Feeding Gotham

New York City witnessed unparalleled growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, its population rising from thirty thousand to nearly a million in a matter of decades. Feeding Gotham 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, Gergely Baics explores the changing dynamics of urban government, market forces, and the built environment that defined New Yorkers’ experiences of supplying their households. A masterful blend of economic, social, and geographic history, Feeding Gotham traces how a highly fragmented geography of food access became a defining and enduring feature of the American city.