Views of New York, 1860 - 1920.

This collection of views of New York, collected and commented on by Gabrielle Townsend - already author of "John Singer Sargent" and "Winslow Homer" with the same publisher - relates the irrepressible metamorphosis of a city passing from traditional urban horizontality to a strict verticality, supported in this by the dazzling progress of a technology imported by architects and builders from old Europe. Liberty Enlightening the World or Statue of Liberty, designed by the Frenchman Auguste Bartholdi with the collaboration of the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and the engineer Gustave Eiffel, inaugurated in 1886, remains one of the first and most flagrant examples. It would take sixty years for the City of New York to rise and rise towards an architecture in which the skyscraper would be the norm, in the essential service of "commerce and competition". Ten years later, Ferdinand Bardamu, the central character in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, would coin this lapidary phrase: "New York is a city standing tall."