Crossing Broadway

Drawing on research studies, oral histories, and contemporaneous reporting, Snyder'swell-paced narrative projects the neighborhood's serial make-overs against the backdrop of Gotham's turn from postwar industrial and corporate colossus to a place where manufacturing jobs, white people, and corporations seemed to depart all at once. Historians of the city will find much to think about in this stylish, well-researched, and balanced popular history.

* Journal of American History *

Crossing Broadway is a traditional community study and also a beautiful narrative. It will be of interest not only to professionals who engage with the urban landscape but also to those who work with oral histories on many levels.... At once both comprehensive and compelling, Crossing Broadway gains much of its traction by illuminating the individual ways in which residents developed their devotion to their community, demonstrating successful methods for improving public life. Hearing directly from the immigrants and their children makes them real; it touches our hearts and makes them open, truly a great measure of the success of any book.

* Oral History Review *

Robert Snyder provides an intimate portrait of the urban experience. And like all urban histories of the twentieth century, we know that this will end in crisis. Yet Washington Heights lets Snyder move block by block as this transformation comes. Perhaps most telling is Snyder's own backstory; Washington Heights was the neighborhood of his parents who, though they left the neighborhood for the suburbs, still spoke highly of the place.

* Reviews in American History *

Snyder's deftly handled descriptions of upper Manhattan are so richly embroidered, and so well researched, that he circumvents the hazards of a mere parochial accounting of his subject. Clearly, he looks kindly on the tenacity with which residents and others have fought crime, poor schools, gangs, landlord neglect, and myriad other urban travails.

* Journal of Urban Affairs *

Crossing Broadway is an engaging, compelling, insightful study.... There is a good deal here about pride of place, how people struggle and get along and get by day to day in sometimes adverse circumstances, and about how communities are built, and rebuilt, by determined individuals. The book sets a high standard for sensitivity, depth, and excellence in urban community studies.

* New York Histo