 I'm happy to be part of the community and happy that you all are here today. Just for a quick poll, how many people, are there any West Point graduates out here? Has anybody visited West Point? Okay, a few, okay. Any engineers out there, okay? We've got some engineers, okay. We've got this, and how many fans of New York City Central Park are there out there, okay? All right, so this story is the intersection of an education system that came from West Point that still exists at West Point. It's a story of the professions it created, predominantly, mostly we think of the military side, but I'm focusing on the engineers that came out of the academy in the 19th century. And it's the story of New York, the rise of Gotham, as it came to be known in the 19th century. And really, I argue that out of this intersection of these three histories, it really is part of the foundation of what you could argue of modern America in the last century. Engineering is a theme throughout, but at a more simple level, this book is a study of what was the system and what did it produce and what are the outcomes, and that's really where I started with this. So you can't talk about, all right, there we go. You can't talk about New York City without talking, starting with a George Templeton strong quote. So I start the book here, and he went out once I'm received, and he recorded in his diary later that night. Walk tonight on the west side, the Viaduct Railroad, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Stone Peers, a river street 250 feet wide, and the blowing up of Hellgate reefs. These are all changes now underway. We'll make this a new city within 10 years. So he's looking at this change that's going on after the Civil War, why he's out there, and you look at this quote and you think, well, gosh, what does that have to do with West Point? Well, the bridge, as you know, is the Robling family. Washington Robling had the bends. His wife, Emily Warren Robling, ended up carrying out the daily orders for the engineers and building that bridge throughout the 1870s into the completion of the bridge in 1883. Why she's significant to West Point? Well, her brother was a West Point graduate, Governor Kimball Warren. And she understood engineering tangentially from him and from being exposed to that culture. The Viaduct Railroad and the river here is an essential character to my story, Egred El Vile. Have you ever heard of Egred El Vile? We'll talk a little bit about him. Some of my colleagues have heard about him. The concrete, the stone piers, this is part of a larger plan that was going on in the late 1860s through the 1870s to standardize the whole shoreline of Manhattan, right, to make it more accessible for the commercial growth that was increasing every year. And in 1870 to 1873, the Docks Commissioner in charge of making this happen is General George B. McClellan of Civil War fame, so another West Point connection who's working as a Docks Commissioner, and we'll talk more about him in a little bit. And then last, but certainly not least, the Hellgate Reef. If you're not familiar with that is if you go with the old tribar bridge, now called the RFK Bridge, right below that bridge is the most treacherous water in the New York's water system. And General John Newton, class of 1842, figured out how to finally remove what they called Hellgate Rock in 1882 with a significant explosion that was reportedly felt all the way to Philadelphia if you read some of the newspaper reports. So this is where the story starts in the book, but where did it begin for me? Well, it began at this 31-foot pyramid in the cemetery at West Point. Has anyone seen this cemetery before you go there? And when I taught at West Point, my wife who's here today, I would have to bore her with these details, and friends would come to visit. But when you teach in the history department, one of your ancillary duties, your additional duties, is you have to be ready to give a tour. And here you'd say, here lies Egberdel Vile, class of 1847, with his second wife, Julia Dana Vile. He was fought in the Mexican War, first designer of Central Park. He came back from Central Park, joined the army again in Civil War, was a brigadier general, military governor of Norfolk, returned to the city after the war, became a congressman, a booster of the Upper West Side, and was also at one point on the Central Park board and finished his final years being a benefactor to the academy and, in fact, designing the expansion of the cemetery. Not much, right? Kind of pretty ostentatious. I think he deserves a 31-foot cemetery, because right here is Dan Butterfield, right here. And if you come further about 30 yards this way is Libby Custard. And you might see, well, there's a tomb there for General Custer, but they don't know if it's his bones or not that they dug up from out west. But this cemetery has got a lot of famous people on it. Winfield Scott was in there at this time. But he thought he was pretty important to have this. My fear that if I gave that spiel and gave that talk to somebody who was educated, first designer of Central Park. Hmm. Olmstead. Olmstead. So anybody who had an interest in landscape architecture and certainly Central Park would say, hold on a second. How is he the first designer? So there's a little bit of the study of history here. The first book I went to, I found it in the bookstore. It said that Edward L. Ville and Frederick Olmstead worked hand in hand to create Central Park. What I found when I realized I had to dig deeper, there's Ville, was that couldn't be further from the truth. Ville and Olmstead hated