Jackson talks about revising encyclopedia, keeping the pulse of NYC

When you think about it, it’s really not surprising that the Columbia campus is not the most tight-knit community, given how the city swirls around campus. One man who’s devoted a good portion of his life to understanding the urban macrocosm of New York is Columbia history professor Kenneth T. Jackson.

Fifteen years after his best-selling “Encyclopedia of New York City” hit the shelves, with over 4,300 entries proving that even New Yorkers don’t know the real New York, he has published a second edition, which came out last week, to make New Yorkers further aware of how much is woven into the fibers of this metropolis and how little they know of it.

“Sure, maybe there’s a lot going on on Columbia’s campus, but you hop on the 1 train, and you get off at the crossroads of the world,” Jackson said.

“It’s so easy to become anonymous and change your world. For example, if you’re doing something I don’t like in a small town, I can do all sorts of things about it,” he said. “But here, I’m never gonna see you again, so I don’t care. It’s an advantage—it allows you to be whoever you want to be. I don’t have time to worry about you—I’ve got my own life to live! It allows you to do whatever you want to do, not murder maybe, but there are lots of things you can do.”

Although Professor Jackson has thrown himself (far deeper than he expected, he admitted) into chronicling every facet of our great city, he certainly does not trivialize its eccentricities by romanticizing them.

“New York is not everybody’s cup of tea—that’s no question. But if people didn’t want to be here, prices would be cheap,” Jackson said. “So in a capitalist system, that’s telling you this is where people want to be. If we were in Detroit, it’d be a different story.”

Jackson had similarly feisty justifications for why an updated version of his work was merited after 15 years and why New York deserves an encyclopedia in the first place.

“First of all, it would be hard to have this exact kind of encyclopedia for any other city because most other cities just don’t have as much going on as New York or haven’t had much going on for as long,” Jackson said. “It took 200 years for any other city to become even half as large. The cities that might be as large as New York, London, or Paris, they don’t have the stories.”

The hidden gems that Jackson says he’s interspersed throughout the book would shame the proudest city native and make even a Brooklyn sage shed some pretension.

For one thing, the real Little Italy is nowhere close to Mulberry Street. He said, “Arthur Avenue is the most genuine—the real Little Italy of New York. Its meat markets, the people, everything. Even with the Albanians and a bunch of other ethnic groups thrown in the mix, the place has strong Italian flavor—much more so than Mulberry Street.”

Another secret: virtual time travel via architecture just down the road. “Pomander Walk is something Columbia students don’t even know about,” Jackson said, “and it’s right there between 94th and 95th—a row of English Tudor houses, a whole little street you never knew was there, with no cars or anything. “

Jackson also wants readers to laud the city for its noble history. “New York is the oldest of all American cities. People don’t know how old it is—the important role it played in the American Revolution, losing the biggest battle, Battle of Brooklyn—the city’s role as a place of aspiration, whether for immigrants at Ellis Island or Andrew Carnegie coming with millions of dollars—the story of the infrastructure, especially its water system,” Jackson said. “It has the best water system of any city in the world. Unlike other cities, you can drink out of your commode. I’m not saying I actually do that, but it’s drinkable water.”

To give an idea of just how much the city has changed since its encyclopedic debut, Jackson threw out a few key phrases that are now commonplace jargon—“The World Trade Center, a spectacular decline in crime, E-ZPass, the High Line, gentrification of so many different neighborhoods,” just to name a few.

Apparently Columbia students have changed as well, although the student body Jackson waxes nostalgic about graduated well over fifteen years ago.

“I think students here are more conservative now, and more grade-conscious,” Jackson said. “In the 1970s, people thought they were gonna change the world and didn’t care what grade you gave them. Now people care.”