Finally, it’s done!
It took me over three years but I finally finished City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York by Tyler Anbinder. Not because it wasn’t interesting - on the contrary, it was an amazing read. But in my defense, the book (not including the appendices and end notes) was 550+ pages, we moved to a different state, I’m raising two young kids, working a full-time job and two freelance gigs…my 13-year-old self would roll her eyes and look at me in disdain as she devoured a second or third book in a day BUT I’m proud to have found any time to read any book in the last decade and this one was well-worth the time it took to finish.
I highly recommend this book for anybody with immigrant ancestors, whether or not they lived in or came through New York - and that’s pretty much all Americans. If you’re a history buff, or a Big Apple-phile, or you love the musical Hamilton (he gets a pretty big shout-out early-on in the read) or you’re interested in learning some context for what life was like for your New York immigrant ancestors, whether they were colonial immigrants or arrived in the last 30 years, this is an interesting, informative read. It’s dense, packed full of data and details, but not overwhelming to get through (unless you have a job and a family and have recently moved and have zero free time). The one thing I would criticize is that at the end, the author gets a little political. Even though I personally agree with his critique of recent politics regarding immigration, I think it’s a disservice to his argument that immigration has always been a point of contention, that the rejection and acceptance of immigrant groups ebbs and flows, that the contributions of immigrants over the life of New York City to the job market, real estate market, as consumers, as manufacturers, in politics and in innovation. Tyler Anbinder is better served when he points these things out throughout his book and explicitly at the end - there are consistent threads that run through 400 years of immigration history and its effects on and reception by American society. Whatever your beliefs and thoughts on immigration, legal or otherwise, there is a lot of food for thought in this book. And for the rest of us, who are just history and genealogy nerds, this is a book I believe I’ll go back to again and again to help contextualize the dates and places for the immigration of different ancestors - why they came and what it was like while they were here.
Slowly making my way through Tyler Anbinder’s book City of Dreams…well worth the three-plus years it took to finish!