New York Is Not an Exception to the American Story
· The Atlantic
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In the eyes of its many critics, New York City has always been both too American and not American enough. It’s the place where the pursuit of profit curdles into greed—where hustlers, financiers, and real-estate speculators conjure fortunes out of thin air. Just as often, it’s dismissed as too crowded, too diverse, and too entangled with the wider world to fit the vision of a mythical “real America.” The complaints are as old as the republic itself. During New York City’s brief turn as the first American capital under the Constitution, a Boston newspaper dubbed it “a vortex of folly and dissipation.” Again and again, to outsiders, New York has presented an exaggerated vision of what the country is becoming—or worse, what it might already be.
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New York’s many champions have always found something much deeper beneath the myths and caricatures. One, the historian Mike Wallace, died this past week. In 1976, Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows (who died in 2018) set out to write the definitive chronicle of their city. Their work produced one co-authored volume, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1999), and two more by Wallace alone, Greater Gotham (2017) and Gotham at War (2025), covering the city’s history through 1945.
Taken as a whole, the project marks one of the great feats of American historical scholarship and writing. The books are encyclopedic in scale and ambition, but never in feel. They’re wry, intensely readable, and alive with a Whitman-esque delight in the city’s people and places, all while remaining clear-eyed and unflinching. Wallace and Burrows achieve what people have been trying to do since the city’s beginnings: They make New York legible in all of its contradictions.
As the authors explain in a chapter on “Seeing New York” in the first volume, the mere act of witnessing the city is a complicated task. There was the problem of coming to grips with New York’s many transformations through time—from a peripheral trading post in the 17th century to a colonial seaport in the 18th to the center of national finance, culture, and manufacturing in the 19th and beyond.
Then there was the disorientation wrought by so many people and goods moving through the city. Many observers, such as Henry Theodore Tuckerman, who recounted a stroll down Broadway in The Atlantic in 1866, couldn’t help reaching for metaphors of oceans, rivers, and tides to describe the relentless motion of humanity. As Tuckerman noted, the global bazaar of goods seemed to match the global composition of the people: “Persian carpets, Lyons silks, Genoa velvets, ribbons from Coventry and laces from Brussels, the furs of the Northwest, glass of Bohemia, ware of China, nuts from Brazil, silver of Nevada mines, Sicily lemons, Turkey figs,” and on and on. Writers rattled off such lists not just because New York was big, but because it contained too much to be understood all at once.
Another impression of New York was what Burrows and Wallace call “a stark, indeed shocking, contrast between the new social classes: a monied aristocracy of debauched nouveaux riches and a threatening mass of degenerate immigrants.” In confronting this reality, many writers argued that the worlds of the wealthy and the poor each contained their own forms of corruption and moral danger. All of this became a kind of Rorschach test, producing rival pronouncements on the city and the nation that it seemed to be destroying or elevating. There was the rural upstate doctor, Joel Ross, who lamented in 1851 the city’s “trials, losses, frowns, failures, pestilence, poverty, and hypocrisy,” warning that New York was “to dwellers in the country, very like what white lights at night are to flies—brilliant and attractive, but certain ruin.” And there were the boosters, who championed New York as the nation’s great economic engine (“the locomotive of these United States,” one man bragged in 1857) and a multiethnic marvel (“a mixture of many materials makes the best mortar,” a historian wrote in 1859).
The Gotham series explains these competing visions by revealing the historical conditions that shaped them. The currents of people and goods coursing down Broadway become comprehensible once you understand how quickly New York became a hub of so much economic activity and cultural capital. The city’s worlds of dazzling wealth and desperate poverty become intelligible if you’ve followed Burrows and Wallace into a merchant prince’s drawing room and through the heterogeneous warrens of the Five Points slums.
Burrows and Wallace teach readers to see New York not as an exception to the American story, but as one of the places where it unfolds most vividly. As they observe in the introduction to Gotham, entire realms of national life are referred to using city addresses: Wall Street for finance, Ellis Island for immigration, Broadway for entertainment. Within New York’s tight spaces, the country’s recurring arguments over commerce and inequality, immigration and identity, openness and belonging are most visible, sometimes uncomfortably so. It’s all there, if you choose to look.