Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City , by Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana

diZerega Wall. Yale University Press, 374 pages, $39.95.

New York is a city that eats

its history. As soon as market forces decree that a neighborhood must be put to

a new use, developers and their architects swoop in to alter street life,

landscape, and skyline. The process has slowed somewhat with the advent of the

preservation bureaucracy, but Poe homes and meat markets are still varianced

into oblivion, and soon forgotten by future generations.

Some of the waste from this

conspicuous consumption escapes oblivion, thanks to urban archaeologists who

sift buried traces and reconstruct an idea of what the previous lives of the

city were like. The authors of Unearthing

Gotham , Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall, have gone a step further: Their book

examines the entire record of what's been left underneath the city for as long

as anyone has been living in these parts. It's the archaeology of the place

that's been called New York only for a very short time.

I tend to look first at the

index of any book that has one. When it's a book about historical urban life,

in New York or elsewhere, I scan the index to see what's been done about water,

the most basic human need and usually the first element to cause trouble in

urbanizing environments. Many books

purporting to explain how people lived ignore water; Un earthing Gotham does not. The authors' discussion of the transition in the

mid-1800'sfromadisease-afflicted, ill-watered city to a Croton-flushed one is

concise and informative, especially regarding the domestic archaeological

record, which indicates that despite the availability of brand-new Croton water

mains in the early 1840's, New Yorkers were slow to invest in service-pipe

hook-ups-a "trickle-in" acquisition of household water, first by the rich as a

curious luxury and eventually by the poor as a long-delayed agent of better

health. Satisfied that the water issue was well handled, I took in the entire

subterranean panorama assembled with easy style by Ms. Cantwell and Ms. Wall.

The general reader may be tempted to skip past the pre-European

chapters, but would miss the stunning 1950's discoveries by an 11-year-old boy

and other weekend archaeologists of Paleoindian fluted points on garbage-strewn

Staten Island shores, proof that there have been native New Yorkers here since

the glaciers retreated 11,000 years ago. As comfortable discussing the city's

oldest archaeological record as they are the politics of contemporary

archaeological retrieval, the authors present an even-handed account of the

complex 1990's conflict over the 1700's African burial ground discovered during

new office-tower excavations just north of City Hall Park.

There's a slight overreach in the discussion of the huge bounty

of artifacts found a decade ago at the site of the mid-19th-century Five Points

slum, near Chinatown. The authors, both archaeology veterans and currently

anthropology professors, write that "being a madam was the only way that a

woman could hold a management position and even be an entrepreneur." But the

archaeological record is plainly incomplete; we know that shopkeepers,

small-business owners, doctors, artists, teachers, writers and other female

professionals managed to make money without compromising their virtue.

The hundreds of thousands of

artifacts that made up the Five Points collection were housed temporarily in

the basement of 6 World Trade Center. They had been scheduled for permanent

transfer to the South Street Seaport Museum, but now they're presumably

destroyed. Just 18 pieces that had been on display elsewhere survived,

including a temperance-themed teacup pictured in Unearthing Gotham .

The Trade Center site is destined to become a future chapter in

New York's archaeology; it was already the location of the city's first

non-native archaeology. Ever since wooden ship parts were excavated there in

1916, scholars have been debating whether they're the remains of the Tijger , scuttled by Dutch sailors on

what was the lower Manhattan shoreline nearly 400 years ago. Ms. Wall and Ms.

Cantwell tell this legendary New York story with the same dexterity they bring

to dozens of sites in all the boroughs of the modern city, from the oceanfront

Brooklyn of slaughtered native Canarsees to the North Bronx gentility of Van

Cortlandt Mansion.

Unearthing Gotham is a

scholarly book for general readers, a thoroughly enjoyable narrative with

comprehensive notes, sources and index. It's also seductively packaged:

unusually shaped, heavier than its modest thickness suggests, the cover art

serene, the title and chapter headings in a quirky typeface, the innards

arrayed with words on generous and varied white space, and an abundance of

images-archival and contemporary photos, classic and original artwork,

historical maps and explanatory diagrams. The book gives the physical sensation

of an object to be opened up, explored, dug into. All books are texts; this one

is treasure.

