THE NEW YORKERS

A journalist who has covered New York City for more than 50 years offers a potpourri of stories about some of the city’s overlooked residents during four centuries of history.

America’s largest and most polyglot city is impossible to bring into crystal-clear focus, but this book makes it come alive. Although not all of Roberts’ figures are stellar humans, he succeeds in his quest to rescue New York’s “unheralded heroes, men and women whose roles were largely overlooked or, at best, survive as a footnote.” Writing with delightful verve, the author creates a narrative that falls somewhere between a rogues’ gallery and a pantheon of extraordinary people. Opening with a murder and closing with an inspirational neighborhood leader, the text is filled with a full range of NYC characters, the already well-known ones playing only walk-on roles. We learn about Revolutionary firebrand Isaac Sears; African American oyster restaurateur Thomas Downing; Bishop John Hughes, a champion of Catholic schooling; attorney Charles O’Conor, who brought down Boss Tweed; Elizabeth Jennings, who protested discrimination on public transport 100 years before Rosa Parks; Charles Dowd, creator of standard time zones; the Bradley-Martins, the city’s most extravagant and clueless 19th-century couple; Clara Lemlich, early-20th-century labor firebrand; Ciro Terranova, the “Artichoke King” and crime-family mobster; Audrey Munson, “America’s first supermodel”; Jack Maple (whose sketch is the most amusing tale), the transit cop who invented the crime-mapping Compstat system; and Carmelia Goffe, an unsung heroine of the revival of her Brownsville neighborhood in the 1970s and beyond. Perhaps fittingly, the book feels like a New Deal painting you spot in post offices: a panorama of all kinds of New Yorkers doing their best to either improve the world or take advantage of it. The author readily admits his subjectivity, wryly noting that “ ‘The Biography’ might have required 923,380,602 chapters, if you accept that figure as the number of people who ever lived in New York.”

A book guaranteed to enlighten and entertain anyone interested in NYC.