In this history of what New York City came from and what it can become, Thomas Bender invokes architecture, art, photography, city planning, and sociology. He explores a variety of subjects as they relate to the city. The rise (and fall) of intellectuals, how business affected architecture (the prevalence of high-rise buildings), the symbiosis between universities and the city.

“New York today has become such a racially and class divided city that it takes some effort to recall the essentially working and lower-middle class character of the city in the first half of the twentieth century.” He might have added economically divided, but this book was published in 2002 when the distinctions may not have been as sharp as they are today. He decries the homogenization of Times Square: “The bright signs remind me not of older New York but rather of the new Seoul.”

Bender makes a case for the city as “a center of difference” and maybe the only city in the U.S. able to “stand against the rising tide of privatization, residential isolation, intolerance toward difference, and the substitution of consumerism for politics.” He believes the challenge is for New York City to “confront the present and reinvent a metropolitan public that will in and of itself sustain a vital culture of creativity and a politics of justice.” ( )