More Than Manhattan: Planning the Regional City Schlichting, Kara Murphy. New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 328 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0226-61302-4. Eric C. Cimino Molloy College, Rockville Centre, NY, USA doi:10.1017/S1537781421000050 New York Recentered presents a bold history of urban planning in New York City. Instead of giving pride of place to the master builder Robert Moses, Kara Murphy Schlichting brings to the fore a variety of others (among them wealthy benefactors, professional planners, and immigrant working-class beachgoers) who attempted to shape New York City’s expansion beyond the island of Manhattan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Schlichting sets her history of greater New York along the city’s coastal periphery of the upper East River and Long Island Sound, territory that encom- passes the outer boroughs of Queens and the Bronx and their suburbs. It is these peripheral regions, and not Manhattan, she argues, that hold the key to understanding the making of the modern, metropolitan city. Schlichting begins her book with examples of what she calls benefactor planning, processes by which “civic-minded capitalists” exert control over real estate and public works (16). In 1879, the piano manufacturer William Steinway of Steinway & Sons chose the isolated marshland of Astoria, Queens, as the ideal location to build a model company town. Steinway was looking to escape the labor strife associated with Man- hattan, and the area’s “boggy waterfront” presented a natural border that would keep out “anarchists and socialists” (22). Steinway funded marsh drainage, landfill opera- tions, and street grading to improve parts of the shoreline and prepare it for residential, commercial, and industrial use. He consolidated the existing rail networks into the Steinway Rail Company and promoted a variety of bridge, tunnel, and ferry projects so that his firm could have access to Manhattan’s commercial networks and capital. While he hoped to isolate his workforce from Manhattan (although how he planned to keep his workforce from using these same bridges and ferries is unclear), the company would have ready access to the urban core across the river. Schlichting describes Steinway’s efforts in Queens as paternalistic, but she draws a distinction between Steinway’s paternalism and that exhibited by fellow benefactor George Pullman and his company town outside of Chicago. Pullman attempted to strictly control his workers’ social lives by, among other things, banning the consumption of alcohol. In Steinway’s settlement, workers had more autonomy. They could own their own homes and partake of robust cultural amenities, including a waterfront resort with a German beer garden. Schlichting’s argument that Steinway’s efforts were less coercive than Pullman’s is convincing, but Schlichting offers no comment on what effects 358 Book Reviews https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781421000050 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. SUNY Stony Brook, on 27 Apr 2021 at 00:51:33, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.