each other from 1857 on, all the way to 1900. And really what happened is Ville here, he comes from a Knickerbocker background. His family is well to do in that 19th century New York elite system. And he goes to West Point, but he also marries Theresa Ville Griffin, who was running around with the New York upper class. And through her, he takes her out West, comes back and realizes he's going to settle in New York. He comes associated with Fernando Wood in the first Tamini system. And Fernando Wood, if you've seen the movie Lincoln, he's depicted in there as a kind of a rascally character. He's often a footnote to New York history, but he's a Democrat. And politics is everything in the 1850s. He comes in and he needs a topographer to design. At this point, Central Park has moved from the placement of the park, has moved from the East River. They want to put it, Andrew Jackson, Downey, and company, William Cullen Bryant. They want to put it right in the middle of Manhattan of design. So he needs someone who can clear it, do the topography, figure it out, sells himself on the expertise that he gained at West Point. I can do that for you, Mayor Wood. And not only that, I'll be a good Democrat for you. And so he becomes the engineer and chief of Central Park in 1855. And so what does he do? Well, he draws a nice survey. And he comes up with a design for the park. So during these two years, he's taking these working crews. He starts out with 200 employees, soon to be 400 laborers. And they're all immigrants. And they're all coming from downtown with these letters of endorsement from Tammany. So this becomes a source of patronage, obviously, in the city. But if you look, it's kind of sparsely drawn. But it looks similar to what we know about the reservoir here. The ball fields are here now, right, where the Crote and Aqueduct Reservoir. The initial one, I'm sorry, this is the second reservoir. The first one is down by Bryant Park, where it currently exists. But he's got carriageways to go through. He's got a circular path that he envisions people will ride their carriages and show off their horses and that sort of thing for the New York elite. Not necessarily the lungs of the city that many of the folks come to think about at Central Park. And certainly, as Frederick Law Olmsted imagined it to be. Well, here's Olmsted's plan, the Greensboro plan. So how does Olmsted get into the story? Well, you have to understand New York politics, 1857, reform-bent Republicans up in Albany side. You know what? We've really got to get Fernando Wood under control and the Democrats. So they recharter the government. They recharter the government, I think, five or six times in the 1800s. And under that charter, we're going to strip away the Parks Commission, the Parks Department from him, as well as one of the police force. So the new charter comes out in 1857. Calvert Vox, or Vaux, depending on how you read, is five foot one, really hates this plan. So does Andrew Jackson Downing. So does William Cullen Bryant. And other Republicans, they said, you know, we've got Frederick Law Olmsted, who knows who's been studying how to create landscapes, how to create gardens, and do it in urban areas. And as part of this pastoral ideal that's emerging in the 1850s, we need to have this in the city. We need to have a place to do this. So they tell Olmsted, guess what? You're going to be the superintendent. Go there. We are hiring you now. And he reports to Olmsted, or he reports to Vile on the first day. Vile doesn't really understand that he's about to lose his job. And he takes him on this tour of the Muddy Park. A few months later, they announced there's going to be a design competition. 30 designs are submitted. This is design 22. Curiously enough, one of the designs, design number two, was just a pyramid that somebody had submitted. Well, you know the end of the story. This is what gets selected. By 1858, Vile is out of a job. Olmsted and Vaux are on their way to creating the screens where it planned. And what does Vile say? You stole my plan. And of course, there's a good lawsuit that goes for many years. So what Vile claims at the start of this lawsuit is that, hey, look, I had four traversers connecting the east and west sides. I had a nice lake in the middle, so to see. But if you read any good history of the park, which you realize, and if you've been to Central Park, part of the genius of the Greens were designed is that Olmsted sunk these passageways. So if you ever driven to the park, you're in a ditch almost, driving through the park. But if you're standing on the park, all you see is one continuous landscape. So note the detail. Come back up here. You get a better plan with that. This is actually from the New York Public Library. Each bush looks more like a landscape drawing that we're familiar with today. And of course, Olmsted goes on to be the father of American landscape architecture, if not all landscape architecture, up with the park here in Bellevue, and over 70-plus parks across the country that he builds. So I started with this, and I was like, oh, I did the paper on it. And then I started asking, well, what is the connection between this academy, 50 miles up the river from New York, and the city? Are there any other connections? And what I found is that there were. And it starts with Syvenius Thayer. Now, if you're not familiar with Syvenius Thayer, he's the father of the military academy. The academy's found in 1802. Kind of goes on for 15 years, takes the highest in the War of 1812. There's no real regimented system program of education. Cadets can come as young as age 12. They can be entered in. And when they think they're ready, they'll graduate them for the first 15 years. He comes out, and they send him off. The engineers, Joseph Totten, sends them off to France in 1815. Because in 1815, who is the most successful, most popular military leader in the world? Napoleon. So they go over and they say, well, how did Napoleon become so successful? How did his staff work? Well, they went to the coal polytechnic in Paris. So he goes over there with another lieutenant, McCray. And they come back with boxes of French books on mathematics, science. And he comes in and he standardizes the program. 