Although New York City's urban food scene is currently marked by a diverse body of retail spaces, from corner bodegas to national grocery chains like Whole Foods, the city did not always rely on private retailers to feed its population. In fact, through the mid-nineteenth century, most New Yorkers would have shopped at one of the municipal markets, which were managed by the city government for the good of the people. In Feeding Gotham, Baics examines the history of New York City's urban economy, focussing on the development and eventual decline of its municipally regulated public markets. These buildings housed the city's butchers, fishmongers, and vendors of fresh produce and prepared foods. They were important economic centers that brought together a diverse urban population on a daily basis. They were also key community spaces that hosted political rallies, social dances, and festivals. Through his study of food access and municipal provisioning, Baics sheds light on the evolution of the city's markets from public entities to private enterprises – and the impact of that development on the lived experiences of New York residents. He accomplishes this through a combination of spatial, social, and cultural analysis, making his work relevant to a wide variety of scholars of American studies interested in urban communities and their histories.

Specifically, Baics is interested in how food access shaped the lived experiences of New Yorkers as well as the food economy that sustained them – a story that he details throughout the book, and in great depth in his final chapter. Baics's work is not a study of the evolution of restaurant culture or innovations for home cooks. Rather, food acts as the lens through which Baics understands a more sweeping history of the development of urban life in New York and the politics at play in its urban economy. He uncovers this history through three primary themes: urban infrastructure, geography, and the living standards of his subjects, thereby touching upon both distributors and consumers. A complement to modern analysis of food systems, this book offers a historical case study of how space mediates food access down to the neighborhood level where specific conditions, like the distance from one's domicile to the nearest municipal market, impacted consumers’ quality of life.

Baics situates his study of food economy in the early republic and antebellum periods when municipal provisioning initially expanded to accommodate population growth. Eventually, those public markets were deregulated. They became private rather than public entities that operated alongside a growing number of independent stores that sold fresh produce, meats, and fish. Baics is interested in the processes by which food transitioned into a free-market economy and markets became privately held entities. This transition occurred at a time when city governments invested more heavily in other civic amenities like canals, housing, and so on. Thus a fundamental disparity sits at the heart of Baics's study, in which the privatization of New York's urban food economy stands as a foil to broader trends in municipal regulation and civic advancement that expanded the role of city governments in the lives of US residents.

The introduction to Feeding Gotham promises a comprehensive history of urban provisioning, including “the wholesale markets and slaughterhouses, as well as the sprawling landscapes of independent provision shops and street vendors” (10). It delivers on this promise through careful employment of GIS (geographic information system) analysis to study the city's urban food networks. Feeding Gotham maps the important privatization of the American urban food scene that created commercial corridors, and by consequence food deserts where city residents did not have ready access to essential foods. For example, he maps the spread of independent butchers from 1845 to 1854 into northern parts of Manhattan where the municipal markets had never existed, their numbers increasing from 283 to 743 in the city during that time period. Baics's maps reveal that butchers clustered along developing commercial avenues, capitalizing on street traffic to build their businesses. Baics's GIS research, which is particularly compelling in chapters 5 and 6, demonstrates that food access can shape the geography of a city, influencing the development of neighborhoods, creating pockets of wealth and poverty amidst the grid of New York's broad avenues and back alleyways. This digital-based analysis is helpful for scholars seeking a successful example of how to map urban cultural and economic networks. Baics's study is useful not only for geographers, but also for academics interested in the history of regulation, urban development, cultural production, and local economy.

Feeding Gotham homes in on the history of the municipal markets, and specifically on butchers, which were a well-documented class of vendors, enabling Baics to map the spatial dynamics of power within New York's municipal markets. His study acknowledges that butchers – more so than vendors of fish, game, fresh produce, and so on – held positions of power, exercising their political voice within the market system. Yet his in-depth study of markets goes deeper than just acknowledging overarching power structures. In chapter 4, he highlights a particular neighborhood market, Catharine Market. His close reading of the market reveals that certain butchers held more power than their colleagues and that power manifested itself in the spatial makeup of this particular neighborhood market. Empowered butchers, for example, often occupied stalls at the entrances of the markets, gaining prime access to the flow of foot traffic entering these retail spaces. Not only were these vendors ideally positioned, they also retained those prime locations, passing them on to generations of family members who used their financial stability to help extend family-operated businesses in neighboring stalls. Thus Baics masterfully and carefully explores the familial business networks that fueled neighborhood economies in New York.

Future scholars can build upon the foundational scholarship set forth by Baics, which encourages researchers to return to the archive, to the markets, and to their surrounding streets to rediscover the dynamic food economy of urban America. Specifically, researchers have an opportunity to research the underexamined history of typically disenfranchised groups – women and people of color – who worked in the markets and neighboring throughways. Baics acknowledges their robust presence, noting, for example, that in Catharine Market there were forty-eight licensed huckster women to the forty-seven regular butchers in 1818. How did these women build their businesses, attracting customers and building loyalty among them? How did they navigate local laws to their advantage? Similarly, how did people of color, many of whom worked as hucksters in the surrounding streets, work within the bounds of slavery and a racist economic system to build their businesses? Future subjects of historical inquiry, therefore, could include in-depth explorations of the street food economy and the culture of racially and ethnically diverse itinerant vendors, the modes through which these street food vendors traversed New York's ever-changing urban landscape, and the gendered and racial nature of food provisioning in which women and people of color carved out spaces for themselves in a local food economy that favored white men. Ultimately, Feeding Gotham sits at the heart of an important trend in American studies to analyze the material makeup of economic and cultural networks through food.