Biting into the Big Apple

...The case of a cabbie charging a passenger the equivalent of several hundred dollars for a ride has a familiarly modern ring, and one of the amusements offered by both books is to compare New York then and now...

...The source of supply was the Croton River in Westchester County, later augmented by the streams of the Catskills...

...Fatalities numbered in the hundreds along the East Coast...

...His history dissolves into apileofindex cards as, Superman-like, he leaps from building to building...

...It will probably take more than another history-making blizzard to get the New York Times to editorialize, as it did in 1888, that "New Yorkers are the best-natured people in the world...

...the fullest expression of our modern age," observed Leon Trotsky in words as true today as they were when he wrote them in 1917...

...Instances of sacrifice and heroism were common, as were those of greed and selfishness...

...Yet New York: A Physical History, for all its love of its subject, deserves no more than one cheer...

...Instead of cocaine, young men of the 1830s "dissipated on chloroform.' On the other hand, there is reason to believe that New York then was a different kind of place...

...Now, in New York: A Physical History (Atheneum, 269 pp., $29.95) White, without Willensky, has decided to step back a bit to take in the larger picture...

...Amid all this gloom, White somehow finds reason for optimism...

...This system did more than allow for growth into the millions, it made the bathroom possible, first as a status symbol for conspicuous consumers, then as a domestic requirement for inconspicuous necessities...

...The audience the authors were aiming at was less the tourists with time merely for a quick glance at the obvious than the area's residents, those who savored their city and enjoyed leisurely walks in a perpetually changing urban landscape...

...The book begins seriously to go wrong after it arrives at the period when New York's basic infrastructure became fixed...

...It also gave New York the best water of any major American city...

...Though there have been worse storms-only 21 inches of snow fell over a three-day period in early March-few, according to Cable, have caught the city so unawares...

...and they may close New York: A Physical History with the feeling that what they have just completed is a tragedy with a happy ending...

...These are fleeting, sentimental works, centered around personalities or anecdotes, and offering little of substance for readers with teeth...

...But the tourist and casual New Yorker seeks and sees the architectural tips of these icebergs, the monuments advertising the glory of that great engineering...

...In any case, the mood of the text turns decidedly negative as the buildings being described climb higher and higher, especially after modernist boxes have crowded out everything else...

...The Blizzard of 88 goes in more for stories than people...

...Water is one of these...

...Or perhaps he simply lacked interest in the job that remained to be done, for hestates: "When historians reflect on this city, the most important events are in its technology of transportation, of construction, of utilities and water, mostly the invisible bones of buildings, the subterranean conduits of travel and service...

...White is surely correct about the revival of interest in New York's history...

...It has been succeeded by a more flamboyant "postmodernism, " a development that brings no joy to White, who dismisses the current style (if it is a style) as "an outbreak of fancy hats...

...He needed a heartless editor who would have coldbloodedly eliminated the repetitions and straightened out the gnarled sentences...

...She likes the area because it is "an unspoiled reminder of the city's origins...

...White is a clunky, repetitive writer with little talent for narrative...

...It is based on the preservation movement that arose in the 1960s and the current spread of gentrification-dubious foundations for a genuine revitalization-and ignores such profound social problems as the plight of the homeless and the impossibility of raising a middle-class family in Manhattan...

...Through its expert accumulation of detail and information, the AIA Guide turned New York into a giant Easter egg hunt, with unexpected treasures waiting around every corner...

...And once White is obliged to turn his attention to the more familiar structures-the mansions along Fifth Avenue, the skyscrapers of Wall Street and midtown, the railroad stations, courthouses and museums-he abandons any effort at exposition...

...a sucked orange," sneered the New Englander Ralph Waldo Emerson...

...Perhaps he felt he could afford to be perfunctory because he has already had his say about the architecture in the AIA Guide...

...This book," he explains in the Preface, "is not about architecture alone, but also the sewers and subways, water supply and ferries, technology and wealth that created the vast fabric of the city itself...

...New York: A Physical History has sweep and breadth, and its most successful chapters are those dealing with big subjects...

...an oasis of quiet and serenity...

