New York Night: The Mystique and Its History

Caldwell's poetic approach to New York City is epic as he paints a portrait of New York nightlife from 1643 to the present. He brings past places and people alive with vivid imagery, gleaming like neon colors emerging from a twilight fog. The book becomes a time machine, beginning with 17th-century New Amsterdam's Wooden Horse tavern (dispensing "the volatile elixir that alternately held [the city] together and blew it apart"). As centuries flash by, Caldwell (The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption 1862–1954 ) hovers over milestones and architectural splendors. In 1836, the leading outdoor nighttime venue was Niblo's Garden, "famous for its fireworks and festoons of light," which glowed on Broadway long before millions of theatergoers began crowding the Great White Way. Many Manhattan industries—"theater, restaurants, newspapers, broadcasting—begin a crescendo of activity with each dusk," and Caldwell chronicles it all, from gaslights to gangsters, from riots to prizefights, from burlesque to Bickford's, from opium to heroin from the Beat Generation to the fiction of Richard Yates, from fame to obscurity. Plunging into the heart of darkness, this masterful work succeeds in illuminating the vast shadowy soul of New York. Agent, Anne Rittenberg. (Sept.)