The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Wednesday, June 5, 2019 6:30-8:00 pm

Kara Schlichting Book Talk

New York Recentered
Building the Metropolis from the Shore

Chicago University Press, 2019

The history of New York City’s urban development often centers on powerful municipal figures such as Andrew Haswell Green and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered offers a new model for understanding the invention of metropolitan New York. By broadening the definition of planning, and paying close attention to the levels of governance on which it occurred, this book sees a regional history, not just a history of the city’s influence on its periphery. Schlichting recognizes the influence of diverse local actors in conjunction with the work of well-known power brokers such as Robert Moses. The rise of greater New York between 1840-1940 reveals how residential and industrial decentralization, recreation, and public works tied the urban core and periphery together and gave shape to the region.

Kara Murphy Schlichting is an Assistant Professor of History at Queens College. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University in 2014. Her work in late-19th and 20th-century American History sits at the intersection of urban, environmental, and political history, with a particular focus on property regimes and regional planning in greater New York City.

The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.