This study explores the economic, cultural and political factors which shaped the spatial transformation of Gilded-Age New York City. Using narrative, visual, and cartographic sources, it argues that the Manhattan landscape underwent a fundamental restructuring. Real-estate and infrastructural improvements produced a more complex and expansive environment and a monumental canon of urban design. At the same time, market forces tended to make New York's working-class and waterfront districts crowded, squalid, and dilapidated. During the 1860s and '70s, this pattern of uneven development provoked new proposals for planning, environmental regulation, and landscape design.

This "bourgeois urbanism" was not just a technical response to environmental crisis. It reflected new cultural attitudes toward spatial and social order. The city's commercial, real-estate, administrative, and intellectual elites saw the New York landscape as a barometer of moral and social order in the metropolis. Drawing on various graphic and textual representations of the landscape, the dissertation argues that their "readings" reveal a mix of booster confidence and anxiety. Bourgeois urbanists celebrated achievements like Central Park and Brooklyn Bridge as evidence of New York's grandeur and civility. At the same time, they decried the evils of tenement- and street-life as emblematic of social and political ills which were at odds with the city's prosperity and their own civic authority.

The new urbanists thus sought to turn city-building into a means of defining and stabilizing civic order. This campaign took many forms, but the most important was the effort to lay out a genteel landscape of parks, drives, and planned suburbs on the fringe of Manhattan. This "uptown utopia" was designed to project into space bourgeois ideals of private property, public order, domestic virtue, and elite stewardship. It represented, I argue, the first attempt at comprehensive urban design in America.

Ultimately, bourgeois urbanists failed to make city-building a means of instituting their political and ideological authority. The Tweed scandal, the 1870s depression, and the rise of laissez-faire liberalism all worked to stalemate comprehensive urban design. No coalition of reformers, politicos, or real-estate interests was able to impose its values on the city-building process. On the one hand, New York illustrated the dominance of often anarchic market forces over the process of urban spatial change in the late 19th century. On the other hand, it dramatized the larger political and cultural crisis of authority which beset the American urban bourgeoisie during those years.