Christoph Lindner's book is an impressive work of synthetic scholarship, ranging widely over media (literature, film, photography, painting, architecture, and urban design) and time periods (it routinely explores continuities and echoes between New York in the period from 1890 to 1940 and after 9/11). This synthesis has many valuable qualities, namely that it brings together in one place the best of modern urban studies in a manner that is logical and eminently readable. The city has produced a sprawling mass of histories and studies, with very few of them able, or daring, to reach for coverage, preferring to burrow down into the minutiae of the mess that is New York's history and culture. Given how important the period is in the development of the city, and of global urban culture more generally, it is surprising that there haven't been more attempts to map it in its entirety. Lindner therefore deserves praise for having taken on the unenviable task of tracing the most dynamic period of material and cultural development in New York's history. Yet the necessary outcome of this attempt is to leave many specialist readers’ noses out of joint. Some objections will be trifling; others are more significant. They raise questions over the length of the project (the body of the book is two hundred pages, with fifty-two images taking up some thirty of those pages) and the decision to devote so much space to contemporary resonances and to urban theory, meanwhile leaving striking omissions. To produce a brief list of major absences: Edith Wharton, Claude McKay, Hart Crane, Henry Roth, Anzia Yezierska, Langston Hughes, Rudolph Fisher, Damon Runyon, Dashiell Hammett, Wallace Thurman. There are many more I could list (and my examples are all literary, reflecting my own discipline), but of course no study could include them all. Even if the book had been double or triple the length it would have struggled to be exhaustive, yet more coverage would have allowed for the competing voices of the city in this period to be heard in much more detail.

The core argument of the book is as follows: the representation of New York in the period is “dominated by much more than a stress on the iconographic appearance of the city and the new forms of visuality and aesthetic encounter” (11). Lindner offers to “extend” the work of critics such as Thomas Bender, Maria Balshaw and Angela Blake in “new theoretical and empirical directions” by looking at the way “New York's urban imaginary is also dominated by a stress on the way new forms of city space were being organized, experienced, and, above all, imagined” (11). While I will address the dubious claims to theoretical novelty below, I would like to pause on what exactly a new “empirical” direction might be. Empirical evidence research involves the process of attempting to develop knowledge from direct observation or experience. I'm not convinced, therefore, that analysing some books, art and films can be considered empirical research. But never mind, because the real value of the book, Lindner tells us, is that it looks at the way the urban imaginary is imagined …

As mentioned above, Lindner gives over large swathes of the book to contemporary resonances of the period in contemporary New York, with numerous reflections on the effect and aftermath of 9/11, as well as other contemporary New York spatial imaginings, such as the High Line, James Nares's Street (2011) and the Fresh Kills Lifescape project on Staten Island. These contemporary echoes added little to the project: as any cultural historian knows, you can find as much continuity and rupture as you go looking for. Yet this desire for contemporaneity sits uneasily with Lindner's theoretical frameworks, all of which, despite his claims to novelty, have dominated urban cultural studies for the past twenty years. It can feel, at times, like playing bingo: Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Kevin Lynch, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georg Simmel, Andreas Huyssen, Jean Baudrillard – and then a few wild cards from the critical-theory pack: Jean-François Lyotard, Slavoj Žižek, Sigmund Freud. Whereas those working in disciplines such as literary studies have spent the past ten years interrogating the utility of theoretical cherry-picking as a methodology, it still appears predominant in urban cultural studies. Its cumulative effect here is to flatten out the historical and geographic specificity of New York City in this period. It seems as though NYC must be singular, but fit into abstracting frameworks that are universal. While much of this makes Lindner's book a little unsatisfying for the researcher, it does make for an excellent introduction to the field of New York cultural studies for students and neophytes. They will find in it a rich picture of the world's greatest city in its greatest period of growth.