Gerard

Koeppel, author of Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton), is at work on a book about the Erie Canal .

When the gulf between rich and poor is broadest, scandal blossoms. This was New York in the 1890's: flush from a two-decade boom, stunned by a Wall Street panic early in 1893, spiraling into a century-ending depression. The rich had money to burn, the poor had nothing to eat, and everyone else needed some distraction. Then as now, scandal was a way for the anxious middle class to mock its yearning for wealth and fear of poverty.

M. H. Dunlop, who teaches 19th-century American literature and culture at Iowa State University, has scoured the major New York newspapers of the day and brought back to life the great, forgotten scandals and sensations of 1890's New York, dosed with some postmodern attitude.

The stories as Ms. Dunlop presents them in Gilded City are thoroughly entertaining, if not especially enlightening. They were all front-page news at the time, and Ms. Dunlop, for the most part, doesn't challenge the sensational reporting, especially that of the New York Herald , which by then was peaking as a great paper, having never shed its baser instincts. But her catalog of fin-de-siècle follies does offer some sobering perspective on the excesses of our own cash-coated days.

A wedding and a ball thrown by the Bradley Martins, American tax exiles living in Scotland, set the book's tone. In 1893, the Bradley Martins married off their 16-year-old daughter at Grace Church in a riot of ostentation, publicity and, at the end, vandalism by hordes of the informed but uninvited. The wedding occurred a few weeks before the stock crash that launched the country's second-worst depression, which was in full bloom when the Bradley Martins returned in 1897 for their American finale: a costume ball for 1,200 invitees at the Waldorf, outfits of the 16th to 18th centuries required. In the two-week run-up, the ball became the talk of America, London and Paris. In the end, though, only 700 guests ignored the advice of their ministers, the design challenges of authentic and expensive costuming, the threat of bombs and the jeering of five-block crowds. Despite the most luxurious arrangements inside the hotel-its lower windows boarded to deny public viewing-most of the guests left early. The New York Times declared it "in every way the greatest night in the history of New York society," but the longest-lasting last word has been had by leisure-class-basher Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term "conspicuous consumption" in the aftermath of the multimillion-dollar affair. Ms. Dunlop's general disparagement of the Bradley Martins and their ilk puts her safely in Veblen's cozy corner.

The cozy corner is one of many Gilded Age manias that Ms. Dunlop explores. Orientalism, introduced to America in the 1870's, cluttered the corners of 1890's New York flats: a hodgepodge of drapings, rugs, divans, chairs, tables and lamps from various reaches of the East. Trend-setting artist William Merritt Chase had been loading his famous studio on 10th Street for years with bric-a-brac from all over the globe, but not long after fitting out a cozy corner, everything came undone: The studio's entire contents-1,800 lots-went at auction in 1896 at a fraction of their purchase price. Anyone who's spending now on feng shui may want to consider that the Oriental interior-design binge of the 1890's lasted for about three years.

The rich spent time, as well as money, on curious whims. Slumming was in vogue in the 1890's: late-night, police-escorted tours of the darkest slums for men in evening dress. Society editor and poet Richard Watson Gilder slummed with gusto, though proper Henry James peeped and pulled back.

Sex, as always, was on everybody's mind. In 1894, an anonymous bachelor went on at notorious length in the Herald about a teenage schoolgirl he spied on the Sixth Avenue el. The Herald pioneered the personal ad, which varied little from today's: "Refined miss, 18, plump, pretty face, good form, loving disposition, desires acquaintance [with] gentleman of means; object matrimony. Girlish."

Rich men also had non-sexual outlets for their animal instincts. The 75 members of the University Epicurean Club, on University Place, gathered for simple pleasure: "Each man gripped a tankard of ale in one hand, seized a broiled steak with the other, dipped it into a vat of 'epicurean sauce,' and went to gnawing on it." The club featured neither females nor forks.

