Concret and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City

Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. By Matthew Gandy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.344 PP. Index, notes, maps, illustrations, photographs. Cloth, $34.95. ISBN 0-262-0224-6.

Reviewed by Richard Longstreth

The city of New York has long offered fertile ground for historians. In its physical environment, cultural production, business achievement, social relations, and many other arenas, the metropolis provides a gargantuan fare of ideas, events, and trends that carry implications far beyond its five boroughs and adjacent counties. New York is, of course, a city of extremes, and a persistent tendency exists to posit phenomena that occur there as reflective of …