Lecturing on the city that he wrote about. In the very place in the city that you wrote about midtown manhattan. A couple of preliminaries before we roll into this illustrated talk. I like that better than powerpoint, as a term. Im not good at powerpoint. Its not that im a luddite, im just a technological idiot. This is not the book i originally set out to right. The original idea was to do the whole city. All five boroughs, and stretch it out from world war i to world war ii. Without trying to be too cute, i took to bigger bite out of the apple. I discovered, as i was doing my research, that i was really drawn to a really compelling story within the larger story i had intended to tell. It is an untold story, actually. It has been told in bits and pieces. But it has never been stitched together as a compelling historical narrative. That sudden and spectacular rise of midtown manhattan in the 1920s. It was an urban backwater before 1919. There wasnt a single skies group are above 42nd street. By the end of the 1920s, almost half of new york skyscrapers were in midtown. It is one of the great booms in the world. This eruption that occurs in these years. I take on the building of midtown manhattan. It was really a construction project. There was all sorts of cultural spillage. A tremendous revolution. It is a book with a lot of characters, a lot of incidents, and some interesting stories. Let me begin with this. For 300 years, downtown dominated new york city. It was only following the war that midtown began to take off. It kind of calm and aided in the building culminated in the building of this building. It was the first terrifically Tall Building north 42nd street. Nbc and cbs were founded. Radio went national. Grand Central Station had been completed in 1913. But the apogee of the period was in 1927. A lot of the book centers on the year. This is 1927, the year that lindenberg returned from his solo flight from Roosevelt Field on long island to paris. He returns to the Nations Capital in washington, and then to new york city, where over 2 Million People crowded the streets to see it. Its also in 1927 oops, hit the wrong button. The tempo of the city changed dramatic way. F. Scott fitzgerald put it best. The morals were looser, the liquor was cheaper. The jazz age raged on under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money. I wish i could have written that. New york then, in this year, and in this decade, the vanguard of cultural and technological transformation that would make the 20 century the american century. And make new york the quintessential city of the earliest 20th century. The rise of commercial radio and talking movies in 1927, you had the invention of television. You had the beginning of tabloid journalism with the new york daily news, the First American tabloid founded by Joseph Patterson of the Patterson Family in chicago. You have the spread of radio and photographic records of this pulsating new urban music called jazz. I featured Duke Ellington in this book. You have the emergence of yankee stadium, of mass spectator sports. The enormously important boxing matches staged at Madison Square garden, and other venues. Ellington sums it up. The duke says that new york was the capital of everything. Very little happens in the country unless somebody in new york presses a button. And so it is. It is a story, in other words, of an urban revolution. I try to tell it with people. I try to tell the story through about three dozen characters. Its like a playbill at the beginning of the book. Most of them are blazingly ambitious strivers from west of the hudson, and east of the danube. It was eb white of the new yorker who wrote about this phenomenon, of outsiders coming in and transforming the place. Its the same thing in my book on chicago. People coming in, same sort of thing. White rights in a beautiful book called here is new york, which a lot of you have probably read, he says it is the person that was born elsewhere and came to new york in quest of something that accounts for new yorks high strung disposition, its political deportment, his dedication to the arts, and its powerful achievements. And achievements they were. I quoted white, but maybe the most important inspiration for me was a frenchman. He said that every american is eaten up with a longing to rise. My characters arise with that in mind. He came from a belarusian village that was so backward, it was medieval. He couldnt speak a word of english. And he becomes the founder of modern mass medication. And he does it, and takes over rca. You have a saloon keeper from the canadian klondike, who built the modern Madison Square garden. He taught boxing promoters a lasting lesson you cant have a good fight without a good audience. You cant have a good spectacle fight unless you build around a story. I try to deal with that in the book. Right next to him is the great jack dempsey. These two guys turned boxing into a milliondollar business. He had 5 million gates in the 1920s. You had patterson coming in from chicago founding the daily news on a shoestring. By 1927, it barely survives. It is the largest selling newspaper in the world by 1927. There he is, a truant from the baltimore docks. It place called pig town. He transformed his sport as fundamentally as jack dempsey transformed boxing. He turned it from small ball, into long ball. Like dempsey, he was a big hit her. New yorkers seem to like that. The guys who could put it on the canvas and put people in the seats. When i tried to do in the book, just a second on methodology. I tried to reimagine the city as it was back then. To go back there in my mind, and to describe the lives of my characters not as i see them from the present, and as they live them. To try to get behind their eyes. Everyone tells you history gives you perspective, because you have hindsight. But hindsight can be a killer. If you know the Great Depression is coming, you organize your book so that it leads to that. Nobody in the 20s new was coming. That is