When Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, first contemplated the shoreline of Manhattan, the city offered little to keep an ambitious landsman ashore. New York in the 1850s resembled the Eastern Seaboard’s other cities—cramped, wooden, and small—even if its 515,000 residents edged it past Baltimore and Boston as the nation’s most populous. New York’s outer boroughs, not yet part of the city, were mostly rural. At the time of his death in 1849, two years before the publication of Melville’s masterpiece, Edgar Allen Poe resided in an idyllic rural farmhouse in Fordham Village. It is now a historical site located on the Bronx’s main thoroughfare, the Grand Concourse.

Just a hundred years after Ishmael’s voyage, he would not have recognized his home city: skyscrapers and shoreline parks swarming with 8 million residents, joined by millions of commuters who came in every workday via recently constructed tunnels and suspension bridges. The world had changed, but New York had changed far more. While peer cities’ populations had quadrupled or quintupled over the previous century, New York’s had grown 16-fold. Even more consequentially, as the old European seats of power declined, the city had established