The Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment has just pub­lished my review of three immense­ly impres­sive stud­ies of urban his­to­ry: Gail Fenske’s The Sky­scraper and the City: The Wool­worth Build­ing and the Mak­ing of Mod­ern New York (Chica­go), Robert H. Kar­gon & Arthur P. Molel­la’s Invent­ed Edens: Tech­no-Cities of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (MIT), and Dell Upton’s Anoth­er City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New Amer­i­can Repub­lic (Yale).

This is the first para­graph:

“At 7.30 on the evening of April 24, 1913, Pres­i­dent Woodrow Wil­son pushed a but­ton on his desk in Wash­ing­ton, DC, send­ing a tele­graph­ic sig­nal to New York where it set off an alarm bell in the engine room of a sky­scraper and set in motion four mighty Corliss-type engines and dynamos. In an instant, some 80,000 incan­des­cent bulbs flashed on, illu­mi­nat­ing for the first time the world’s tallest sky­scraper – the Wool­worth Build­ing. Thou­sands of spec­ta­tors had gath­ered in City Hall Park and along low­er Broad­way to wit­ness the daz­zling elec­tri­cal spec­ta­cle that marked the open­ing of this fifty-five-storey addi­tion to New York’s sky­line. On the New Jer­sey shore, peo­ple caught their breath as the tow­er appeared, shim­mer­ing against the night sky, a gleam­ing bea­con of moder­ni­ty vis­i­ble from ships a hun­dred miles away. As the 792-foot tall sky­scraper was bathed in elec­tric light, the news was being trans­mit­ted from its pin­na­cle by Mar­coni wire­less to a receiv­er on the Eif­fel Tow­er. From there it was beamed around the world. This mod­ern media event was, as one com­men­ta­tor said, ‘the pre­mier pub­lic­i­ty stunt of this or any oth­er day’. It was a fit­ting open­ing for what would become the most famous office build­ing in the world.”

Read the rest here.