Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America

869 Pages·2014·15.83 MB·English

by  Donald L. Miller

PRAISE FOR
“A great skyscraper of a book. Supreme City is the improbable story not just of
America’s greatest metropolis during the Jazz Age, but the biography of an
epoch.”
—Rick Atkinson, author of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western
Europe, 1944–1945
“Sparkling. . . . The history of dozens of astonishing newcomers who—largely in
one tumultuous decade, the 1920s—made New York into what Duke Ellington
called the capital of everything. . . . Miller skillfully weaves these different and
colorful strands into a narrative both coherent and vivacious. . . . The full story
richly deserves his original synthesis and, for me, makes New York even more
fascinating.”
—Robert MacNeil, The Washington Post
“Sweeping. . . . Enjoyable. . . . [In the 1920s] New York was the United States
intensified, an electric vessel into which the hopes and desires of a nation were
distilled. As Mr. Miller’s vivid and exhaustive chronicle demonstrates, Jazz Age
Manhattan was the progenitor of cultural movements—individualized fusions of
art and commerce—that came to symbolize the American way of life.”
—David Freeland, The Wall Street Journal
“Lower Manhattan dominated New York for three hundred years. In the 1920s,
however, as Donald L. Miller makes clear in a page-turning book with an
astonishing cast of characters, Midtown became the beating heart of the
metropolis. Supreme City is about how these few square miles at the center of a
small island gave birth to modern America. If you love Gotham, you will love
this book.”
—Kenneth T. Jackson, Barzun Professor of History, Columbia University
and Editor-in-Chief, The Encyclopedia of New York City
“[An] entertaining new history of Manhattan in its modern heyday. . . .
Accessible, romantic, sweeping and celebratory.”
—Beverly Gage, The New York Times Book Review
“Supreme City sings with all the excitement and the brilliance of the Jazz Age it
recounts. Donald Miller is one of America’s most fervent and insightful writers
about the urban experience; here he gives us New York City at its grandest and
most optimistic.”
—Kevin Baker, author of The Big Crowd
“Donald L. Miller’s latest triumph. . . . [He] elegantly introduces one vivid
character after another to recreate a vital and archetypical era when, as Duke
Ellington declared, the whole world revolved around New York.”
—Sam Roberts, The New York Times
“Supreme City captures a vanished Gotham in all its bustle, gristle, and glory.”
—David Friend, Vanity Fair
“A splendid account of the construction boom in Midtown Manhattan between
World War I and the Great Depression, and the transformation of
transportation, communications, publishing, sports, and fashion that
accompanied it. . . . [Miller is] a virtuosic storyteller.”
—Glenn C. Altschuler, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Miller’s Supreme City is an awesome book on an awesome subject, a time in the
history of New York City when commerce and culture engaged in a symbiotic
relationship, spurring an unprecedented boom in architecture, art, music,
theater, popular culture and communications that lit up the city, then America,
and then the world.”
—Allen Barra, The Daily Beast
“Donald L. Miller has long been one of my favorite historians. Anyone who reads
Supreme City will understand why. Miller brilliantly examines the birth of
Midtown Manhattan during the glorious Jazz Age. It’s the story of how a gaggle
of success-hungry out-of-towners—including Duke Ellington, Walter Chrysler,
E. B. White, and William Paley—turned the Valley of Giant Skyscrapers near
Grand Central Terminal into the symbolic epicenter of wealth, power, and
American can-doism. Highly recommended!”
—Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History, Rice University and author of
Cronkite
“Lively . . . synthesizes a vast amount of material on everything from skyscrapers
to showgirls to create a scintillating portrait of Manhattan in the ’20s. . . . Much
of Supreme City’s charm comes from the amiable way Donald Miller ambles
through Jazz Age Manhattan, exploring any corner of it that strikes his fancy.”
—Wendy Smith, The Daily Beast
“Miller captures the heady excitement and enduring creativity of 1920s
Manhattan. . . . Conveying the panoramic sweep of the era with wit, illuminating
details, humor, and style, Miller illustrates how Midtown Manhattan became the
nation’s communications, entertainment, and commercial epicenter.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who
helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and
entertainment. . . . The narrative bursts with a dizzying succession of tales about
the politicos, impresarios, merchants, sportsmen, performers, gangsters and
hustlers who accounted for an unprecedented burst of creativity and
achievement. . . . A scholarly . . . social history but one with plenty of sex appeal.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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CONTENTS
Preface
Map of Midtown Manhattan
Cast of Characters
Prologue: The Jimmy Walker Era
PART ONE: POWER AND POLITICS
1. A Test for Tammany
2. Jimmy Walker’s New York
PART TWO: CRIME AND PROHIBITION
3. Too Good to Be True
4. Owney Madden
5. “The Night Club Era”
6. “He Did It Alone”
PART THREE: THE MAKING OF MODERN MANHATTAN
7. Revenue Plucked from the Air
8. Street of Dreams
9. Vanishing Social Citadels
10. The Woman’s City
11. Fred French
12. Masters of the Skyline
13. The Silver Spire
14. The Magic Carpet
PART FOUR: BRINGING IN THE FUTURE
15. Sarnoff
16. Paley
17. Jazz Age Baby
18. Sluggers
19. Tex
20. Pursuits
21. Visions
22. Highway Under the Hudson
23. Poet in Steel
24. A School of Minnows
PART FIVE: JAZZ AGE ICONS
25. Music Is My Mistress
26. Master of Allure
27. A Bag of Plums
Epilogue: Blue Skies
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About Donald L. Miller
Notes
Bibliography
Photo Credits
Index
To Chuck Manoli, who got our minds moving