The waspish essayist E. B. White remarked in 1949 that if poetry “compresses much in a small space,” then Manhattan – the “greatest human concentrate on earth” – was effectively a “poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.” By then, the New York myth involved many features – its Midtown skyline, its tourist geographies, and its quintessential Americanness – which remain (sometimes wearily) familiar. Yet as Angela Blake engagingly demonstrates, this was the result of three decades of struggle between differing conceptions of how the city should be viewed, conceptualized and represented. At the turn of the nineteenth century, New York often seemed a city of dualities: Lower East Side or Midtown, American or un-American, native or immigrant, sublime or picturesque. An array of boosters, businessmen, and social reformers engaged with these ambivalences, with the “elusiveness” of New York, between 1890 and 1924 in attempts to make the city knowable, visible and saleable.

Blake stakes this account in the rhetoric of the social reform movement – the social scientists and urban planners who sought to rationalize and reform New York's poorest areas – and the conflicting agenda of the rapidly developing tourist infrastructure of New York (the city was receiving almost half a million visitors per day by 1919). These two discourses produced different modes of visualizing the city, from the street-level photographs and detailed modelling of tenements characteristic of the reform movement to the penchant for bird's-eye views and guidebooks produced by the tourist industry. The competing representations of the city – especially in the maps and images produced by these two groups – is the most compelling history in Blake's account, but not the only one. As the title suggests, the tourist industry sought to assert New York's Americanness – a cultural nationalism often palpable in the assertion that the skyscrapers which dominated New York's architectural rejuvenation from the 1890s onward formed a distinctively American landscape, an urban correlate to the Western canyons and mountains. Simultaneously, such tourist boosters wished to stress New York's “unAmericanness,” the exotic titillation of its racial and ethnic diversity. Blake's decision to end her study in 1924 – the year of immigration restriction – indicates how important racial and ethnic diversity was to the discourses of both social reform and tourism in New York, and its fluctuating status as problem, challenge and picturesque. An accessible, informative and engaging read, Blake's book is itself a useful guide to understanding just a little more of White's elusive concentrate.