Mike Wallace, co-author of 'Gotham,' a history of New York City, dies at 83

Mike Wallace, the Long Island-raised historian whose book about New York City, “Gotham,” written with Edwin G. Burrows, was hailed as the definitive account of the metropolis and won a Pulitzer Prize, has died. He was 83.

Wallace died Saturday at a hospital in Mexico City, said his wife, writer Carmen Boullosa. He had Lewy body dementia since 2019, she said.

The hardcover edition of “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,” published in 1998, weighed in at a monumental 1,416 pages and 4.35 pounds. The authors immodestly aimed to trace the city’s development as a “nodal point on the global grid of an international economy, a vital conduit for flows of people, money, commodities, cultures, and information,” migrating from peripheral trading post “to the center of the world.”

The book touches, early on, on the glacial mechanics that left Staten Island’s 410-foot Todt Hill the highest natural point on the Eastern Seaboard south of Maine, and the superabundance of wildlife that apparently enabled one early hunter to kill 170 blackbirds with one shot. On to the city’s role in the cotton trade, which by 1798 accounted for half the value of the city’s domestic exports and helped grow the city’s millionaire count from two in 1845 to dozens in the next decade. On to Tammany Hall, machine politics and sanitation engineer George Waring, who helped loosen the machine’s grip on the Department of Street Cleaning and turned New York into a place where people might actually want to live.

The volume, which took its authors roughly two decades to produce, covered the city’s history until 1898.

Most earlier histories of New York were city biographies, a genre that tended to emphasize progress and achievement and the lives of the elites, said Clifton Hood, professor emeritus of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. In “Gotham,” two meticulously researched sequels about the city, and other books and essays, Wallace worked within that genre but expanded it to encompass stories of “immigrants, strikes, insurrections, social discontent. …What Mike Wallace really did was modernize the city biography,” Hood said.

Another hallmark of Wallace’s work was his use of secondary historical literature, an approach that let him cover the place and its people on a far wider scale than could be done using primary sources like municipal records alone, Hood said.

“A lot of city biographies of the past are dusty, distanced," he said. "What he did was humanize all these people. He brings the people and the past alive.”

The Pulitzer Prize Board, which awarded Burrows and Wallace its U.S. history prize for 1999, said it was “as vast and varied as the city it chronicles” and “a dazzling read.”

Spent much of his childhood on Long Island

Wallace was born in Manhattan on July 22, 1942, and spent much of his childhood in Valley Stream and Great Neck, according to a biography on the website of Gotham Center for New York City History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, a research institute he founded.

The son of an Eastern European dressmaker mother and a father who worked in real estate, Wallace graduated from Columbia College in 1964 and stayed on to do graduate work with historian Richard Hofstadter.

In 1970, he was hired as a history professor at Franconia College in New Hampshire. In 1971, he moved to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, where he taught for decades.

Besides the Gotham trilogy, Wallace published books about post-9/11 New York, the ways in which history is produced and consumed in popular culture, and one, with Boullosa, on the history of the Mexican drug war.

He was senior historical adviser on Ric Burns’ “New York: A Documentary Film,” and a consultant for many historical exhibitions.

In 2011, Wallace was guest curator for "Nueva York," an exhibit produced by The New York Historical and El Museo del Barrio, that focused on the city’s Caribbean, Mexican and South American history.

“He helped us rethink a story that virtually no one knew,” said Louise Mirrer, president of The New York Historical.

Led support for New York Historical

In the early 1990s, when The New York Historical (then called The New-York Historical Society) was in dire financial straits, he helped galvanize support from hundreds of fellow academics, many of whom relied on the institution’s archives for their work.

At the Museum of the City of New York, he advised on “New York at Its Core,” a major permanent exhibit that opened in 2016. In a statement, museum president Stephanie Hill Wilchfort called him “one of the great historians of New York City, a scholar whose insistence on telling the city's story from the ground up changed the way all of us think about this place."

In an email, Harold Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and Manhattan borough historian, called Wallace “one of the great chroniclers of New York City” who paired “voluminous research and beautiful writing.” 

Besides Boullosa, whom he married in 2005, Wallace is survived by a sister, Penny Wallace, of California. He is also survived by three of Boullosa’s grandchildren.

Wallace had been unable to speak for weeks, but before he died was able to tell them, “I love you,” Boullosa said.

Funeral services were held in Mexico City. A memorial will be held at a later date at the Gotham Center in Manhattan.

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.