1817 to 1833, he is the superintendent of the academy. Now, this program of study remains largely intact, except for a period in the 1850s where they go to a five-year program, a five-year study. But when you're a first year, fourth year, commonly known today, as we say, a freshman, but they're called plebs today, a couple of classes. You study mathematics, and you study French. Why do you have study French? You have to read the textbooks that you're going to read as you come up, certainly, into your first year or your senior year. And it's an evolution that comes up. And you don't really get your military training till up here under Professor Douglas with fortification, military art, and civil engineering. So engineering becomes the forefront, because it's about fortification. It's about building defenses. It's about understanding how to fire artillery so you have to understand math. So all of these building blocks come in there. But I circled this guy here, Cadet Mahan, Alfred Thayer's father, Dennis Hart Mahan. Cadet Mahan was an outstanding cadet. If you were a talented cadet, you got drafted to be the teaching assistant. You got drafted to teach a section of the plebs. And there he is. How many of you are familiar with Dennis Hart Mahan? You guys all know Alfred Thayer, Mahan, right? He's former president of the Naval War College, esteemed scholar, great naval strategist. We still think about his son today. Dennis Hart Mahan came to the academy initially his parents immigrated from Ireland. They moved to New York City after he was born. He was raised in Norfolk, Virginia. So he had Southern interests. He comes in, graduates the top of his class in 1824. He comes ill, can't really take his first assignment, but they figure, you know what? We're gonna keep him on as an instructor. They sent him to Paris. They sent him to France to get his education, his graduate education. And he comes back and he perfects the Thayer system over the next 40 years. That program I showed you, he takes it and he starts writing textbooks, starts translating the engineering textbooks. Every cadet, every military officer who graduates from West Point takes his course. So if you're a military historian or a civil war fan, there are those who think Mahan may have been part of the reason there was so much carnage during the civil war, because they follow his teachings. And tactics, it was order of March. It was trying to figure out how to employ artillery battalions. And it really wasn't as highly operational as we think about it now, but they are reading Clausewitz. They are reading Jominy. But they're also learning how to be engineers. And part of that process, I'm gonna back up in just a moment, there's this course right here, like drawing, drawing. Why the heck are they drawing? Well, if you're gonna be an engineer, you have to know how to make a topographical map. If you're gonna go be a lieutenant, you have to be able to convey the battlefield that you're operating on. They didn't have Google Earth, they didn't have their maps. So they had Robert Weir. Robert Weir institutes the drawing program. He's hired in 1834. He's at the Academy teaching drawing till 1876. He was a well-known artist. He was recommended by William Cullen Bryant. He was hired by President Andrew Jackson. This is the 1820s, 1830s. Andrew Jackson has a lot of direct influence of what's going on at the Military Academy, right? Not a large country. And certainly it's one of the few national institutions of learning that exist. The Naval Academy is not created till 1845. So this is the only truly national military academy that's in the country. He uses a system of drawing and drawing books by Seth Essman, Eastman. You could find his artwork, Robert Weir's artwork, Eastman's artwork, and many others in art collections. This is a nice art collection at West Point, the Museum Proper. But so they're accomplished artists in their own right, but they're using it for a military means. So here's an example of some of the artwork that the cadets would do. And this is, again, I'm going back to Governor Kimball Warren. So he's Class of 1855, but if you notice, it's the drawing rock formations in trees. And you can find, as Robert E. Lee has a famous Roman helmet that he sketched. That's often in books that you'll find. And you'll find all sorts of topographical drawings of West Point, the landscape proper. Done by these graduates. So regardless of where they finish in their class, classes graduated anywhere from 40 to 25 to 20 cadets, depending on the year. But you had to be the number one or number two cadet to get into the Corps of Engineers. That was the prize assignment. If you got to be in the Corps of Engineers, you got to go to places like Newport, where there were people. There were ladies. You could have a social life. If you weren't in the top two, you generally went to artillery or infantry or quartermaster, Regenerals grants biography. You can understand that. Or you could become a topographical