...The day the blizzard struck, Walt Whitman published a poem in the New York Herald entitled "The First Dandelion...

...The abrupt turnabout comes not quite out of nowhere, but almost...

...No one any longer shared the view of an 1811 Aldermanic commission that centuries would pass before Washington Heights, near the northern end of the island, was inhabited...

...Two new excursions into the city's past are Carole Klein's Gramercy Park: An American Bloomsbury (Houghton Mifflin, 330 pp., $19.95) and Mary Cable's TheBlizzard of '88 (Atheneum, 197 pp., $19.95), the latter obviously timed to catch the centennial wave...

...Although his account begins with some geology, followed by Giovanni da Verrazzano's arrival at New York Harbor in 1524, White actually starts with a series of tone-setting introductory quotations about a place that has awed, entranced and repelled for over 200 years:"acloacinaofallthe depravities of human nature," grumped that unregenerate agrarian Thomas Jefferson about the hometown of his arch rival, Alexander Hamilton...

...Projecting forward, he sees a "renaissance of the inner city" emerging from a renewed appreciation of the past, "atender reloving of acity that architects, planners and builders seem unable to simulate even by a wide margin...

...The city, it seems, has always been dirty, fastpaced and slightly chaotic...

...Sponsored by the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects and written by Norval White and Elliot Willensky, it took readers on a block-by-block, almost building-bybuilding tour of the metropolis, describing not only the prominent monuments that make their way into every guidebook but also the kinds of structures that tend to get passed over without anyone realizing their architectural or historical significance...

...A swelling population needed something more reliable, however, and in 1842 the breakthrough occurred with the construction of a reservoir on 42nd Street, at the site where the Public Library now stands...

...White is equally good on the city's transportation...

...He concludes with a lament on the disruptions brought about after World War II by the automobile, a plague to every admirer of traditional, pedestrian-oriented cities...

...The earliest European inhabitants, the Dutch and the English, depended on wells, and as late as the 1830s New Yorkers bought drinking water from roving vendors while collecting washing water from rooftops...

...As White notes, it was crucial to the region's expansion...

...Tracing its evolution from ferries to steam-powered railroads to electrified elevateds and subways, he shows how the advances of mass transit dictated the pattern of the outer boroughs and determined Park Avenue's unique configuration...

...By the turn of the century, Manhattan was rapidly filling up and its future was clear...

...But why go on?-which is precisely the question one wants to ask the author...

...With feet the only available means of transportation, pedestrians moved through midtown at the rate of one mile an hour...

...Some things apparently never change...

...clean and straight and meagre and hard and white and high, " opined Gertrude Stein with the sort of adjectival extravagance New York has always seemed to inspire...

...At a time when telephones were scarce and buildings depended on coal deliveries for heat, New Yorkers were much more vulnerable to the weather than today...

...The Croton cocktail," White declares, "is not, to some, ill named, for it merits some honorific title more lofty than water...

...Even those readers who sympathize with the author's acid assessments of the state of recent architecture will have trouble following him on his incongruous journey back to the future...

...Others may find that the book most comes to life when Gramercy Park's unique gentility is broken, by bohemian individualists like Stephen Crane and Nathanael West, or by Stanford White's wild soirees involving ladies in states of undress that the 19th century wasn't supposed to know were even possible...

...Gramercy Park is a personality parade, like one of those movies Hollywood used to make that featured all the stars on a studio lot...

...Lever and Seagram, " White writes of two of the crowning achievements of post- World War II architecture, " are isolated moments of distinction in a sea of commercial boredom...

...Practically everyone appears to have lived in the Gramercy Park neighborhood during the century and a half of its existence: inventor/philanthropist Peter Cooper, pubUsher James Harper, actor Edwin Booth, architect Stanford White, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, authors William Dean Howells, Herman Melville and O. Henry...

...The books are pouring forth...

...Those who didn't reside there came to the parties-Emma Goldman, Isadora Duncan, George Gershwin, the Fitzgeralds of course, Edmund Wilson...

...Commuters were stranded for three days...

...Modernism's culmination was that bland disaster, the World Trade Center...