1. art and entertainment
2. books and literature

Sample Syllabus based on last years course. Field
trips, and details of assignments will change.
Department of Technology, Culture, and Society
New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering/Department of History
HI-UY 3034/HIST-UA 283 Introduction to New York City ‘s Infrastructure
Professor Jonathan Soffer
To contact professor: jonathan.soffer@nyu.edu
Office: LC 130C
Phone: 718 260-3999
Office hours: TBA or by appointment
Course Pre-requisites HuSS 1023W or EN 1233W or EN 1203H (Freshman writing), for engineering
students; one semester of expository writing for students of other NYU schools.
Course Description: This survey of New York City’s infrastructure concentrates on water, sanitation
and public health, electrical and communications systems, the development of housing and real
estate, the security infrastructure and plans for the future. The course explores how the city’s
political economy has shaped its physical environment and how technological innovations have
made the city modern and postmodern.
Course Objectives:
1. To teach students to read precisely, and intertextually, to recall what they read, and to think about
what they read and use their newly acquired historical knowledge to raise questions for discussion of
possible interpretations and implications of their reading.
2. To improve students’ oral and written expression of historical knowledge and their ability to
marshal evidence and construct an argument.
3. To teach students to think historically—to understand the subject position and actions of the
historical actors they are studying, and the relationship of historical actors to larger forces,
discourses, and structures.
4. To survey the outlines of New York City’s social, economic, and political history and to teach
students how to learn about the past, present, and potential future of the city’s neighborhoods.
Course Structure
The course will consist of a combination of lectures, class discussions, team projects, student
presentations and small group discussions and written assignments.
If you are student with a disability who is requesting accommodations, please contact New
York University’s Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at 212-998-4980 or
mosescsd@nyu.edu. You must be registered with CSD to receive accommodations.
Information about the Moses Center can be found at www.nyu.edu/csd. The Moses Center is
located at 726 Broadway on the 2nd floor.
Required Readings:
Kate Ascher, The Works: Anatomy of a City (Penguin Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0143112709 paperback
$12
--The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (Penguin Press, 2011) ISBN 1594203032 $24 new
Ed Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York to 1898 paperback ISBN 0195140494
$20 e-book edition $9.99
2
Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives Dover Edition (about $8.50)
Leonard Levitt,. NYPD Confidential: Power and Corruption in the Country’s Greatest Police Force.
paperback ed. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0312650940 ($12, e-book $10)
Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: a History. Princeton, N.J.; Chichester: Princeton University
Press, 2001. $30 new but there are many used copies available
0691011397
You are also requested to obtain a free subscription to the the City/State daily newsletter First Read
http://www.cityandstateny.com/Gotham Gazette Eye-Opener. http://www.gothamgazette.com , and
regularly scan The Infrastructurist http://www.huffingtonpost.com/Infrastructurist.
All books are on order at the NYU Bookstore and will be on reserve at Dibner Library. Additional
bibliography is listed for each topic on the syllabus. Additional reading assignments, as specified, are
posted by date and will be available on NYU Classes.
In addition to the texts, students will be expected to buy or obtain from Bobst or some other library
one additional monograph for their book reviews.
Course requirements
1. Come to class prepared. You are expected to do the assigned reading in preparation for
class, which will be combination of lecture, discussion and your presentations,
2. One 6000-7000 word (20-25 page) team project paper, (about 5-6 pages of writing apiece)
based on primary sources, plus a half –hour team presentation of your neighborhood study,
on the last day of class (35%). on the development of a Brooklyn or Manhattan neighborhood
based on research at the Brooklyn Historical Society or the Municipal Archives. See assignment
sheet. Drafts due Nov. 18 for Workshopping (mandatory attendance) Nov. 25. Final Report Due
Dec. 11.
3. One 1250-1500 word (5-6 page) review of two books and a fifteen minute oral presentation
of your book review. (30%).
5. In-class mid-term and take-home final exam. (15% each 30% total).
These long and short essay exams will allow students to demonstrate their understanding of the
assigned readings, the lectures, and student presentations.
6. Class participation, attendance, especially on field trips, and credit for improvement (10%).
Recap
1. Neighborhood team project and presentation (graded individually)
2. Book review and presentation of book review of two books
3. Midterm exam
4. Final exam
5. Class participation
(30%)
(15%)
(15%)
(10%)
100%
(30%)
3
Schedule
Week 1. Tuesday Sept 2
A. Introduction to course: Lecture: What is the Urban Infrastructure?
B. What is the Urban Infrastructure? The organic metaphor and beyond.
C. Reading diagnostic exercise.
Thursday Sept. 5 NO CLASS, Makeup TBA The New York Estuary: Sanitation, Public Health,
Water 1850-2003
Week 2. Sept. 9-11.
