ARTICLES

“The Long Con,”  The Huffington Post   READ

“How New York City could have looked like Paris,”  New York Post    READ

The History Behind Manhattan’s Street Grid,” Time.com    READ

“The Bronx River: A Visual Essay,” City Courant, The Journal of the Museum of the City of New York
(Museum of the City of New York)     DOWNLOAD

“Re-Inspired: An Artistic Navigation of the Erie Canal,” exhibition catalogue     DOWNLOAD

“Andrew Bartow and the Cement That Made the Erie Canal,” New-York Journal of American History     DOWNLOAD

“A Struggle for Water,” American Heritage of Invention & Technology      READ


OPINION / LETTERS

“Hidden History at Ground Zero,” New York Times     READ

“Postmodern infrastructure will call for a firm footing”  Boston Globe    READ

“Rock the boat & believe in ferries: Our city of islands should dive in, head first, and help people get around by boat” New York Daily News    READ

“Is Vision Zero humanly possible?”   New York Daily News    READ
A reader responds…. READ

“Manhattan’s Street Grid: Great or Greatest or…. Not?” History News Network    READ

“The Vision of Central Park,” The New York Review of Books    READ

“Fracking is too dangerous for New York,” New York Daily News     READ

“Building the Erie Canal Was Messy: It’s Worth Remembering That,” History News Network     READ

“A Canal to Bank On?,” The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA)     READ

“Can Buffalo Ever Come Back,” The New York Sun     LETTER  in response to  ARTICLE

“Manhattan Traffic Congestion is a Historic Mistake,” The Villager (New York)     READ

“Muddied Waters?,” New York Sun     READ

“Pipe Dreams,” New York Times     READ

“The Water Racket,”  The New Yorker    READ


REVIEWS

Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall          READ

Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York, M.H. Dunlop          READ

Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York–The Last Two Hundred Years, Benjamin Miller     READ


BLURBS

Gerard Koeppel author of review for this book.Heaven’s Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal
“Jack Kelly has a whole new take on two old creations―the Erie Canal and the Second Great Revival―deftly synthesizing familiar separate stories into a timeless interplay of technological and religious fervor, speculation and salvation. Heaven’s Ditch reminds us how man and God have long mingled in the psyche of America where strong, deep, competing urges for commercial and spiritual uplift give us destructive chaos and astonishing progress. Heaven’s Ditch is beautifully written and masterfully told: intelligent and insightful new history.”


natureofnewyork
The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State
David Stradling’s survey of New York’s nature over four hundred years–from the Lenape and Leatherstocking to Levittown and Love Canal–is a marvel of environmental writing. In at times heartbreaking detail, he reminds us that New York, like anywhere, is a living place–pristine, violated, cleansed, preserved–where humans are just one organism, a part of and apart from the destiny of the place.”


shipablaze
Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum
“Edward T. O’Donnell’s incisive narrative races with the doomed steamer Slocum up New York’s East River, illuminates the thousand obscure lives lost, and picks through the negligence for which no one was held sufficiently accountable.”

 


waterworks

 

Waterworks: A Photographic Journey Through New York’s Hidden Water System
“Stanley Greenberg’s photographs of New York City’s waterworks capture the essence of urban life, the tension between the vigor and the devourings of crowded human habitation: the obscure, subterranean, dank habitats of its pure lifeblood flowing from distant mountains through the faucets of millions”