The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor PDF Download
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Author: Marguerite Holloway
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089800
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
"Randel is endlessly fascinating, and Holloway’s biography tells his life with great skill." —Steve Weinberg, USA Today John Randel Jr. (1787–1865) was an eccentric and flamboyant surveyor. Renowned for his inventiveness as well as for his bombast and irascibility, Randel was central to Manhattan’s development but died in financial ruin. Telling Randel’s engrossing and dramatic life story for the first time, this eye-opening biography introduces an unheralded pioneer of American engineering and mapmaking. Charged with “gridding” what was then an undeveloped, hilly island, Randel recorded the contours of Manhattan down to the rocks on its shores. He was obsessed with accuracy and steeped in the values of the Enlightenment, in which math and science promised dominion over nature. The result was a series of maps, astonishing in their detail and precision, which undergird our knowledge about the island today. During his varied career Randel created surveying devices, designed an early elevated subway, and proposed a controversial alternative route for the Erie Canal—winning him admirers and enemies. The Measure of Manhattan is more than just the life of an unrecognized engineer. It is about the ways in which surveying and cartography changed the ground beneath our feet. Bringing Randel’s story into the present, Holloway travels with contemporary surveyors and scientists trying to envision Manhattan as a wild island once again. Illustrated with dozens of historical images and antique maps, The Measure of Manhattan is an absorbing story of a fascinating man that captures the era when Manhattan—indeed, the entire country—still seemed new, the moment before canals and railroads helped draw a grid across the American landscape.
Author: Marguerite Holloway
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089800
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Randel is endlessly fascinating, and Holloway’s biography tells his life with great skill." —Steve Weinberg, USA Today John Randel Jr. (1787–1865) was an eccentric and flamboyant surveyor. Renowned for his inventiveness as well as for his bombast and irascibility, Randel was central to Manhattan’s development but died in financial ruin. Telling Randel’s engrossing and dramatic life story for the first time, this eye-opening biography introduces an unheralded pioneer of American engineering and mapmaking. Charged with “gridding” what was then an undeveloped, hilly island, Randel recorded the contours of Manhattan down to the rocks on its shores. He was obsessed with accuracy and steeped in the values of the Enlightenment, in which math and science promised dominion over nature. The result was a series of maps, astonishing in their detail and precision, which undergird our knowledge about the island today. During his varied career Randel created surveying devices, designed an early elevated subway, and proposed a controversial alternative route for the Erie Canal—winning him admirers and enemies. The Measure of Manhattan is more than just the life of an unrecognized engineer. It is about the ways in which surveying and cartography changed the ground beneath our feet. Bringing Randel’s story into the present, Holloway travels with contemporary surveyors and scientists trying to envision Manhattan as a wild island once again. Illustrated with dozens of historical images and antique maps, The Measure of Manhattan is an absorbing story of a fascinating man that captures the era when Manhattan—indeed, the entire country—still seemed new, the moment before canals and railroads helped draw a grid across the American landscape.
Author: Gerard Koeppel
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306822857
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Winner of the 2015New York City Book Award The never-before-told story of the grid that ate Manhattan You either love it or hate it, but nothing says New York like the street grid of Manhattan. This is its story. Praise for City on a Grid "The best account to date of the process by which an odd amalgamation of democracy and capitalism got written into New York's physical DNA."--New York Times Book Review "Intriguing...breezy and highly readable."--Wall Street Journal "City on a Grid tells the too little-known tale of how and why Manhattan came to be the waffle-board city we know."--The New Yorker "[An] expert investigation into what made the city special."--Publishers Weekly "A fun, fascinating, and accessible read for those curious enough to delve into the origins of an amazing city."--New York Journal of Books "Koeppel is the very best sort of writer for this sort of history."--Roanoke Times
Author: Drew Philp
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 147679801X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.
Author: Stuart Firestein
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199828075
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Contrary to the popular view of science as a mountainous accumulation of facts and data, Stuart Firestein takes the novel perspective that ignorance is the main product and driving force of science, and that this is the best way to understand the process of scientific discovery.
