The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York City

In the closing decades of the 19th century, New York City was becoming the most electrifying, terrifying, and transformative metropolis on Earth. James Dabney McCabe captured it all in this unstinting portrait: the million souls packed onto Manhattan, the Irish and German and Jewish immigrants flooding in, the gilded Fifth Avenue mansions rising blocks away from tenements reeking of cholera and soot. He writes of Tammany Hall's thieves in office, of alleyway gambling dens and phosphoritic dance halls, of newsboys sleeping in doorways and merchant princes lighting their cigars with banknotes. But he also chronicles the city's jaw-dropping virtues: its relentless ambition, its mad entrepreneurial energy, its capacity to absorb the world's poor and forge them into something new. This is urban journalism before the term existed, a sprawling, moralistic, frequently astonishing document that lets modern readers touch the texture of a New York that has otherwise vanished entirely. For anyone curious about the bones beneath the skyline, the answer lies here.