Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, by Donald L. Miller
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Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, by Donald L. Miller
Free PDF Ebook Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, by Donald L. Miller
“Supreme City captures a vanished Gotham in all its bustle, gristle, and glory” (Vanity Fair). In the 1920s midtown Manhattan became the center of New York City, and the cultural and commercial capital of America. This is the story of the people who made it happen.In just four words—“the capital of everything”—Duke Ellington captured Manhattan during one of the most exciting and celebrated eras in our history: the Jazz Age. Supreme City is the story of Manhattan’s growth and transformation in the 1920s and the brilliant people behind it. Nearly all of the makers of modern Manhattan came from elsewhere: Walter Chrysler from the Kansas prairie; entertainment entrepreneur Florenz Ziegfeld from Chicago. William Paley, founder of the CBS radio network, was from Philadelphia, while his rival David Sarnoff, founder of NBC, was a Russian immigrant. Cosmetics queen Elizabeth Arden was Canadian and her rival, Helena Rubenstein, Polish. All of them had in common vaulting ambition and a desire to fulfill their dreams in New York. As mass communication emerged, the city moved from downtown to midtown through a series of engineering triumphs—Grand Central Terminal and the new and newly chic Park Avenue it created, the Holland Tunnel, and the modern skyscraper. In less than ten years Manhattan became the social, cultural, and commercial hub of the country. The 1920s was the Age of Jazz—and the Age of Ambition. Transporting, deeply researched, and utterly fascinating, Supreme City “elegantly introduces one vivid character after another to re-create a vital and archetypical era…A triumph” (The New York Times).
Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, by Donald L. Miller- Amazon Sales Rank: #102613 in Books
- Brand: Miller, Donald L.
- Published on: 2015-05-19
- Released on: 2015-05-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.90" w x 6.12" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 784 pages
From Booklist *Starred Review* Miller dates the pivotal transformation of midtown Manhattan from the completion of Grand Central Terminal in 1913 and its direct impact on the area nearby, but he focuses on the next decade, during the colorful Prohibition Era mayoralty of Jimmy Walker. From 1921 to 1929, we learn, a building went up in New York, on average, every 51 minutes. Along with the construction came monumental cultural changes, described here in commensurate detail. In what amounts to a social history of an extraordinary place and time (though there is no attempt to explicitly demonstrate the premise of the subtitle), Miller offers portraits of outsized individuals who altered New York, most of them not native New Yorkers: architects, such as the Rumanian Jew, Emery Roth; media pioneers (David Sarnoff and William Paley); newspaper and book publishers (Horace Liveright, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, Bennett Cerf) , Broadway producers (Flo Ziegfeld), musicians (Duke Ellington); sports figures (Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth), and successful merchants (Bergdorf and Goodman, Gimbel, et al.). He includes exceptional immigrant women: rival cosmetics giants Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden and designer Hattie Carnegie. Miller’s prose is workmanlike but his scope prodigious, even if the book’s focus blurs amidst the deluge of minutiae. Predominantly relying on previous publications, Miller usefully attaches a 50-page bibliography that, perhaps as much as the text itself, will become an essential resource for future historians. --Mark Levine
Review “A great skyscraper of a book. Supreme City is the improbable story not just of America's greatest metropolis during the Jazz Age, but the biography of an epoch.” (Rick Atkinson, author of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Europe, 1944-1945)“Supreme City sings with all the excitement and the brilliance of the Jazz Age it recounts. Donald Miller is one of America’s most fervent and insightful writers about the urban experience; here he gives us New York City at its grandest and most optimistic.” (Kevin Baker, author of The Big Crowd)“Donald L. Miller’s latest triumph. . . . [he] elegantly introduces one vivid character after another to recreate a vital and archetypical era when, as Duke Ellington declared, the whole world revolved around New York.” (Sam Roberts The New York Times)“Sweeping. . . . Enjoyable. . . . [In the 1920s] New York was the United States intensified, an