Gerard Koeppel

Oh, I really wanted to like this. I love New York, I love urban planning, I assume I'm the target market. But it was just so ... dull. The research was exemplary (does he have a time machine? How does he know all this stuff?) but far too detailed for someone who isn't planning their Doctoral thesis around some aspect of it. I gave up in the early 1800s and stopped reading.

If it were half the size (or a third), focussing on the good bits, that would have been quite a book! But by including every fact about everything and everyone he just lost me. Here's an early tidbit:

"In April 1790, the Council formerly offered L'Enfant ten acres at the northeasterly corner of the Common Lands, roughly between today's 68th and 70th Streets east of Third Avenue. Remote as it might have been from the city, this land did border the well-traveled Post Road and was just up the road from the Dove Tavern, a popular public house established in 1763 (and the locus of Nathan Hale's hanging in 1776) at today's 66th Street and Third Avenue."

And guess what? He turned them down! A whole paragraph about nothing. How about "The Council offered him land but he turned them down." I don't need all these details about what the rejected offer was, and what it was near, and what things happened in a place that was near the place that was near the land that he didn't accept.

If you love detail upon detail, don't wait. But for the average reader, I expect this is more chore than cheer.

(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!)… (mais)

New York City has always struggled to meet the demands of it's citizens and visitors and few challenges have been as controversial and contentious as the search for adequate water. In Water for Gotham Koeppel related the story of the high minded idealists and the low down scoundrels (including a Vice President of the United States!) who alternated between working together and fighting among themselves to establish a permanent solution to this most vexing of the Big Apple's problems. While he does delve a bit into the engineering of the many solutions, this is more a book about the people and the stories of the many projects from precolonial times to the end of the nineteenth century when a steady supply was finally assured, at least for the moment.

This is a fairly fun book to read with it's many characters and story lines. It does at time slow down in the discussion of the political battles for that most important element of any construction project (money!) but most of the time it keeps up a good pace for the reader. There are adequate maps and illustrations to view. And it does have a happy ending... so far.… (mais)