The full force of the era's sexed-up social privilege was seen in the infamous "Seeley dinner" of Dec. 19, 1896, which Ms. Dunlop reconstructs with delight. At Louis Sherry's society restaurant, Herbert Barnum Seeley, 25-year-old nephew of the late showman P.T., presided over a bachelor party for his brother Clinton and 20 of their fellow (mostly married) Larchmont Yacht Club friends. After a 13-course meal came the main attraction: an assortment of disrobing dancers, including Little Egypt, managed by Oscar Hammerstein (grandfather of the librettist and lyricist). Just as the men were shedding whatever distinction their evening clothes had afforded them, a police raid ended the bacchanal-but initiated a year's worth of headlines. Grand-jury testimony revealed details "against the interests of public morality"; and because trial testimony promised more of the same, all indictments were dropped.

Men's special desire for young girls was evident in the "sex club" of architect Stanford White, a "satyr" in Ms. Dunlop's eyes. The young Seeleys were caught and exposed, but White-perhaps because of his professional stature and his unfortunate murder by the crazed husband of his former sweet-16 plaything Evelyn Nesbit-has escaped general censure of his private life. Ms. Dunlop admirably tracks 100 years of a now-crumbling biographical cover-up, albeit in a one-and-a-half-page endnote.

The book concludes with another fine, lengthy endnote relating the author's search for the remains of Tip, a world-traveled celebrity elephant subjected to brutal treatment in the miserable Central Park Zoo and a hysterical public execution in 1894. But the main narrative, relying again on newspaper accounts, demonizes American Museum of Natural History official William Wallace, whom Ms. Dunlop makes out to be a bloodthirsty, rifle-toting animal-hater bent on Tip's death and subsequent skinning, boiling-down and eventual display (in skeletal and stuffed form) in the museum's galleries. This is the same Wallace who, three years later, was the protective, kind, loving and faithful foster father of Minik Wallace, the Eskimo-boy sensation who goes unmentioned in Gilded City .

A hundred years from now, someone will certainly sift our tabloids for local tales of sex, money and mayhem. Trump, Kimes, Helmsley, Strawberry, even our double-daming Giuliani-all might be suitably forgotten names ripe for renaissance. But reading M.H. Dunlop's gilded tales, one is reminded of an eternal truth: Easy panning for the big chunks of dirt allows the finer stuff to slip away.

Gerard Koeppel, author of Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton University Press), is writing a book on the building of the Erie Canal .

Garbage is a problem for all people who stay put, especially those who live in close quarters on islands. For nearly 300 years, New Yorkers lived on one island, Manhattan; excepting Bronx mainlanders, all New Yorkers remain island dwellers. And the problem persists.

The tides made things easy in the early days: An increasingly nauseating array of human, animal, domestic and proto-industrial waste was legally dumped in the East and Hudson rivers, though wharves and weather made for inefficient flushing, and fantastic amounts of fetid waste stayed in port. At the same time, undisposed garbage piled up on the city's streets, which were famously filthy far into the 1800's. In typical New York fashion, most people sidestepped the issue. Ocean dumping, incineration, animal-byproduct processing and recycling come and go, but real-estate-creating landfill has shouldered the bulk of our load for decades. New York City right now boasts what Benjamin Miller calls "the biggest, densest, richest supply of refuse in the world."

Mr. Miller knows a lot about garbage. On the job, as the former director of policy planning for the New York City Department of Sanitation, he saw and smelled it all; what he didn't know, he has dug up. He knows the whole history of garbage creation and disposal in New York City and the physical and theoretical European antecedents. He understands the relationship between garbage and the broad spectrum of urban life, including transportation, recreation, energy, environment, politics and economics. He doesn't know quite as well how to write (overlong sentences, an elliptical style, extended digressions), but the story he manages to tell in Fat of the Land makes comprehensible the importance of garbage in our lives. If you've dumped scraps in the kitchen trash, crumpled paper into the office waste basket or tossed a drink container in the corner garbage can, you should read this book. Garbage is not just a byproduct of life in the city, but an essential part of it.

The tail end of the book covers Mr. Miller's gig in the trash trenches, with sniping at the "fiscal arrogance" of Rudy Giuliani and the "studied ignorance" of his sanitation commissioner, Emily Lloyd. The bulk of Fat of the Land concerns garbage in the roughly two centuries before it was Mr. Miller's problem.

