Building the Metropolis

"Alexander Wood asks a deceptively simple question about New York City in its most iconic period of growth from the 1880s to the 1930s: "Who did this?" In chronicling the labor of architects, builders, contractors, and construction workers, Wood compels our attention to the physical and social challenges embodied in buildings: where did the billions of bricks, millions of feet of lumber, millions of pounds of stone, and thousands of miles of wire, pipe, and steel come from, and who arranged to use them when, where, and how they were? His answers reveal much about the local specifics but also about national and international flows of ideas and goods"--