electric vessel into which the hopes and desires of a nation were distilled. As Mr. Miller's vivid and exhaustive chronicle demonstrates, Jazz Age Manhattan was the progenitor of cultural movements—individualized fusions of art and commerce—that came to symbolize the American way of life.” (David Freeland The Wall Street Journal)“Lower Manhattan dominated New York for three hundred years. In the 1920’s, however, as Donald L. Miller makes clear in a page-turning book with an astonishing cast of characters, Midtown became the beating heart of the metropolis. Supreme City is about how these few square miles at the center of a small island gave birth to modern America. If you love Gotham, you will love this book.” (Kenneth T. Jackson, Barzun Professor of History, Columbia University; Editor-in-Chief, The Encyclopedia of New York City)“Supreme City captures a vanished Gotham in all its bustle, gristle, and glory.” (David Friend Vanity Fair)“A splendid account of the construction boom in Midtown Manhattan between World War I and the Great Depression, and the transformation of transportation, communications, publishing, sports, and fashion that accompanied it. . . . [Miller is] a virtuosic storyteller.” (Glenn C. Altschuler The Philadelphia Inquirer)“Donald L. Miller has long been one of my favorite historians. Anyone who reads Supreme City will understand why. Miller brilliantly examines the birth of Midtown Manhattan during the glorious Jazz Age. It’s the story of how a gaggle of success-hungry out-of-towners—including Duke Ellington, Walter Chrysler, E. B. White, and William Paley—turned the Valley of Giant Skyscrapers near Grand Central Terminal into the symbolic epicenter of wealth, power, and American can-doism. Highly recommended!” (Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History, Rice University and author of Cronkite)“Miller captures the heady excitement and enduring creativity of 1920s Manhattan. . . . Conveying the panoramic sweep of the era with wit, illuminating details, humor, and style, Miller illustrates how Midtown Manhattan became the nation’s communications, entertainment, and commercial epicenter.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))“Lively . . . synthesizes a vast amount of material on everything from skyscrapers to showgirls to create a scintillating portrait of Manhattan in the ’20s. . . . Much of Supreme City’s charm comes from the amiable way Donald Miller ambles through Jazz Age Manhattan, exploring any corner of it that strikes his fancy.” (Wendy Smith The Daily Beast)“An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment. . . . The narrative bursts with a dizzying succession of tales about the politicos, impresarios, merchants, sportsmen, performers, gangsters and hustlers who accounted for an unprecedented burst of creativity and achievement. . . . A scholarly . . . social history but one with plenty of sex appeal.” (―Kirkus Reviews (starred review, one of the Best History Books of the Year))
About the Author Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History at Lafayette College and author of nine books, including City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, and Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America. He has hosted, coproduced, or served as historical consultant for more than thirty television documentaries and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. Visit DonaldMillerBooks.com.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful. Supreme Book for a Supreme City By Constant Reader I loved this book. It is a collection of fascinating vignettes of Manhattan in the 1920s. This covers everything from Jimmy Walker to gangsters to Texas Guinan to William J Wilgus, the architect of Grand Central Terminal, to beauty entrepreneurs to Fred F French & Irwin S Chanin to Walter Chrysler and his beloved skyscraper. Also included are "Roxy' Rothafel & his magnificent movie palace & the radio boys, Sarnoff & Paley, Jack Dempsey & Gene Tunney, Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig, Duke Ellington & Flo Ziegfeld.There is something for everyone here if you are interested in New York's history. It was a fascinating time of great change for the great metropolis. The personalities are split up into 27 chapters with each chapter standing on it own. This is good because if you have no interest in boxing you can skip this chapter and move on to a character and subject that interest you. It is well written and moves you along at a quick New York pace.I enjoyed reading Donald Miller's "City of the Century" 18 years ago. That book is his history of Chicago. While I am a Chicagoan I think this book is much better. I think if you love New York then you will love this book.
