This book offers a new model for understanding the invention of metropolitan New York during the city’s unprecedented expansion between 1840 and 1940. By broadening the definition of planning and playing close attention to the levels of governance on which it occurred, this book tells a regional history, not just a history of the city’s influence on the periphery. This book demonstrates how regional actors directed much of greater New York’s formation through work on the urban edge. It’s broad definition of city planning recognizes the work of diverse local actors—amusement park entrepreneurs, ... More

This book offers a new model for understanding the invention of metropolitan New York during the city’s unprecedented expansion between 1840 and 1940. By broadening the definition of planning and playing close attention to the levels of governance on which it occurred, this book tells a regional history, not just a history of the city’s influence on the periphery. This book demonstrates how regional actors directed much of greater New York’s formation through work on the urban edge. It’s broad definition of city planning recognizes the work of diverse local actors—amusement park entrepreneurs, politicians, and urbanites who sought contact with the natural world—in conjunction with the work of well-known power brokers such as Robert Moses. While powerful professional planners and government officials employed planning theory and design to shape greater New York, focus on this work alone obscures the diversity of actors and the varied regional development work of nonprofessionals. The lasting contributions of locals provide a counterweight to designed-focused histories of the early twentieth-century city. It also identifies the struggle to define the spatial, governmental, and cultural relationship between localism and regionalism as central to suburbanization and the shaping of metropolitan form in concert.A focus on the coastal landscape of the East River and Long Island Sound reveals how the characteristics of the coastal environment shaped urbanization and, in turn, the environmental change wrought by regional growth.