot Willensky's book is an essential reference for everyone with an interest in architecture and those who simply want to know more about New York City. First published in 1968, the AIA Guide to New York City has long been the definitive guide to the city's architecture.
The Encyclopedia of New York City by Publication Date: 2010 (2nd ed.)An updated, expanded edition of the most comprehensive one-volume reference work on New York City ever compiled. A great starting place for New York City research on neighborhoods, historical events, and more.
The Historical Atlas of New York City by Publication Date: 1994The rich and eminently browsable visual guide to the history of New York. The Historical Atlas of New York City takes us, neighborhood by neighborhood, through 400 years of Gotham's rich past, describing such crucial events as the city's initial settlement of 270 people in thirty log houses; John Jacob Astor's meteoric rise from humble fur trader to the richest, most powerful man in the city; and the fascinating ethnic mixture that is modern Queens.
The WPA Guide to New York City by Publication Date: 1939Originally published in 1939 at the time of the World's Fair, this is a reissue of this guide for time-travellers. It offers New York-lovers and 1930s-buffs a look at life as it was lived in the days when a trolley ride cost only a few cents, a room at the Plaza was $7.50, Dodger fans flocked to Ebbetts Field, and the new World's Fair was the talk of the town.
New York City History & Development
The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology by Publication Date: 2000Featuring more than 200 striking photographs, rare documents, and vintage illustrations from the Schomburg's world-famous collection, and packed with thousands of fascinating details, The Black New Yorkers offers an unparalleled view of African American life.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Publication Date: 1961The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's tour de force is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities.
Empire City: New York Through the Centuries by Call Number: F128 .E47 2002Publication Date: 2002This major anthology brings together not only the best literary writing about New York—from O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Paul Auster, and James Baldwin, among many others—but also the most revealing essays by politicians, philosophers, city planners, social critics, visitors, immigrants, journalists, and historians.
Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics by Call Number: HB3722 .P497 2017Publication Date: 2017When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country's largest metropolis fail? In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today.
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Publication Date: 1999In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation.
Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 by Call Number: F128.5 .W227 2017Publication Date: 2017In this utterly immersive volume, Mike Wallace captures the swings of prosperity and downturn, from the 1898 skyscraper-driven boom to the Bankers' Panic of 1907, the labor upheaval, and violent repression during and after the First World War. Here is New York on a whole new scale, moving from national to global prominence—an urban dynamo driven by restless ambition, boundless energy, immigrant dreams, and Wall Street greed. New York was transformed in these two decades as the world's second-largest city and now its financial capital, thriving and sustained by the city's seemingly unlimited potential.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Publication Date: 2005A passionate and dramatic account of a year in the life of a city, when baseball and crime reigned supreme, and when several remarkable figures emerged to steer New York clear of one of its most harrowing periods.
Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City by Publication Date: 2009By geographically matching an 18th-century map of Manhattan's landscape to the modern cityscape, combing through historical and archaeological records, and applying modern principles of ecology and computer modeling, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson is able to show what Manhattan looked like 400 years ago, Mannahatta is a groundbreaking work that gives readers not only a window into the past, but inspiration for green cities and wild places of the future.
Names of New York: Discovering the City's Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names by Publication Date: 2021In place-names lie stories. That's the truth that animates this fascinating journey through the names of New York City's streets and parks, boroughs and bridges, playgrounds and neighborhoods. Exploring the power of naming to shape experience and our sense of place, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on the city's map.
New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation by Publication Date: 2021Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York's terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it became a different place—kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been. New York, New York, New York, Thomas Dyja's sweeping account of this metamorphosis, shows it wasn't the work of a single policy, mastermind, or economic theory, nor was it a morality tale of gentrification or crime.
New York: An Illustrated History by Publication Date: 2003The companion volume to the PBS television series, with more than 500 full-color and black-and-white illustrations. Chronicling the story of New York from its establishment as a Dutch trading post in 1624 to its global preeminence today, the book is at once the biography of a great city and a vivid exploration of the myriad forces—commercial, cultural, demographic—that converged in New York to usher in the contemporary world.
New York City: A Short History by Publication Date: 2002An exploration into what America was, is, and can become through the lens of the rapidly changing American metropolis From its origins as a primitive Dutch outpost to the sprawling urban complex it is today, the defining characteristic of New York has been constant, dramatic, and rapid change.
The Power Broker by Call Number: NA9085.M68 C37 1975Publication Date: 1975A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man's incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and mis-shaping) of 20th century New York. One of the Modern Library's hundred greatest books of the 20th century.
The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present by Publication Date: 2018 (3rd ed.)A brief, insightful and lively history of the peoples, events and interactions that have formed New York City. Weaving together the shifting currents of economic, political, social, and cultural life, Joanne Reitano shows how New York has acted both as an indicator and a driver of the American experience in its negotiation of evolving urban challenges
Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II by Publication Date: 2000With a keen eye for historical detail and a firm grasp of the intricacies of New York City politics, Freeman shows how the anti-communist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealism, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt a crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city's wealthy elite made an audacious grab for power.
