Gotham Unbound

The alumni book club will meet at 5:00 PM PT / 8:00 PM ET on October 10th, October 24th, November 7th, and November 28th, 2023 to discuss Ted Steinberg’s Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York, the book choice for the Tri-State Region Alumni.

Book club discussion questions will be posted here.

Winner of the 2015 PROSE Award for US History.

Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York, by Ted Steinberg, recounts the four-century history of how hundreds of square miles of open marshlands became home to six percent of the nation’s population. Ted Steinberg brings a vanished New York back to vivid, rich life. You will see the metropolitan area anew, not just as a dense urban goliath but as an estuary once home to miles of oyster reefs, wolves, whales, and blueberry bogs. That world gave way to an onslaught managed by thousands, from Governor John Montgomerie, who turned water into land, and John Randel, who imposed a grid on Manhattan, to Robert Moses, and Charles Urstadt.

“Steinberg’s volume begins with Henry Hudson’s arrival aboard the Half Moon in 1609 and ends with another transformative event—Hurricane Sandy in 2012.” —  The Plain Dealer, Cleveland