Canada and the United States 1459 one-tenth of households, owned any real estate. This was not a city of working-class homeowners, as other American cities were. Scobey emphasizes the fragmen- tation of New York's real estate market—"for those who could afford to play, the real-estate economy diffused the rights, powers, and rewards of city build- ing across a grid of small projects and divided inter- ests" (p. 129)—but this market was not a cross-class arena. Perhaps New York's real estate owners could be mobilized under the banner of "imperial" boosterism in part because they were so similar to one another. In the end, of course, Victorian bourgeois urbanism was a failure. Grand plans for upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs collapsed with the fall of the Tweed Ring and the onset of the depression of the mid-1870s. The confidence of the imperial planning vision was replaced by an elite politics of retrenchment and "muscular laissez-faire liberalism" (p. 260). Tweed had been one candidate for the Haussman role. Others left New York (Frederick Law Olmsted), faded into obscurity (real estate promoter William R. Martin), or switched to the retrenchment side of city-building debater (Andrew Haswell Green, famous as the "re- form" comptroller). Scobey makes many striking observations. Upper Manhattan was filled with "tenement rows broken off in midblock, villas rising up amid vacant lots with the apparent randomness of chess pieces in an endgame" (p. 119). The elevated railway used Pullman-style cars with plush seats and "sumptuous appointments" to offer riders "a workaday version of the fantasy of luxury and adventure associated with high-class travel" (p. 168). The book is also lavishly illustrated with images that Scobey analyzes in consistently interesting ways. Temple University Press might be faulted for making complicated images too small, but this is generally a handsome book as well as a very illuminat- ing one. ROBIN L. EINHORN University of California, Berkeley THOMAS BENDER. The Unfinished City: New Y ork and the Metropolitan Idea. New York: New Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 287. $30.00. "The metropolitan idea," as Thomas Bender views it, is challenging, subtle, malleable, diffuse. What, he asks in this flowing, conversational collection of fourteen revised essays, "is the character of metropolitan cul- ture in this city, and how has it changed over two hundred years?" (p. vii). The term "metropolitan," he points out, can imply setting a definitive national standard. Yet New York "resist[s] . metropolitan completion"; it "will not be Paris" (p. xi). He sees it as one of New York's characteristics to change, yet a changing city cannot easily define a standard. Bender's book uses these big questions about New York to provide a distinctive perspective on some of the city's notable places, and on some of its most notable artists and writers. Bender divides his essays into three groups: on the "icons" of Washington Square, Brooklyn Bridge, and the New York skyline; on "art, intellect, and public culture"; and on "politics." This book is most striking for its artfully interwoven commentaries on painters Thomas Cole, Samuel F. B. Morse, George Bellows, Georgia O'Keefe, Joseph Stella, Joseph Cornell, John Sloan, Marcel Duchamp, Florine Stettheimer, John Marin, and Andy Warhol; on photographers Alfred Steiglitz, Berenice Abbott, Charles Sheeler, and Paul Strand; on city planners and critics Frederick Law Olmsted, Montgomery Schuyler, Lewis Mumford, and Jane Jacobs, and on the Beaux Arts tradition in New York; on writers Walt Whitman, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser; and on dance pio- neers George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. It is also striking for the way Bender relates the figures in this canon to notions of cities and politics that he finds in writings of Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Beard, John Dewey, Frederick C. Howe, Wood- row Wilson, and Herbert Croly. Bender's essays are deeply engaged and committed to his project of reasserting a general public role for historians. How, he asks, can New York and its artists reconcile wealth and dissent, change and authority, market and democracy, democracy and expertise, hos- pitality to the avant-garde and national leadership? To what extent can New York play an authoritative na- tional culture-defining role in a federal republic whose capital is located elsewhere and whose political and social cultures resist centralization? How did New York's changing physical form reflect and shape no- tions of class, of community, of identity, or support its national aspirations? These are large questions. Many of the most arrest- ing observations in this book derive, however, from close reading of particulars, notably the physical par- ticulars and artistic representations of selected bits of New York City streetscape and architecture. Bender noten that crowded tenement districts and leafy resi- dential neighborhoods appeared at the same time, in response to the same forces—and those forces in- cluded newly gendered ideas about home life as well as economic and population pressures. He vividly de- scribes how, at key dates, Union Square, Central Park, and Forty-Second Street presented spectacles more complex and more comprehensive than most contem- poraries allowed themselves to acknowledge. He ar- gues that the architecte of New York's skyscrapers deserve praise for their attention to urbanistic context, not blame for backward-looking design ideas. He shows how changing notions of identity and the body long relegated the paintings of Cornell and Stetthei- mer to marginality, then made them important. In many passages of this book, Bender uses language that ascribes to New York City unity, a mind, and a will. This language emphasizes moral values and the city's people as a whole. But on occasion it leaves an AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2003