Washington Mews Books/NYU Press – serie
Visar alla böcker i serien Washington Mews Books/NYU Press. Handla med fri frakt och snabb leverans.
2 produkter
2 produkter
Inbunden, Engelska, 2025
322 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
How an engineering crisis threatened a career, a building, and the lives of countless New YorkersThe Citicorp Center, a fifty-nine-story skyscraper built in 1977, immediately became one of the most recognizable features on the New York City skyline with its distinctive inclined roof and oddly placed support columns. Designed by one of the top structural engineers in the field, William LeMessurier, the tower would become the crown jewel of his professional career; In essence, he created a skyscraper on stilts. The building was a modern marvel – until it was revealed that it had a 1 in 16 chance of collapse.The Great Miscalculation tells the riveting story of LeMessurier's discovery of a fatal flaw in his building's design and his decision to blow the whistle on himself, putting his reputation on the line in a race to save this iconic skyscraper. With hurricane season rapidly approaching, the structural design flaws of the Citicorp Tower posed a menacing danger. Meanwhile, the economic hardships and political turmoil of 1970s New York only compounded the obstacles to a massively expensive, never-before-seen structural redesign in the heart of downtown Manhattan.A fascinating piece of overlooked New York City history, The Great Miscalculation tells the gripping narrative of a catastrophe averted in the nick of time.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2026
406 kr
Kommande
How New York's elite claimed authority over social welfare in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist TragedyIn American history, few tragedies have been as consequential—and as enduringly misunderstood—as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Long remembered as a turning point in the struggle for labor protections, Fire in the Heart of the City shows how the fire also helped transform another cornerstone of modern American life: the rise of modern charity.Set in early twentieth-century New York, the book tells the extraordinary story of what happened when a catastrophic fire in Greenwich Village threw Adolph Ochs, the ambitious new publisher of the New York Times, and Rose Schneiderman, a defiant young labor organizer, into a momentous struggle over who should organize the city's response: a rising charity sector led by wealthy financiers and civic elites, or the reform-minded unions and activists of Lower Manhattan. Drawing on newly released archival documents, interviews with the descendants of Times publisher Adolph Ochs and New York labor organizers, previously confidential reports, and long-overlooked private diaries and correspondence, historian and former journalist David Conrad-Pérez offers a striking new account of the disaster and its aftermath. He shows how a handful of charities on the brink of irrelevance were suddenly recast as New York's best answer to the social and economic conditions the fire laid bare—a watershed moment in the rise of modern charity and elite authority over social welfare in the United States.In the months after the fire, the Times and its philanthropic allies joined forces to popularize the idea that social crises should be managed not by immigrant reformers, labor advocates, or neighborhood coalitions, but by a select class of elite and supposedly "scientific" charitable institutions. In doing so, they elevated a new language of expertise around poverty and public welfare that would leave a lasting mark on American civic life.A deeply researched and absorbing work of narrative history, Fire in the Heart of the City offers a major reinterpretation of one of the most important urban disasters in American history, revealing how a single catastrophe helped reshape not only the politics of labor, but also the moral and institutional foundations of modern American charity.