Volume 42, Number 18 · November 16, 1995
Metropolitan Life
By Jason Epstein
The Encyclopedia of New York City
edited by Kenneth T. Jackson
Yale University Press/The New-York Historical Society, 1350 pp., $60.00
When I was a child of ten or so and while my classmates were still struggling to fathom the language of the gutter, a bookish friend and I pieced together in a single afternoon the secrets of human reproduction from the unabridged dictionary in Miss Brown's sixth-grade classroom. In this way I formed the lifelong habit of using dictionaries and encyclopedias not simply to look up facts but to penetrate the outskirts of great mysteries. For me an encyclopedia is a treasure map, a spur to conjecture, a set of linked clues. This is why I have lately been reading The Encyclopedia of New York City edited by Kenneth Jackson, seeking answers to a puzzle that has gripped me ever since my friend Jane Jacobs posed it some twenty-five years ago in The Economy of Cities, her classic attempt to explain why some cities grow and others don't.
Review, 2865 words
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