Miller - Supreme City: how Jazz Age Manhattan gave birth to modern America

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

To Chuck Manoli, who got our minds moving

Every American is eaten up with a longing to rise.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here.... Second, there is the New York of the commuter.... Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the lastthe city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New Yorks high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.

E. B. WHITE, HERE IS NEW YORK

T his book began as a vastly larger enterprise: a history of New York Cityall five boroughsin the years between World War I and World War II. Not long into the research, however, I was strongly drawn to a story within the larger story I had set out to tellthe transformation of Midtown Manhattan in the 1920s from a commercial backwater with one consequential skyscraper, the twenty-five-story Times Tower on Times Square at Forty-second Street and Broadway, into the entertainment and communications center of New Yorkand Americaand a business district that rivaled Wall Street in power and consequence. This transformation began in earnest with the completion of Grand Central Terminal in 1913, the magnet project for the reconstruction of Midtown, and reached its apogee in 1927, the year David Sarnoffs new NBC radio network went national, the Roxy and Ziegfeld Theatres opened, and real estate prince Fred F. French completed his Art Deco skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, one of the first terrifically tall buildings north of Forty-second Street.

In 1927, the year of Charles Lindberghs solo flight from New York to Paris, the tempo of the city had changed sharply... recalled F. Scott Fitzgerald. The parties were bigger and the buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper.... The Jazz Age now raced along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money.

I try to reimagine the city as it was then, to describe the lives of my charactersmost of them from places other than New Yorkas they lived them, unsure of what lay ahead or of posteritys judgment. In 1927, it seemed unimaginable that the greatest urban building boom in modern history would soon collapse with shocking suddenness, and that stylish, high-living Jimmy Walker, the citys immensely popular mayor, would be brought low by charges of corruption and forced to resign.

(With Place of Origin)