Author: Manil Suri
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408833255
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
An enthralling virtuoso debut that eloquently captures the loves and losses of a dying man 'All the elements of great storytelling are here, the mystic transports of Ben Okri with the intimate charm of Arundhati Roy ... enchanting' Sunday Tribune 'Beautifully captures with great tenderness and depth the eternal war between duty and desire. This is a love letter to Bombay and its people' Sunday Express Vishnu, the odd-job man in a Bombay apartment block, lies dying on the staircase landing. Around him the lives of the apartment dwellers unfold - the warring housewives on the first floor, the lovesick teenagers on the second, and the widower, alone and quietly grieving at the top of the building. In a fevered state Vishnu looks back on his love affair with the seductive Padmini and comedy becomes tragedy as his life draws to a close.
Author: Theodore Steinberg
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476741247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
Presents the history of New York City as it was transformed over a four-hundred-year period by politicians and developers from a Hudson River estuary with rolling hills, rivers, and forests into the concrete flatland that exists today.
Author: Leslie Berlin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145165152X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
Acclaimed historian Leslie Berlin’s “deeply researched and dramatic narrative of Silicon Valley’s early years…is a meticulously told…compelling history” (The New York Times) of the men and women who chased innovation, and ended up changing the world. Troublemakers is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world. “In this vigorous account…a sturdy, skillfully constructed work” (Kirkus Reviews), historian Leslie Berlin introduces the people and stories behind the birth of the Internet and the microprocessor, as well as Apple, Atari, Genentech, Xerox PARC, ROLM, ASK, and the iconic venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the space of only seven years, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born. “There is much to learn from Berlin’s account, particularly that Silicon Valley has long provided the backdrop where technology, elite education, institutional capital, and entrepreneurship collide with incredible force” (The Christian Science Monitor). Featured among well-known Silicon Valley innovators are Mike Markkula, the underappreciated chairman of Apple who owned one-third of the company; Bob Taylor, who masterminded the personal computer; software entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Bob Swanson, the cofounder of Genentech; Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer behind the first successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from the factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, the Stanford administrator who changed how university innovations reach the public. Together, these troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.
Author: James Nevius
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493008404
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
NYC tour guides and authors James and Michelle Nevius explore the lives of 20 iconic New Yorkers—from Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant to Alexander Hamilton, park architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—and use them to guide the reader through four centuries of the city’s story. Beginning with the oldest standing building in the city, , a 1652 farmhouse in Brooklyn, and journeying all the way to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, the book follows in the footsteps of these iconic New Yorkers. The authors tell the stories of everyone from slave traders and long-forgotten politicians to the movers and shakers of Gilded Age society and the Greenwich Village folk scene. One part history and one part personal narrative, Footprints in New York creates a different way of looking at the past, exploring new connections and forgotten chapters in the story of America’s greatest metropolis. Visit www.footprintsinny.com for more.
Author: Paul E. Cohen
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486799417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
This handsome volume features 65 full-color maps charting Manhattan's development from the first Dutch settlement to the present. Each map is placed in context by an accompanying essay.
Author: Matthew Spady
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823289443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
Audubon Park’s journey from farmland to cityscape The study of Audubon Park’s origins, maturation, and disappearance is at root the study of a rural society evolving into an urban community, an examination of the relationship between people and the land they inhabit. When John James Audubon bought fourteen acres of northern Manhattan farmland in 1841, he set in motion a chain of events that moved forward inexorably to the streetscape that emerged seven decades later. The story of how that happened makes up the pages of The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It. This fully illustrated history peels back the many layers of a rural society evolving into an urban community, enlivened by the people who propelled it forward: property owners, tenants, laborers, and servants. The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot tells the intricate tale of how individual choices in the face of family dysfunction, economic crises, technological developments, and the myriad daily occurrences that elicit personal reflection and change of course pushed Audubon Park forward to the cityscape that distinguishes the neighborhood today. A longtime evangelist for Manhattan’s Audubon Park neighborhood, author Matthew Spady delves deep into the lives of the two families most responsible over time for the anomalous arrangement of today’s streetscape: the Audubons and the Grinnells. Buoyed by his extensive research, Spady reveals the darker truth behind John James Audubon (1785–1851), a towering patriarch who consumed the lives of his family members in pursuit of his own goals. He then narrates how fifty years after Audubon’s death, George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938) and his siblings found themselves the owners of extensive property that was not yielding sufficient income to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Like the Audubons, they planned an exit strategy for controlled change that would have an unexpected ending. Beginning with the Audubons’ return to America in 1839, The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot follows the many twists and turns of the area’s path from forest to city, ending in the twenty-first century with the Audubon name re-purposed in today’s historic district, a multiethnic, multi-racial urban neighborhood far removed from the homogeneous, Eurocentric Audubon Park suburb.