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful. Brilliant, Rose-Colored History of Midtown Manhattan in the 1920s. By Gateur2 Historians recording the arrival of railroads in the American West have described situations where a railroad bypassed an existing town, which was soon superseded by a completely new town which rapidly developed around a station on the new railroad line. An analogous situation occurred in early 20th Century New York City, where the New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad built major terminals in mid-Manhattan: Grand Central Terminal at 42nd Street and Pennsylvania Station at 34th Street. Both sites were well north of the city's traditional Downtown - "Wall Street," the densely-developed Central Business District at the southern tip of the island. The construction of the two new terminals in what (until then) had been considered New York City's traditional Uptown soon transformed the area into a second, completely new Central Business District - Midtown Manhattan. As a further consequence, the sparsely developed, almost rural, area further north - above 59th Street and adjoining Central Park -- became the city's new Uptown. Donald Miller's book is a study of the creation and impact of Midtown Manhattan during the 1920s. Previously, the district was characterized by docks, warehouses, bars, gas works and abattoirs along both its riverbanks; factories, tenements and middle class townhouses as one went further inland; and, finally a parade of ostentatious mansions centered along Manhattan's spine of Fifth Avenue. Miller chronicles the district's transformation from "a commercial backwater" into a veritable new and exciting city. Midtown Manhattan became a cluster of glamorous theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, boutiques, high-end department stores and (especially) skyscrapers. It became "the entertainment and communications center of New York - and America - and a business district that rivaled Wall Street in power and consequence." Miller begins his story when the Wall Street district still contained all but one of the city's skyscrapers. These embodied New York City's position as the Capital of Capitalism, after the City of London's decline when Britain became impoverished by its lengthy fight in World War I. Wall Street skyscrapers were the headquarters of the city's, and most of the nation's, largest banks. Wall Street was also home of the nation's largest insurance and manufacturing firms, and the most powerful and prestigious law firms. Virtually all were dominated by WASPs, most of whom barely acknowledged and rarely hired Irish or German immigrants (or their children or grandchildren), except for menial jobs; considered Blacks fit only for janitorial work; and regarded Jews as anathema.Miller concludes his story in the late 1920s, when there were still more skyscrapers Downtown than Midtown; but the latter were taller, more beautiful, and arguably just as important. The Midtown office skyscrapers housed rapidly growing radio, publishing, real estate and advertising businesses, while the residential skyscrapers (especially their penthouses) were home to many of the city's large and growing number of millionaires. Downtown New York had been challenged, but not eclipsed, by the new Midtown. Miller calls the new skyscraper district, "a miniature Wall Street," which was "markedly different in character and cachet from the closed world of the Morgans and the Harrimans - yet rich and uncompromisingly modern, a place where new blood and fresh ideas mattered [more than family, race and ethnicity]."Much of the vitality of Midtown Manhattan resulted from the job opportunities it provided to new immigrants, and their rapidly-assimilated children, as well as to (white) newcomers to the city from other parts of America. Benefits to non-Whites consisted mainly of `trickle-down" revenues to musically-talented performers working at nightclubs and radio performances. Out of the 33 persons Miller lists in his "Cast of Characters" only one (Duke Ellington) is not white, and only 6 have New York City as their "Place of Origin." The others arrived from places as close as Philadelphia, Chicago and Waco, Texas, and from as far away as Switzerland, Austria, Slovakia, Poland and Belarus. A substantial portion of the newcomers were Jews, and all the foreign immigrants came from Europe. The racial exclusion laws which America and Canada enacted during the previous century ensured that very, very few of the newcomers to New York (or anyplace else in North America) came from China or Japan.Although the author lists only 33 persons in his official "Cast of Characters," the book's full ensemble contains almost ten times as many actors. Miller uses them to write much more than an architectural or technological history of Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers. He has interweaved multitudinous mini-biographies to create a dazzling combination of economic, social, and cultural history. The book's complete cast includes not only the builders, financiers, architects, and iron workers responsible for creating the new skyscrapers, but also innumerable politicians, actors, restaurateurs, fashion