| | The Historical Atlas of New York City. Eric Homberger.
Similar to Mayer and Wade's Chicago:
Growth of A Metropolis, Homberger's book tells the
story of a great city through images, photographs, maps
and diagrams. Subtitled A Visual Celebration of Nearly
400 Year's of New York City's History, the book starts
in 1609 when Henry Hudson was hired by the Dutch East India
Company to find a northern route to China, and ends in 1994
with the writer lamenting over Broadway's decline but optimistic
for its future. Each chapter in between deals with a roughly
50-year span of time, defining the important events for
the city in the respective period and then using primarily
maps and diagrams to elucidate particular aspects. It is
through these graphics - with Alice Hudson's cartographic
assistance - that the book finds its saving grace, as the
book is not as thorough historically, as in Burrow and Wallace's
pre-1900 account Gotham, or physically, as in Stern
and others' New York 1880, 1930 and 1960
tomes. Those books have their place, as does Homberger's
slimmer "atlas", which uses maps and other diagrams
to add a perspective and understanding that cannot be grasped
by words and photographs alone.
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