Peculiarities of American Cities

In the closing decades of the 19th century, America was remaking itself. Cities that had been villages were becoming metropolises, and Willard W. Glazier had seen them all - over a hundred of them, lived in, walked through, memorized. This travelogue captures urban America at a pivotal moment, before the automobile, before the skyscraper boom, when cities still wore their histories on their sleeves. Glazier writes not with the detachment of a statistician but with the warmth of someone who knows a city's streets like the lines in his own palm. The book opens in Albany, where he arrives from Boston, and immediately we feel the pull of the old Capitol, the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, the thrum of State Street. Each city becomes a character - its ambitions, its landmarks, its particular light. For readers who want to see America not as it is but as it was becoming, Glazier offers an intimate, observant companion through a nation in motion.