designers, fighters, singers, scientists, writers, publishers, aviators, musicians, dress makers, sandhogs, playboy millionaires, and scores of others responsible for creating Jazz Age Manhattan. The author coordinates his ensemble by using Midtown Manhattan for the book's setting, and by selecting Mayor Jimmy Walker (son of an Irish Catholic immigrant) as the book's leading character. Two chapters focus entirely upon Beau James, and he makes guest appearances in almost every other chapter: visiting Tin Pan Alley to seek songwriting work in his early years; fighting New York State censorship laws; presenting Charles Lindbergh with the Key to the City and accompanying him in the tickertape parade; chatting with Texas Guinan in her gangster-owned speakeasy; attending boxing matches at Madison Square Garden; sitting in the audience of the Ziegfeld Follies, watching himself being impersonated by Eddie Cantor and listening to "My New York," a song "written expressly for the Mayor by Irving Berlin"; allowing city officials to categorize Edwin Goodman as Bergdorf-Goodman's "janitor", so the owner and his family could legally reside in a penthouse built at top of the exclusive department store; making a late night visit to the Cotton Club, which had "a special `Royal Box' reserved for `The Nightime Mayor [;]'" sending Ziegfeld's widow a (declined) offer of an official funeral for her husband; and, resigning in disgrace after the Seabury Committee's investigation of corruption during his administration.I have several criticisms. The first concerns the length of the book, nearly 800 pages. That is too long. The chapters which discuss Prohibition, speakeasies, gangsters and the rise of organized crime are interesting and colorful, but add relatively little to the book's thesis and arguments. These chapters should have been severely pruned and consolidated, thereby creating a shorter book which would rest more easily upon a reclining reader's stomach.My next criticisms deal with subjects I feel that (based upon the book's subtitle) the author should have discussed, but did not. This means that I criticize the book for being too long and also for not being long enough. Deal with it.A book about "Jazz Age Manhattan" and its impact on the "Birth of Modern America" raises expectations of an analysis, or at least a description, of the men, women, and firms who produced New York City's music, as well as those who performed and broadcast it. Even the most improvizational of jazz musicians ultimately depended upon sheet music scored, written, and published by someone other than themselves. Except for a brief mention in the chapter on Duke Ellington, there is no reference to Tin Pan Alley, much less any extended discussion of the workings of Manhattan's composers, song writers and music publishers during the 1920s. They had already resolved fierce internecine disputes to present a united front against the Phonograph Industry via the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). The coming of radio caused further inter-industry battles all throughout the 1920s, wherein broadcasting moguls David Sarnoff and Bill Paley were necessarily forced to ignore their personal differences and work closely together. Furthermore, the 1927 premiere of "The Jazz Singer" brought the motion picture industry into the fray. The outcome of these judicial/legislative/regulatory battles, covered by Bruce Pollock in A Friend in the Music Business: The Story of ASCAP (a work uncited by Miller), were just as important as the invention, commercialization, and national diffusion of the new technologies of radio and talking pictures. Supreme City's omission of this topic caused me to remove one star from my evaluation of the book.The author provides an excellent description of the Midtown skyscrapers' builders, and the arcane, but vitally important, subject of skyscraper financing in the decades before federally-regulated Real Estate Investment Trusts. His discussion of new mortgage-based securities mass marketed by investment syndicates would be more useful, however, if accompanied by more discussion about the rise of new real estate firms, especially those offering property management services. Upper class residents who moved from demolished mansions to new residential skyscrapers demanded services much different from those provided for traditional tenement dwellers. Like "the new breed of entertainment entrepreneurs" who built and operated "film theaters in and around Times Square," many of the Midtown skyscrapers' builders and realtors included "success-hungry Jews...who had grown up in extreme poverty and advanced rapidly in an industry in which there were few social or ethnic barriers." The uber-WASP officers of the New York Central Railroad may have initiated the skyscraper boom by their novel utilization of air rights over the railroad's properties, but the WASP establishment (including its major realtors) was slow to recognize and take full advantage of the unexpectedly large demand for skyscraper footage (commercial and especially residential) outside of the Grand Central Zone.Since the book seeks to describe the impact of Midtown Manhattan upon the rest of America, the main "Cast of Characters" should also