Housing, Transportation & Infrastructure
722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York by Publication Date: 1993When it first opened on October 27, 1904, the New York City subway ran 22 miles from City Hall to 145th Street and Lenox Avenue--the longest stretch ever built at one time. From that initial route through the completion of the IND or Independent Subway line in the 1940s, the subway grew to cover 722 miles—long enough to reach from New York to Chicago. In this definitive history, Clifton Hood traces the complex and fascinating story of the New York City subway system.
Affordable Housing in New York by Publication Date: 2015A richly illustrated history of below-market housing in New York, from the 1920s to today. The book examines the people, places, and policies that have helped make New York livable, from early experiments by housing reformers and the innovative public-private solutions of the 1970s and 1980s to today's professionalized affordable housing industry.
Freedomland: Co-Op City and the Story of New York by Publication Date: 2022In Freedomland, Annemarie H. Sammartino tells Co-op City's story from the perspectives of those who built it and of the ordinary people who made their homes in this monument to imperfect liberal ideals of economic and social justice. In 1965, Co-op City was planned as the largest middle-class housing development in the United States. Sammartino's narrative connects planning, economic, and political history and the history of race in America.
Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City by Publication Date: 2013America's largest city generates garbage in torrents--11,000 tons from households each day on average. But New Yorkers don't give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a litter basket, and promptly forget about it. In Picking Up, the anthropologist Robin Nagle introduces us to the men and women of New York City's Department of Sanitation and makes clear why this small army of uniformed workers is the most important labor force on the streets.
Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century by Publication Date: 2008When it comes to large-scale public housing in the United States, the consensus for the past decades has been to let the wrecking balls fly. Yet one notable exception to this national tragedy remains. The New York City Housing Authority, America's largest public housing manager, still maintains over 400,000 tenants in its vast and well-run high-rise projects. By focusing on what worked, rather than on the conventional history of failure and blame, Bloom provides useful models for addressing the current crisis in affordable urban housing.
The Works: Anatomy of a City by Publication Date: 2005Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more.
Essays & Culture
The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts by Publication Date: 2003Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived in—or spent time—in the greatest of American cities. A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city's inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home; of those who have conquered its challenges; and of those who struggle against its cruelties.
Here Is New York by Call Number: F128.5 .W58 1999Publication Date: 1949Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E.B. White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times has named Here is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker calls it "the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city."
Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Call Number: P40.5.L562 U674 2024Publication Date: 2024From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet.
Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas by Publication Date: 2016Nonstop Metropolis, the culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts—from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists—amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey.
One Out of Three: Immigrant New York in the Twenty-First Century by Publication Date: 2013This anthology features in-depth portraits of diverse ethnic populations, revealing the surprising new realities of immigrant life in twenty-first-century New York City. Contributors show how nearly fifty years of massive inflows have transformed New York City's economic and cultural life and how the city has changed the lives of immigrant newcomers.
The Five Boroughs
The Birth of the Bronx: 1609-1900 by Publication Date: 2000The Birth of The Bronx touches on the hardships, the daring, the glory, and the day to day living of the people who helped make The Bronx what it is today. It is told in their own words as recorded in their journals, diaries, letters, and memoirs. One of four volumes in the Life in The Bronx series.
Break Beats in the Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop's Early Years by Publication Date: 2017The origin story of hip-hop—one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx—has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. He questions the unexamined assumptions about hip-hop's beginnings, including why there are just four traditional elements—DJing, MCing, breaking, and graffiti writing—and not others, why the South Bronx and not any other borough or city is considered the cradle of the form, and which artists besides Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash founded the genre.
The Bronx by Publication Date: 2004The home of the Yankees, the Bronx Zoo; and the Grand Concourse, the Bronx was once a haven for upwardly mobile second-generation immigrants eager to leave crowded Manhattan tenements. But during the 1960s and 1970s, neighborhoods that had held generations of Bronx families disappeared under waves of arson, crime, and housing abandonment, with solid blocks of brick apartment buildings turning into rubble-filled empty acres. This is the history of the New York City borough that has made a complete revolution—from the home of the American dream to the last place on earth and back again.
South Bronx Battles by Publication Date: 2019Community activist Carolyn McLaughlin takes us on a journey of the South Bronx through the eyes of its community members. Facing burned-out neighborhoods of the 1970s, the community fought back. McLaughlin illustrates the spirit of the community in creating a vibrant, diverse culture and its decades-long commitment to develop nonprofit housing and social-services, and to advocate for better education, health care, and a healthier environment.
Brooklyn: The Once and Future City by Publication Date: 2019An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early 17th century to today. America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades—celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella tells the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world's most resurgent cities.
