New York Sawed in Half: An Urban Historical - Hardcover

Rose, Joel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582340986 ISBN 13: 9781582340982

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2001

Synopsis

In 1824, the inhabitants of New York City were just returning from the wilds of Greenwich Village after having fled a yellow fever epidemic that threatened to devastate the population of 150,000. The recent economic depression forced many of the city's laborers out of work. It was a time of extreme gullibility, a time when newspapers began to realize that sensation sold, truth or lies, giving way to a rash of hoaxes.

So when two men of supposed high reputation began a rumor that Manhattan was sinking into the harbor because of overdevelopment on its southern tip, everyone listened closely. The men had been sent, they claimed, to save Manhattan from inevitable doom. Their idea: to saw New York in half, drag it out to sea, turn it around and reattach it to the mainland at Kingsbridge. Far fetched? Not at the time when a river was being forged through the mountains to create the Erie Canal. The wonders of engineering made anything possible. And so begins the story of the greatest hoax ever played on the people of New York City.

About this title

About the Author

Joel Rose is the editor of the Urban Historicals series. He is the author of the novels Kill the Poor and Kill Kill Faster Faster. He is the founder of the now legendary literary magazine Between C&D, and the editor of two literary anthologies. He edited and contributed to several anthologies, among them, The Paradox Press Big Book of Thugs.

Reviews

Bloomsbury launches its "Urban Historicals" series with a pair of books on both New York's most infamous cook and what (if true) would have been the city's greatest hoax. Bourdain, the chef and author of last year's cheeky Kitchen Confidential, attempts to retell the story of Mary Mallon from a cook's perspective. Early in the last century, the Irish immigrant Mallon became notorious as "Typhoid Mary" and was imprisoned by health authorities on an island in the East River after (unwittingly or not) spreading typhoid to 33 victims, with three confirmed deaths. Like Lizzie Borden, Mallon has received various writers' interpretations, the last in a 1996 biography by Judith Leavitt of the same title (LJ 5/15/96) that told the tale with more health science and a less cranky style. Bourdain chooses to light the story's shadows by relating to her as a once-proud, broken-down cook, interpreting Mallon's infecting spree with a kitchen-hardened aplomb and New York attitude. Chapter titles tend toward the snarky and hip ("There's Something About Mary," "Typhoid sucks"), and only a New York guy would describe bacteria settling into a gall bladder "like rent-controlled pensioners." Yet when, at the work's end, Bourdain makes a cook-to-cook offering at Mary's grave, it somehow feels more moving than stagey. Rose, a novelist and founder of the 1980s literary magazine Between C&D, has created "an entertainment, a reimagining of a piece of the past that may well have been imagined in the first place." His light-handed telling concerns a possible hoax from about 1824, when a butcher and a carpenter in New York's old Centre Market purportedly discussed their plan to solve overbuilt Manhattan's dangerous bottom-heaviness by sawing it in half, turning the top part of the island around, and reattaching it at the Battery. Word spread, and the enormous project seized the imaginations of Manhattan's poor, who showed up by the hundreds with saws and shovels, while merchants set aside enormous stores of food for the expected work crews. So, at least, claimed one of the hoaxers years later in a conversation with his amateur-historian nephew. Instead of being the "Crop Circles" phenomenon of its day, however, there seems no reason to believe the sawing scam was put over on anyone beyond the credulous nephew who first recorded it; Rose is quite aware of this and puts this re-embroidered lore into entertaining context, along the way creating a charming, atmospheric portrait of old New York. He also notes some classic period cons (the 161-year-old slave who nursed George Washington; the embalmed mermaid) perpetrated by the era's proven master humbuggers. Nathan Ward, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Early-nineteenth-century New York serves as the setting for New York Sawed in Half . Re-creating a legendary hoax, Rose traces the progression of a deliberately planted rumor. When two cronies--John DeVoe and a man known only as Lozier--are overheard discussing the possibility of the southern tip of Manhattan sinking into the harbor, madness and mayhem quickly ensue. Claiming that overdevelopment and overpopulation have jeopardized public safety, the two propose that Manhattan Island be sawed in half, a project that is embraced by a multitude of gullible dupes. This humorous treatment of a classic, long-forgotten fraud will appeal to popular culture buffs. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582340986
• ISBN 13: 9781582340982
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160