Ten Books That Recast Who Really Built Modern New York

By Elena Vasquez

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 workers in 1911. The building where it happened now carries the name of the philanthropist who later donated it to New York University — not the name of labor organizer Rose Schneiderman, who fought for the protections that followed.

That asymmetry drives "10 Books on the Birth of Modern New York," a reading list by David Conrad-Pérez, author of Fire in the Heart of the City: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Origins of Modern Charity, published by NYU Press. Conrad-Pérez spent more than a decade researching the fire's aftermath.

What does the list argue?

New York's conventional history celebrates financiers, politicians and philanthropists whose names appear on buildings, parks and libraries. Conrad-Pérez counters that others dug the tunnels, kept the lights burning and set the tables at the lavish parties that made the newspapers. He writes: "The tidier the story, the more important it is to ask whose contributions have been left out."

He identifies a structural problem in the archives. Wealthy families leave vast collections of papers; factory workers, tenants and neighborhood organizers survive only in fragments. "The danger is that we mistake the abundance of a paper trail for the importance of a life," he warns.

His own research illustrates the gap. Records of New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs and financier Jacob Schiff — both of whom shaped the city's response to the 1911 tragedy — are extensive. Recovering immigrant workers and organizers like Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman required, in his words, "following a far more scattered trail."

Which books made the list?

The ten titles span history, memoir, fiction and urban criticism:

• Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 — Wallace, a self-described radical historian who died this year, placed workers, women, Black New Yorkers and immigrants alongside financiers. He arrived at Columbia in 1960 intending to study medicine.
• James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son — Baldwin moves between autobiography, criticism and reflections on Harlem. Conrad-Pérez keeps a Baldwin line at his desk about people "impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin."
• Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad — Foner reconstructs the Black New Yorkers and abolitionists who helped enslaved people escape, showing reform "built from below."
• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments — Hartman reads police reports and prison files "against the grain" to recover young Black women's lives, including Mattie, who arrived from Virginia in 1913.
• Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones — a novel of a Barbadian immigrant family in 1930s and 40s Brooklyn.
• Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City — a reconstruction of 1975, when New York approached bankruptcy and austerity politics reshaped the city.
• Robert Caro, The Power Broker — more than fifty years after publication, still a manual on how power works. Caro's editor told him: "Turn every page."
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities — the 1961 classic that named the "sidewalk ballet" and helped change how New Yorkers fought for their city.
• James McBride, Deacon King Kong — a 1969 Brooklyn housing project novel opening with a deacon shooting a drug dealer.
• Rose Schneiderman, All for One (with Lucy Goldthwaite) — the autobiography of the garment worker turned organizer who advised Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and became secretary of the New York State Department of Labor.

Why does one book's survival matter?

The Schneiderman entry carries the list's sharpest warning about how history vanishes. Severe arthritis prevented Schneiderman from writing by hand, so she recorded her recollections on reel-to-reel tapes. Relatives later recorded over most of them, leaving only a few minutes of her voice. After her death, fellow organizer Pauline Newman cut passages from her letters, including romantic intimacies and criticisms of union leaders. Families destroyed other letters uncomfortable with the fact that many early women labor organizers had relationships with other women.

Conrad-Pérez credits Schneiderman's great-niece, Annie Schneiderman Valliere, with years of preservation work. Her effort, he writes, reminds us "that history doesn't preserve itself."

The takeaway is plain: New York was never the creation of a few great men. It remains, in Conrad-Pérez's words, "the work of countless people struggling over what kind of city they want to live in" — and the next reassessment of the record will depend on which fragments survive.