Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manhattan and the New York Idea
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From a Sibert Medalist comes the epic story of Manhattan—a magical, maddening island “for all” and a microcosm of America. A veteran nonfiction storyteller dives deep into the four-hundred-year history of Manhattan to map the island’s unexpected intersections. Focusing on the evolution of four streets and a square (Wall Street, 42nd Street, West 4th Street, 125th Street, and Union Square) Marc Aronson explores how new ideas and forms of art evolved from social blending. Centuries of conflict—among original Americans and Europeans, slavers and the enslaved, rich and poor, immigrants and native-born—produced segregation, oppression, and violence, but also new ways of speaking, singing, and being American. From the Harlem Renaissance to Hammerstein, from gay pride in the Village to political clashes at Tammany Hall, this clear-eyed pageant of the island’s joys and struggles—enhanced with photos and drawings, multimedia links to music and film, and an extensive bibliography and source notes—is, above all, a love song to Manhattan’s triumphs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this ambitious, richly visual "biography of an island and an idea," Aronson (Poisoned Water) covers 400 years of Manhattan history, beginning with Munsee and Lenape agriculture and continuing through Civil War draft riots, AIDS activism, and Covid-19. Tracing the city's initial evolution through five loci, he focuses on Wall Street, a center of displacement, revolution, and finance; Union Square, a new kind of city center; 42nd Street, which challenged artistic sensibilities; "transnational" West 4th Street, "capital of revolutionary thinking and living"; and 125th Street, center of the Harlem Renaissance and subsequent cultural movements. Details about the city's subsequent fall and rise follow, not stinting on people and motivations rooted in prejudice, including a city-wide "racial purge" in 1863. An intersectionally inclusive, well-contextualized volume about a city that constantly "create and re-creat itself out of the clash and confluence of its self-renewing resource: its people." Ample visuals include archival photos, historic maps, and newspaper illustrations; extensive back matter follows. Ages 10–up. ■