The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York by Publication Date: 2011Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation, locating the origins of gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.
The World in Brooklyn: Gentrification, Immigration, and Ethnic Politics in a Global City by Publication Date: 2012The World in Brooklyn: Gentrification, Immigration, and Ethnic Politics in a Global City, is a collection of scholarly papers which analyze demographic, social, political, and economic trends that are occurring in Brooklyn. The chapters investigate issues of social class, urban development, immigration, race, ethnicity and politics within the context of Brooklyn.
Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum by Publication Date: 2010Located in today's Chinatown, Five Points witnessed more riots, scams, prostitution, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in America. But at the same time it was a font of creative energy and the home of meeting halls for the political clubs and the machine politicians who would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. Drawing from letters, diaries, newspapers, bank records, police reports, and archaeological digs, Anbinder has written the first-ever history of Five Points, the neighborhood that was a microcosm of the American immigrant experience.
Twenty Minutes in Manhattan by Publication Date: 2009"The walk from my apartment in Greenwich Village to my studio in Tribeca takes about twenty minutes, depending upon the route and whether I stop for a coffee and the Times. Invariably, though, it begins with a trip down the stairs." And so sets out architecture critic Michael Sorkin on his daily walk from his home in a Manhattan old-law-style tenement building. Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is his personal, anecdotal account of his casual encounters with the physical space and social dimensions of this unparalleled city.
When Harlem Was in Vogue by Publication Date: 1981When Harlem Was in Vogue recaptures the excitement of the decade and a half following World War I, displaying the intoxicating hope that black Americans could create important art and compel the nation to recognize their equality. This extensively-researched, fascinating volume reveals the major significance of the Renaissance as a movement which sprang up in Harlem but lent its mood to the entire era, and as a culturally-vital period whose after-effects continue to add immeasurably to the richness and character of American life.
Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic by Publication Date: 2023A vibrant exploration of the everyday life of one of the most diverse places in the world: Queens, New York. Remade by decades of immigration, Queens, New York, has emerged as an emblematic space of social mixing and encounters across multiple lines of difference. With its expansive subdivisions, tangled highways, and centerless form, it is also New York's most enigmatic borough. Through more than 200 contemporary photographs, Joseph Heathcott captures this multifaceted borough.
Immigrant Crossroads: Globalization, Incorporation, and Placemaking in Queens, New York by Publication Date: 2021Nearly half the 2.3 million residents of Queens, New York are foreign-born. Immigrants in Queens hail from more than 120 countries and speak more than 135 languages. As an epicenter of immigrant diversity, Queens is an urban gateway that exemplifies opportunities and challenges in shaping a multi-racial democracy. The editors and contributors to Immigrant Crossroads examine the social, spatial, economic, and political dynamics that stem from this fast-growing urbanization.
The Neighborhoods of Queens by Publication Date: 2007This intimate portrait of the 99 neighborhoods of Queens is a wonderful tribute to the borough's past history and present diversity. Detailing the history, people, and cultural activities of each neighborhood, the book is generously illustrated with more than 200 photographs, both contemporary and historical, and over 50 maps that chart the precise neighborhood boundaries.
The New Noir by Publication Date: 2019The expansion of the Black American middle class and the unprecedented increase in the number of Black immigrants since the 1960s have transformed the cultural landscape of New York. In The New Noir, Orly Clerge explores the richly complex worlds of an extraordinary generation of Black middle class adults who have migrated from different corners of the African diaspora to suburbia. Paying particular attention to the largest Black ethnic groups in the country, Black Americans, Jamaicans, and Haitians, Clerge's ethnography draws on over 80 interviews with residents to examine the overlooked places where New York's middle class resides in Queens and Long Island.
Discovering Staten Island: A 350th Anniversary Commemorative History by Publication Date: 2011As one of the five boroughs of New York City, Staten Island has a rich and colorful past, and it is full of places where people have shaped the city, state and nation. To commemorate its 350th anniversary, local community leaders and educators have gathered together this unprecedented collection.
The Forgotten Borough: Staten Island and the Subway by Publication Date: 2023What sets Staten Island apart from the rest of New York City? The island's identity has in part been defined in opposition to the city, its physical and cultural differences, and the perception of neglect by city government. It has long been whiter, wealthier, less populated, and more politically conservative. Kenneth M. Gold argues that the lack of a subway connection has deeply shaped Staten Island's history and identity. He chronicles decades of recurrent efforts to build a rail link, using this history to explore the borough's fraught relationship with New York City as a whole.
Staten Island: Conservative Bastion in a Liberal City by Publication Date: 2012Staten Island is New York City's smallest yet fastest growing borough: a conservative, suburban community of nearly a half a million on the fringe of the nation's most liberal, global city. Staten Island: Conservative Bastion in a Liberal City chronicles how this "forgotten borough" has grappled with its uneasy relationship with the rest of the City of New York since the 1920s.