He conducts a 19th-century world tour of garbage: the London of social reformer Jeremy Bentham, unpopular sanitarian Edwin Chadwick and wise cholera doctor John Snow; the Paris of sewer researcher Parent-Duchâtelet and boulevard and park builder Eugène Haussmann; the guano of South America, which launched W.R. Grace–the "Pirate of Peru"–in the fertilizer business; and Swedish dynamiteer Alfred Nobel, the market-maker for glycerine, the sweet oil from cooked animal wastes. All of these informed the ideas and actions of New York's sanitarians: earnest but ill-informed engineer Egbert Viele, street-cleaning czar George Waring and upstart landscaper Frederick Olmsted, whose extensive park and parkway plans were later appropriated in grand style by the ruthless re-creator Robert Moses, omnipotent chief of state and city park bureaucracies and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.

Most writers praise or condemn Moses' famous public works: over 50 of the region's best-known highways, bridges, tunnels and parks. Noting that Moses "commanded the flow of every ton of refuse disposed of in New York City for over three decades," Mr. Miller focuses on Moses' single largest legacy, "the biggest man-made object on the planet": the 3,000-acre Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, daily depository of 13,000 tons of raw garbage. In a complex saga of trash and transportation, secrecy and broken promises that began during the Depression, Moses transformed the glorious Fresh Kills salt meadows into the landmark landfill in order to build the necessary access road for the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

By the time Moses was finally deposed from the last of his many offices in 1968, Fresh Kills was only one of 11 landfills spewing extraordinary amounts of greenhouse gases, hydrocarbons and chlorinated organics from all the boroughs but Manhattan.

Moses' dubious success–exquisite but traffic-clogged arteries, cul-de-sac Long Island, stinking Staten Island–was a triumph over the earlier rail-based designs of the anti-Moses, the forgotten transportation genius William Wilgus, who flourished and failed in the three decades just before Moses made the car king. Wilgus–civil engineer, New York Central executive, creator of Grand Central Terminal, father of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey–conjured a web of outlying rail lines linked to rail tunnels that would haul freight into New York and garbage out. New York's transition from Wilgus to Moses came when the elder man's dream of a rail tunnel under the Narrows was killed by the younger man's insistence on an auto bridge over it.

Staten Island has been the repository of most of the city's garbage for the past half-century, but the lesser islands have not gone untouched. Long before its prison sentence, little Rikers Island was grown into a dump whose garbage became landfill for LaGuardia Airport. A white-sand oasis of cedar and sedge called Barren Island in the mouth of Jamaica Bay was transformed from the mid-1800's into the world's largest waste-processing site, turning garbage into grease, fertilizer and nitroglycerine; the forlorn place was landfilled onto Brooklyn in the 1920's to create Floyd Bennett Field, and has come full circle in recent years as a nature preserve.

There are few heroes in the history of New York garbage. Mr. Miller delightfully sullies early officials like "Doctor" Alfred White, the Whig city inspector who secretly awarded the first monopoly contract for city waste-disposal to his own company; trash entrepreneurs like "Fishhooks" McCarthy, whose Tammany-backed Brooklyn Ash Removal Company created the smoldering dump in Corona Meadows where the "ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens," as passing train commuter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby , that Long Island novel with the working title Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires ; modern conglomerates like Wayne (Blockbuster) Huizenga's Waste Management Inc., the world's largest landfill owner, whose subsidiary, Wheelabrator-Frye, tried and failed to build the Brooklyn Navy Yard incinerator; and a passel of past and current politicians, planners, P.R. spinners and environmental gurus with corrupt, suspect or half-cracked garbage ideas.

In a blurb for Mr. Miller's book, former Mayor Ed Koch claims that Rudy Giuliani's 1996 decision to close Fresh Kills on the last day of 2001–also the last day of his tenure as Mayor–"before any alternative method of dealing with the city's garbage is in place, has placed this city in great jeopardy." As Mr. Miller writes, despite ever-shifting garbage bureaucracies, technologies and attitudes, "when it comes to how we actually interact with this ineluctable stuff, little has really changed."

Gerard Koeppel is the author of Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton University Press).