Unearthing
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
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
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
mains in the early 1840’s, New Yorkers were slow to invest in service-pipe
hook-ups-a “trickle-in” acquisition of household
curious luxury and eventually by the poor as a long-delayed agent of better
health. Satisfied that the
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
