The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History

   Written in 1966 and republished in 2005, Ellis’ book give you Manhattan as seen through the kooks and wackos that inhabit Gotham’s history. We get the basic story – Peter Minuit buys the island for a bag of junk, then the city grows, then it becomes a place where you can act stupid, Peter Stuyvesant shows up to whip everyone into shape, people still act stupid – and nothing’s changed. But what makes this book enjoyable is that the author goes for the really crazy parts that are left out of the history books.

Let’s start with a chapter on The Doctor’ Riots of 1788. Ellis frames the events in the context of a weak local government and a weak central government that lacked any authority. It pays to mention that in the pre-telegraph days, getting word to the central government took weeks, so don’t think of calling the president for help. The riots themselves started when some medical student, or maybe just stupid kids, hung dissection limbs in a window, and with grave robbery being a problem, the masses now knew where the goods ended up.

Now here’s where the author uses the events to illustrate the problem of the time. New York had a huge number of poor people, and tempers often flared. When the mob got into a frenzy, they were impossible to control, and the city’s tiny militia couldn’t handle them. The result was that the militia had to resort to firing into the crowds (and now that the militia have been replaced by the NYPD, I wonder if that’s changed?) As for the medical students’ disrespectful handling of the cadavers, it doesn’t surprise me, given the medical ethics of the day. As we saw in a recent history of Bellevue, and the infamous book about Henrietta Lacks, doctors often saw their patients, especially poor ones, as expendable guinea pigs.

This book originally came out at a time when there weren’t as many books about New York, and the few that existed are rarely read today. The year 1966 was a great time to be in New York, as long as you were tough and didn’t have to raise kids. If you wanted to be a musician or join the Warhol crowd, great, but if you were afraid of getting mugged, you looked elsewhere. The city wasn’t anywhere near as desirable a it is now, so maybe there was less interest in it?