SEPT. 9 FIELD TRIP NEWTOWN CREEK WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANT VISITORS CENTER
WITH DIGESTER EGG TOUR. BE AT THE PLANT AT 10:30 (YOU WILL GET AN E-MAIL WITH
THE DETAILS). THIS IS A HARD TO GET TOUR, AND VERY EXCITING BECAUSE YOU GET TO GO
INSIDE THE DIGESTER EGGS, WHICH MANUFACTURE BIOFUELS FROM SEWAGE.
Sept. 11
Lecture: From the first attempts at a water system to the Croton System.
Koeppel, Water for Gotham, chs. 8,9.
Week 3. Sept. 16-18 . Water, Sanitation And Sewage To 1899; Since Consolidation.
Improvements on the Croton System. The sewers.
Koeppel,. Water for Gotham chs. 9-epilogue.
Week 4 . Sept. 23-25 Gasification, Electrification and Communication 1850-2003 Gotham, Ch.
60, pp. 1059-70; Ascher, 92-110
Thurs. Sept. 25 Transportation I The Transportation Revolution Transport to 1850/1899
Gotham, Chs. 27(pp. 429-452), & 34 (pp. 563-86) Ascher 58-80, Steinberg, ch. 4 “Adventures in
Drainage”
Week 5 Sept 30-Oct. 3 Transportation II Railroads and Subways
Tuesday September 30
Ascher, 26-58, The Subways, Cliff Hood, 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They
Transformed New York, excerpt.
Presentations:
1. Ted Steinberg, Gotham Unbound (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2014). and Phillip Lopate,
Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan. Reprint edition. New York: Anchor, 2005.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
4
John A. Jakle, City Lights: Illuminating the American Night. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001 and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of
Light in the Nineteenth Century. Reprint edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Evan Cornog, The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769-1828.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 and Gerard Koeppel, Bond of Union: Building the Erie
Canal and the American Empire. Reprint edition. Da Capo Press, 2009.
Joanne Abel Goldman, Building New York's sewers : developing mechanisms of urban
management (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1997) and Joel A. Tarr, The
Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective. The University of
Akron Press, 2011.
Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of
New York City. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. and Benjamin Miller, Fat of the Land: Garbage
of New York -- The Last Two Hundred Years. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted
Inhabitants (Bloomsbury USA, 2005) and Dawn Day Biehler, Pests of the City: Flies, Bedbugs,
Cockroachs & Rats. University of Washington Press, 2013.
Thurs Oct. 2 trip to Municipal Archives. CONFIRMED
Week 6 Oct 7-9 Transportation III Bridges and Automobiles
Ballon and Jackson, excerpts. Ascher, 44-58.
Presentations:
7. Joseph B Raskin,. The Routes Not Taken: A Trip Through New York City’s Unbuilt Subway
System. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. and Sunny Stalter-Pace, Underground
Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2013.
8. Hilary Ballon, New York's Pennsylvania Stations, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 2002) and Jill
Jonnes, Conquering Gotham : a Gilded Age epic : the construction of Penn Station and its tunnels
(New York: Viking, 2007).
9. Anthony Flint,. Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and
Transformed the American City. Reprint edition. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks,
2011 and Roberta Brandes Gratz, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert
Moses and Jane Jacobs. First Trade Paper Edition edition. New York: Nation Books, 2011.
10. Sam Roberts, Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America. 1St Edition edition.
New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2013. and Kurt C. Schlichting, Grand Central’s
Engineer: William J. Wilgus and the Planning of Modern Manhattan. Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2013.
11. Owen D. Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American
Landscape. Reprint edition. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 and William W.
Buzbee, Fighting Westway: Environmental Law, Citizen Activism, and the Regulatory War That
Transformed New York City. 1 edition. Cornell University Press, 2014.
12. David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Reprint edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983 and Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge:
Fact and Symbol. 2 edition. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1979.
Week 7 Oct 14-16 Real Estate: Development up the Island, Housing and tenement regulations
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
13. Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted
Inhabitants (Bloomsbury USA, 2005) and Dawn Day Biehler, Pests of the City: Flies, Bedbugs,
Cockroachs & Rats. University of Washington Press, 2013.