the problem with that kind of history. The most inaccurate phrase in the english language is the foreseeable future. The future can never before seen. In 1927, it was unimaginable to new yorkers that the greatest urban building boom in modern history would soon collapse. Its collapse was shocking and sudden. This guy here, high living jimmy walker, who committed new york in these years, that he be brought low by charges of corruption and forced to resign. Walker is one of the major characters in this book. He is fun to write about. I try to avoid most articles on walker tend to substitute analysis for anecdote. Or anecdote for analysis. They dont get into him it. He is really an adjusting guy. His heart was in the right place, but he didnt have the energy and moral courage to stand up to the mob bosses. He got involved in a lot of corruption. They never put a single charge on him. They investigated him from his nose to his toes, and they couldnt put a charge on him that was triable in a court of law. The pressure from roosevelt, governor of new york at the time, pressure from al smith forced him out of office. He is a great character. A quick wit. He learned everything through his ears. They would read off, heres what you do, heres what you say. Here is what the issues are. He would go in and say it. Good impromptu speaker, too. He would run through parties. He had the yarmulke on, and the crowd asked circumcision next . And he said no maam, i prefer to wear it on. [applause] [laughter] a great part of my book is centered on tammany politics. I deal a lot with prohibition. I deal with organized crime it. I deal with boxing, i do with baseball. Tonight and want to focus on not the whole book. If you try to summarize, you compress and kill it. I want to deal with the central drama, the building of this town and the cultural revolution that accompanied it. A century ago, a group of audacious drivers set out to build a modern downtown, and they did it right. The story begins with grand Central Station. Completed in 1913. This project, this is a digging and the cultural revolution that operation. It is enormous. It is an operation not quite on the scale of the panama canal, but pretty close. The effort to build this terminal, while the old terminal still operated, is set in motion by a crisis. The worst train disaster in new operation. York city history at the time of. A commuter train was in an underground tunnel, they failed to spot warning lights, and they slammed into the rear of another train waiting in the railyard. The carnage was terrible. The new York Central Railroad was forced by the state legislature to electrify its trains. At that point in time, this guy, william willis, the George Washington midtown manhattan. He is the railroads chief engineer. He has vision. He not only electrify the trains, but he buried the tracks. He goes a step further. He convinces his superiors, mostly vanderbilts, to build a new, stateoftheart terminal. A great people moving machine. And a stateless building. Underground passageways that lead to subway stations. Also, there is a lot of smart shops along the passageways. New yorkers are talking about reviving these in a big way. They connect to adjacent hotels and commercial buildings. That is what the city needs if it has density. You need to move density, you need to move people. Hence the caller like roadway that runs around Grand Central, and the aqueduct roadway that runs into it. And then the building beyond it, the first drivethrough building in the history of the world. For half a century, this is what the area north of the station looked like. All the way up to 56th street. From 42nd street to east 56th street. It is a gigantic railyard, it just spans out here. Pedestrians had to cross it on those iron crossways there. Over catwalks, as they called them, breathing smoke and ash, and things like that. There is no grid there. Manhattans grid is gone. There no streets there in manhattan. Close to the river, there might be an avatar a brewing company. This is what it became it. Williams that we will do is, on the roof of these smokeless tunnels, we will build on real estate that the railroad owns. Will build park avenue, as Ella Fitzgerald wrote. It was in the earliers flanked by tall apartments, very restrained. There are a lot of common cornice lines. These are the first guy strippers built for permanent skyscrapers built for permanent living. They do this by selling their air rights to developers. With revenue plucked from the air, we can create a veritable city. He called it a terminal city. The city around the terminal. We can make money for the railroad, and build a butyl section of the city. While this is going on, there are big happenings on fifth avenue. It was called vanderbilt alley before the war. It ran to central park with vandergrift mansions, some of them a block wide. This is easter sunday, 1913. A lot of the commanding influences, a lot of the older vanderbilts had died in 1921. Their widows of these mansions, and couldnt keep them up. Some of them have the money to do it, but it was hard to hire a irish maid. A group of real estate agents, former garment workers from the lower east side, come in and buy these mansions. The day after they bought them, they tear them down. They tear everything 01 down except one within a year. By 1928, vendor vanderbilt alley is clear of these mansions. They sell the land to merchandising empresarios. They turned it into the grid a shopping area in the country. The entire stretch of the avenue looks Something Like this. This is the vanderbilt mansion. Alice vanderbilts lived there. It is right across from the park. This is saks fifth avenue. Edmund goodland, who was a garment worker from rochester new york, who founded a taylor shop, he moved uptown. Tailoring has ever gone this far uptown. You are in vanderbilt country up on central park east. But he leases the property, and eventually buys it and controls that whole property. He and his wife lived in a penthouse on