328 REVlEWS

direction of that change for better or for worse. This is a collection of eighty-three photographs taken between 1864 and 1938 and matched by contemporary photos, each carefully executed to replicate the original camera locations. The intent was “to represent the major thoroughfares and districts of Manhattan” and not “to dramatize the degree and nature of change in the city”. Major landmarks receive considerable attention, as might be expected. The overall effect of the book is to excite in the reader a curiosity as to how and why the landscape has changed, but unfortunately the text offers little explanation of these changes.

GERALD R. WOLFE, New York: A Guide to the Metropolis; Walking Tours of Architecture and History (New York: New York University Press, 1975. Pp. xiv+434)

Walking and driving tours as teaching devices are little discussed among American historical geographers although many use “field trips” to advantage in their classes. Few think of publishing their itineraries as means of introducing students and the lay public to the historical interpretation of landscape. Not so the historian Gerald Wolfe who publishes here twenty of the more popular walking tours which he developed in his course on ‘The many faces of Gotham’, taught at New York University. Maps clearly depict the tour routes and major landmarks. In the text landmarks, streets and localities are described both as they are today and as they used to be. Unfortunately, emphasis is placed on unique structures and on significant people and events; less effort is made to paint the broad patterns of geographical change through time or to treat the vernacular or commonplace. Maps showing shifting land uses, population densities and other distributions in the past are missing. It is difficult to see how the average reader could derive from this work a general picture of New York City’s evolving landscape. However, the book does provide a basic historical-geographical frame of reference to the contemporary landscape. Engravings and photographs supplement the text to give the reader a picture of the past as he stands viewing the landscape today. The book is sufficiently compact to be carried and should be used as a field guide.

TONY P. WRENN and ELIZABETH D. MULLOY, America’s Forgotten Architecture (New York: Pantheon Books for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1976. Pp. 3 11. $8.95)

Intended to promote the historic preservation movement in the United States, this exquisite essay of photographs and the written word serves both to orient the uninitiated and inspire the already converted. Initial discussion focuses on the discovery of historical and aesthetic value in the built environment; emphasis is given to the identification of architectural styles. Throughout the book the biases of academic architectural history are dominant although the works of others, historical geographers included, receive passing mention. The door is left open for broader “landscape” orientations, but many readers will come away feeling that preservation should necessarily be a “one- building-at-a-time” conceptualization. Because the role of historic district planning is clearly understated, the book stands more as a consensus on where we have been rather than a prologue as to where we are going. The book is organized by building type and treats structures associated with residential, farm, institutional, transportation, com- mercial and industrial functions ; one section deals with monuments and memorials. The authors conclude with sections on architectural surveys, methods of preservation (in- cluding recognition programmes, preservation ordinances, deed restrictions and building codes), financial orientations (including revolving funds and tax abatements) and adaptive uses for buildings.

University of Illinois JOHN A. JAKLE