Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America PDF
Preview Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America
PRAISE FOR “A great skyscraper of a book. Supreme City is the improbable story not just of America’s greatest metropolis during the Jazz Age, but the biography of an epoch.” —Rick Atkinson, author of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945 “Sparkling. . . . The history of dozens of astonishing newcomers who—largely in one tumultuous decade, the 1920s—made New York into what Duke Ellington called the capital of everything. . . . Miller skillfully weaves these different and colorful strands into a narrative both coherent and vivacious. . . . The full story richly deserves his original synthesis and, for me, makes New York even more fascinating.” —Robert MacNeil, The Washington Post “Sweeping. . . . Enjoyable. . . . [In the 1920s] New York was the United States intensified, an electric vessel into which the hopes and desires of a nation were distilled. As Mr. Miller’s vivid and exhaustive chronicle demonstrates, Jazz Age Manhattan was the progenitor of cultural movements—individualized fusions of art and commerce—that came to symbolize the American way of life.” —David Freeland, The Wall Street Journal “Lower Manhattan dominated New York for three hundred years. In the 1920s, however, as Donald L. Miller makes clear in a page-turning book with an astonishing cast of characters, Midtown became the beating heart of the metropolis. Supreme City is about how these few square miles at the center of a small island gave birth to modern America. If you love Gotham, you will love this book.” —Kenneth T. Jackson, Barzun Professor of History, Columbia University and Editor-in-Chief, The Encyclopedia of New York City “[An] entertaining new history of Manhattan in its modern heyday. . . . Accessible, romantic, sweeping and celebratory.” —Beverly Gage, The New York Times Book Review “Supreme City sings with all the excitement and the brilliance of the Jazz Age it recounts. Donald Miller is one of America’s most fervent and insightful writers about the urban experience; here he gives us New York City at its grandest and most optimistic.” —Kevin Baker, author of The Big Crowd “Donald L. Miller’s latest triumph. . . . [He] elegantly introduces one vivid character after another to recreate a vital and archetypical era when, as Duke Ellington declared, the whole world revolved around New York.” —Sam Roberts, The New York Times “Supreme City captures a vanished Gotham in all its bustle, gristle, and glory.” —David Friend, Vanity Fair “A splendid account of the construction boom in Midtown Manhattan between World War I and the Great Depression, and the transformation of transportation, communications, publishing, sports, and fashion that accompanied it. . . . [Miller is] a virtuosic storyteller.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, The Philadelphia Inquirer “Miller’s Supreme City is an awesome book on an awesome subject, a time in the history of New York City when commerce and culture engaged in a symbiotic relationship, spurring an unprecedented boom in architecture, art, music, theater, popular culture and communications that lit up the city, then America, and then the world.” —Allen Barra, The Daily Beast “Donald L. Miller has long been one of my favorite historians. Anyone who reads Supreme City will understand why. Miller brilliantly examines the birth of Midtown Manhattan during the glorious Jazz Age. It’s the story of how a gaggle of success-hungry out-of-towners—including Duke Ellington, Walter Chrysler, E. B. White, and William Paley—turned the Valley of Giant Skyscrapers near Grand Central Terminal into the symbolic epicenter of wealth, power, and American can-doism. Highly recommended!” —Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History, Rice University and author of Cronkite “Lively . . . synthesizes a vast amount of material on everything from skyscrapers to showgirls to create a scintillating portrait of Manhattan in the ’20s. . . . Much of Supreme City’s charm comes from the amiable way Donald Miller ambles through Jazz Age Manhattan, exploring any corner of it that strikes his fancy.” —Wendy Smith, The Daily Beast “Miller captures the heady excitement and enduring creativity of 1920s Manhattan. . . . Conveying the panoramic sweep of the era with wit, illuminating details, humor, and style, Miller illustrates how Midtown Manhattan became the nation’s communications, entertainment, and commercial epicenter.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment. . . . The narrative bursts with a dizzying succession of tales about the politicos, impresarios, merchants, sportsmen, performers, gangsters and hustlers who accounted for an unprecedented burst of creativity and achievement. . . . A scholarly . . . social history but one with plenty of sex appeal.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook. Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com CONTENTS Preface Map of Midtown Manhattan Cast of Characters Prologue: The Jimmy Walker Era PART ONE: POWER AND POLITICS 1. A Test for Tammany 2. Jimmy Walker’s New York PART TWO: CRIME AND PROHIBITION 3. Too Good to Be True 4. Owney Madden 5. “The Night Club Era” 6. “He Did It Alone” PART THREE: THE MAKING OF MODERN MANHATTAN 7. Revenue Plucked from the Air 8. Street of Dreams 9. Vanishing Social Citadels 10. The Woman’s City 11. Fred French 12. Masters of the Skyline 13. The Silver Spire 14. The Magic Carpet PART FOUR: BRINGING IN THE FUTURE 15. Sarnoff 16. Paley 17. Jazz Age Baby 18. Sluggers 19. Tex 20. Pursuits 21. Visions 22. Highway Under the Hudson 23. Poet in Steel 24. A School of Minnows PART FIVE: JAZZ AGE ICONS 25. Music Is My Mistress 26. Master of Allure 27. A Bag of Plums Epilogue: Blue Skies Photographs Acknowledgments About Donald L. Miller Notes Bibliography Photo Credits Index To Chuck Manoli, who got our minds moving
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