14. Jared N. Day, Urban castles : tenement housing and landlord activism in New York City 18901943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and Joseph J. Varga, Hell’s Kitchen and the
Battle for Urban Space: Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894-1914.
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013
5
Week 8 TUES OCT 14 FALL RECESS NO CLASS
Thurs. Oct. 16 MIDTERM EXAM Please Bring Laptop to Class
Week 9 Oct. 21-23 The Skyscraper October 22 read: Kate Ascher, The Heights: Anatomy of a
Skyscraper
15. Efrat Eizenberg, From the Ground Up: Community Gardens in New York City and the Politics of
Spatial Transformation. New edition edition. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Pub Co, 2013 and David M Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New
York City Landscape. Temple University Press, 2003.
16. Carol Willis, Building the Empire State, 1st ed. (New York: W. Norton, 1998) and Gail Fenske,
The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York.
Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2008.
17. Mason B Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York. 1
edition. S.l.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
Thursday October 23 field trip to the Skyscraper Museum. Class will met at 10:45 am at the
Museum. $2.50 entrance fee.
Week 10 Oct. 28-30 Public Housing Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Public Housing That Worked
(excerpts), on My Poly
Presentations:
18. Robert Fogelson, The Great Rent Wars. Yale UP, 2013 and Roberta Gold, When Tenants Claimed
the City: The Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing. 1st Edition edition. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2014.
19. Sharon Zukin, Loft Living : Culture and Capital in Urban Change. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1989 and Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders: Property Development in New
York and London, 1980-2000. Revised edition. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
Week 11 Nov. 4-6 Security I Lisa Keller, Triumph of order : democracy & public space in New York and
London (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) available online from NYU Chs. 8 & 10. Leonard
Levitt,. NYPD Confidential: Power and Corruption in the Country’s Greatest Police Force. 1st ed. New
York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009. chs. 1-5
20. Jameson W. Doig, Empire on the Hudson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 and Gail
Radford, The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in
Twentieth-Century America. Chicago ; London: University Of Chicago Press, 2013.
21. Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded available on-line from the NYU Library and Max
Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s
Destruction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
22. Warren Sloat, A battle for the soul of New York : Tammany Hall, police corruption, vice, and
Reverend Charles Parkhurst's crusade against them, 1892-1895, 1st ed. (New York, N.Y.: Cooper
Square Press, 2002) and Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the
Progressive Era. First Edition /First Printing edition. Chicago ; London: University Of Chicago
Press, 2009.
Week 12 Nov. 11-13 Security II Levitt, 7-afterword.
6
23. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-century New York. New
York; London: W. W. Norton, 2007 and Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham. Reprint edition.
New York: Berkley Trade, 2013.
24. Gregory Holcomb Umbach, The Last Neighborhood Cops the Rise and Fall of Community
Policing in New York Public Housing. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011)
available from NYU ebrary. and Cathy Lisa Schneider, Police Power and Race Riots: Urban
Unrest in Paris and New York. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
25. Marilynn S. Johnson, Street justice : a history of police violence in New York City (Boston, Mass.:
Beacon Press, 2003) and Sarah Burns, The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding.
Knopf, 2011.
Week 13 Paper draft due Nov. 18-20 The Urban Crisis and the Infrastructure: Austerity and
Gentrification I.
Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn : Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in
Postwar New York. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011) chs introduction 2, & 6. (available
through NYU on Ebrary—go directly to ebrary—it’s miscataloged in Bobcat;
26. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier : Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London %3B New
York: Routledge, 1996 and Lance Freeman, There Goes the ’Hood : Views of Gentrification from
the Ground Up. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006.
27. Ella Howard, Homeless: Poverty and Place in America, Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2013
and Alex S. Vitale, City of Disorder : How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York
Politics. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Week 14 Tuesday Nov. 25 Paper drafts due for workshopping
Thursday Nov. 27 Thanksgiving NO CLASS
Week 15 Dec. 2-4 . Gentrification continued. Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color : Race and
Social Power in Brooklyn. New York: Columbia University Press, chs. 9-10. (on MyPoly). Film: My
Brooklyn. Inventory of Fulton Street.
Presentations:
28. Themis Chronopoulos, Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero
Tolerance. Routledge, 2013. chs. 3 & 4 and Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic
Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. 1 edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.
Week 16 Dec. 9-11 Neighborhood history assignment due.
Thurs. Group presentations of Neighborhood History projects