the top floor of the store. By new york law, custodians werent permitted to live in a citys industrial buildings. Industrial buildings, because womens made dresses on the sixth floor. Jimmy walker is a friend, and he gets the goodmans listed as custodians. They had to be the richest janitors in the history of the world. It pays to know people. This is the regal stretch of fifth avenue, as it is transformed in the 20s. These two women i will be talking about had a lot to do with it. They formed the newest new york business. By 1935, it was the eighth largest business in the country. It was called the beauty business. Cosmetics. Founded by elizabeth arden, came to new york on her own. It is also found by helena rubinstein, who was born in a ghetto. Her father was a kerosene dealer. They built their shops close together on fifth avenue, and they were venomous rivals. They have their shops within two blocks of each other for 40 years, never spoke to each other. Rubinstein called arden the other one. And complained that she dyed her hair. Before they arrived in new york, only actresses and fast living and working girls wore makeup. By the mid20s, powder and paint had become badges of independence. You not only put it on in the powder and of but you put it on in public. That was a sign of real audacity. Beauty business becomes one of the Largest Industries in the country. American women were spending more on Beauty Products in 1927, mostly womens Beauty Products, then all of america was spending on electric power. Lots of opportunities for entrepreneurship too. If you were working in the city in the 20s, you made 17 bucks a day. That translated to about 17 a week, make that 170 that week today. If you were a graduate of one of these beauty culture schools, you could, on your own, support a family of four. There were lots of opportunities for entrepreneurship. One of the most enjoyable things about writing this book was getting to know these and other independent minded women. Among them was carnegie, because she saw a steel magnet coming over an immigrant like herself. There were jewish and Italian American women in the Garment Industry. Dealing with writers. My personal favorite, lois long of the new yorker. She had column called lipstick. More than any other columnist helped to launch the new yorker as americas first sophisticated cosmopolitan magazine. I prepared a feature on these women of new york, which i have up here, and you dont have to pay for it. While i appreciated the wonderful things a reviewer in the New York Times wrote about my book, i was really shocked by her comment with exceptions, the women tend to appear in millers book as client showgirls and prostitutes. That is a gross misrepresentation. There isnt a single prostitute in the book. One wonders. While this is going on, while arden and goodman on these people are transforming fifth avenue, Anne Vanderbilt moved from this area of town. They move all the way across town to set in place. They take a decrepit neighborhood, and they gentrified. They make it a community of women dedicated to philanthropy. And then write down the way from there, fred french, you saw his skyscraper earlier. He an Affordable Community for in town living. It is still there. I think as an overlooked model of affordable in town living. It is a parklike area. He used to have a golf course. Fred frenchs papers are here at the new york public library. They are very good. This whole area then, the Grand Central area, fifth avenue, sutton place, all along the shore of the east river from queensboro bridge down past 42nd street, it is all transformed. This is a shot more representative of the parklike atmosphere they attempted to create there. About this time, Walter Chrysler comes in. We know a lot about the chrysler building. One of my editors said there was a Walter Chrysler . Yes. There was a will to chrysler. One of my student a Walter Chrysler. One of my student thats where i was going, and i said dday, and he said the rock group . Chrysler is one of these drivers. He is born on a campus prairie, the scent of a railroad mechanic, and he becomes a railroad mechanic. And then he gets in the auto business, takes over buick, and then forms the chrysler corporation. He wants to establish his headquarters in new york. When he does that, he wants to create as the capping moment, he was to create the tallest building in the world. This is four years after introducing his first car. It was called the chrysler six. At the time he is throwing up this building in 1927, 1928, there is a building going on downtown with the same idea. The owners there had the same aim in mind. This instigates what i call a sky race. A lavishly publicized competition to see who is going to build the first building taller than the eiffel tower. The tallest building in the world. Everyone thought that is both buildings were nearing completion, everyone figured that 40 wall had won the day. But chrysler ordered the construction inside the building, in secret, of a thing called the vertex. That is this deal needle on the top. It is about 180 feet high. It is built inside the tower, and then one october morning, in 1929, they raised it up. It wasnt even covered in the papers. Chrysler makes an announcement that gotcha. [laughter] when they threw it up, the architect stood four blocks away and watched it, and he thought it would fall down. When it is raise, it is 77 stories high, at 1046 feet tall, it is the highest structure ever built. But only for 11 months, when it was topped by the empire state building. Then allen, no one has heard of the guy. I came across a great quote from a british designer. He says it is inconsistent that new yorkers dont know the names of their most brilliant architects. The chrysler building, called hot jazz in stone and steel, is a near perfect representation of midmanhattan style and speed. It fits the idea of seeing biographies of the builders in the buildings they create. Monticello would be a classic example of that. Van all