have included James E. Casey. The founder and president of United Parcel Service came to New York from Seattle via Los Angeles, and created Manhattan's first mechanized Distribution Center. Workers using conveyer belts unloaded and deconsolidated massive streams of packages transported in by large trucks from Lord & Taylor and other high-end department stores; and then sorted, reconsolidated, and reloaded the packages into smaller delivery vans which transported them to the customers' homes. Later, North Carolina trucker Malcom McLean created the nation's (and the world's) largest truck firm by using similar Distribution Center technology for long-distance (as opposed to local) inland freight delivery, with heterogeneous fleets of delivery vans and tractor-trailers. He subsequently invented cargo containerization by scaling up Distribution Center infrastructure. He used tractor-trailers in place of delivery vans, container ships in place of tractor-trailers, and seaport container terminals in place of inland truck terminals. The international sea transport of cargo containers (Wired Magazine's "20 Ton Packets") provided the physical basis of globalization. Later, Arkansas retailer Sam Walton developed still another type of Distribution Center, which relied upon computerized communications. The Distribution Centers of Walmart, K-Mart, Home Depot, Toys-R-Us, and other Big Box Retailers handled freight carried in (first from American wholesalers, then directly from American manufacturers, and finally from Asian manufacturers via Pacific Coast seaports) and out (to individual stores) on homogenous fleets of tractor-trailers. Since Casey's development of mechanized UPS Distribution Centers in Midtown Manhattan marked an important early stage in the evolution of both globalization and American deindustrialization, he deserves a brief mention in the book.My final criticism of Supreme City concerns its overly positive view of the Jazz Age. The author recognizes that the economic excess of the Jazz Age (especially inflated values of urban property) was one of the causes of the 1929 Crash and Great Depression. The gravamen of my final complaint is that Supreme City rarely acknowledges any other downside to the Jazz Age. The book downplays its social and personal costs, except for those incurred by the rise of organized crime which followed the onset of Prohibition. Alcoholism is occasionally mentioned, but only as part of the life stories of brilliant, doomed writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald) and publishers (Horace Liveright) who burned themselves out. There is no mention (much less detailed discussion) of any possible correlation between the spread of Jazz Age lifestyles and an overall rise in alcohol-related deaths and disease: cirrohsis, delirium tremens, tuberculosis, wood alcohol blindness, etc. A history of the Jazz Age which included the perspective of nurses and doctors working in hospital Emergency Wards and in mental institutions (such as the one where Zelda Fitzgerald died while awaiting electroshock treatment) would be less upbeat -- but far more accurate -- than one focusing only on penthouses, publishing houses, nightclubs and radio networks. Supreme City could have presented a more balanced picture of Midtown Manhattan's Jazz Age by reducing its discussion of gangsters and speakeasies, and including a chapter focused on Bellevue Hospital. New York City's largest public hospital was located at Kip's Bay in Midtown Manhattan. It was a national leader in the treatment of, and (with Rockefeller Foundation funding) medical research about, alcoholism and sexually transmitted disease - at a time before the discovery and commercial production of penicillin.Given the scope, information, and readability of Supreme City, however, these are only minor quibbles. My criticisms should not deter anyone from buying Miller's book. It is informative, entertaining and brilliantly written history. It may even be a work of art, albeit one that is somewhat flawed. It is a pleasure to read, re-read, and ponder what the author has written - especially with Will Jason's and Val Burton's "Penthouse Serenade" playing in the background.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. J.J. Dougherty, Ph.D. By Amazon Customer Donald Miller's recently published "Supreme City" provides a new and welcome approach to urban history. Concentrating on the years 1926-1932, Miller brings New York City to life like no previous work. Without sacrificing his high scholarly standards, Miller moves the story along at the pace of a gripping novel. He reveals how these years were so critical to the economic, social, cultural, political, and physical changes that transformed the city and made it what it is. In telling the stories of the fascinating personalities and organizations that re-created the city during these years, Miller easily clarifies their vastly complex and significant relationships. Miller has, once again, as he did with Chicago in "The City of the Century," produced a significant history that is eminently readable, and a "must-read" for anyone curious about the iconic city that has so defined urban America.
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