Gotham : a history of New York City to 1898

In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have written an epic as vast and varied as the city it chronicles, Drawing on the work of hundreds of scholars who have re-examined New York's past, the authors weave together diverse histories - of sex and sewer systems, finance and architecture, immigration and politics, poetry and crime - into a single narrative tapestry that reads like a fast paced novel.