About, midtown manhattan, and a couple preliminaries before we roll into this illustrated talk. I like that better than power point as a term. Im not good at power point. Its not that im a luddite. Im just not good at technology. Im just a technological idiot. Well, this is not the supreme city is not the book i originally set out to write. The original idea was to do the whole city, all five boroughs, and stretch it out from world war i to world war ii, but without trying to be too cute, i took too big a bite out of the apple, and i discovered as i was doing my research that there was i was really drawn to a really compelling story within the larger story i had intended to tell, and its an untold story actually. Its been told in bits and pieces, but its never been stitched together as a compelling historical narrative, and that story is the rise of the the sudden and spectacular rise i should say of midtown manhattan in the 1920s which was an urban backwater before 1919. There wasnt a