Feeding Gotham

New York City witnessed unparalleled growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, its population rising from thirty thousand people to nearly a million in a matter of decades. This book looks at how America's first metropolis grappled with the challenge of provisioning its inhabitants. It tells the story of how access to food, once a public good, became a private matter left to free and unregulated markets—and of the profound consequences this had for American living standards and urban development. Taking readers from the early republic to the Civil War, the book explores the changing dynamics of urban governance, market forces, and the built environment that defined New Yorkers' experiences of supplying their households. It paints a vibrant portrait of the public debates that propelled New York from a tightly regulated public market to a free-market system of provisioning, and shows how deregulation had its social costs and benefits. Using cutting-edge GIS mapping techniques the book reconstructs New York's changing food landscapes over half a century, following residents into neighborhood public markets, meat shops, and groceries across the city's expanding territory. The book lays bare how unequal access to adequate and healthy food supplies led to an increasingly differentiated urban environment. A blend of economic, social, and geographic history, the book traces how this highly fragmented geography of food access became a defining and enduring feature of the American city.