engineer. And a lot of these folks went into that. This is the Survey Act of 1824. Survey Act of 1824, I don't know how it would pass today, but it's creating, basically, authorizing the Corps of Engineers to build the infrastructure for the century. The canals, the roadways. Not really sure about railways yet. Railways are gonna become more prom in the 1830s, 1840s. But in order to make this happen, two or more skillful engineers, and such offices as other Corps of Engineers, may be detailed to duty with that Corps as he may think proper. The B&O Canal, which grew into the B&O Railroad, said, hey, we'll take eight. They took eight topographical engineers. And if you read the history of the men that took that assignment, they weren't in the Army much longer than two or three years after the assignment, and they happened to become employees of that firm. So before the Mexican War and even after the Mexican War, before the Civil War, a lot of these guys would take that expertise and parlay it into a civilian career, which would prove to be more lucrative and perhaps a little more, what's the word I'm looking for? A little more sedentary. So, stabilize, that's the way I'm thinking of it. So they're looking for a way to do that. So the survey act is huge. And one of the guys that benefited from this to a certain degree is George S. Green. He's Rhode Island, born and bred. He's most famously known in military circles for Culp's Hill, the second day of battle at Gettysburg, holding the fish hook up there at age 61. He worked for the Croton Aqueduct before and after the Civil War. But he's, again, class of 1823. So what does he do for the first 10 years of his life? He goes up to Maine, and he's working on the harbors up there. And it's as many souls from the 19th century. It's kind of tragic. He loses his first family in the course of seven months, wife and three kids, to illness. And so he decides it's time to make a change. And so he decides to become a civilian engineer. He works in South Carolina on the railroad. He works in New York. He meets Alfred Craven, who's gonna be one of the founders of the, one of the leaders of the Croton Aqueduct. And of course, one of the founders of the American Society of Civil Engineers, to which George S. Green also becomes a part of. He dies in 1896. His work, especially after the war, he built the structures, the water structures, and the buildings that go around the Round Reservoir, the major reservoir at Central Park. He helped build the dam up at Boyd's Corners to bring water to the city. So if you go look at his papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society, you'll find his notebook. And if you read an 19th century script, most handwriting, it's hard to do, right? It's almost a lost art. But this notebook, it's the most fine new detail. Has arches and specifications for pipes and how to build waterways and formulas for physics. Truly remarkable that he carried with him his whole life. And so he becomes, in my mind, one of the quintessential guys to carry us through the century. Now, let's come back to Egbert, right? After the Civil War, he doesn't work for the Crote and Aqueduct. He tries to be more prominent and more public in his life. He becomes what they call a West Side Booster. The West Side Association is invent on competing with the East Side for developing the streets west of Central Park heading up towards Harlem. That becomes his neighborhood. He buys a house up there, and they meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and you can find the minutes of these meetings. And they're not really, they're more than a civic organization. There's really a bunch of guys trying to make money and develop the Upper West Side. But he does have a side to him that does look around him and realize there's problems in the city, there's problems with sanitation, there's problems that perhaps his military training, his engineering training can help stem. And he looks at it and says, you know what, we've got to figure out where the miasomatic odors, where the bad water comes from. They didn't understand germ theory, but they knew that poor conditions, health conditions evolved from where water stood and where people didn't have good drainage. So he draws this map in 1865. It's called the water map. It gets updated again in 1874. Has anybody seen this map before? So this map, it's on the cover of the book. There's several versions of it as it comes out, but if you look at this map, what he's done is he's taken the grid, Randall's grid from 1811, and he superimposes it over the terrain of what was Manhattan Island. And you can see it's got all these creeks and streams that run through it. And he's got the original Croton, the second Croton aqueduct reservoir right here. And you can kind of see the outline of Central Park. And he draws this in it. It's exist today because the detail is such that any builder that builds in Manhattan has to consult this map today. Still, everybody every eight years you'll see an article in the New York Times that'll say, hey, I've got water in my basement. I never knew why until I looked at this map. And they go, oh, you're on top of a spring. But they built the city core building. They realized that they had to look at where the foundation was. I don't think I've got the extra down in this area here. The other thing you can see that's interesting about the map, let me back up a little bit, is you can see where they filled in to extend the streets and the docks. The green is where the original shoreline was. But they've really conformed the Manhattan to make the development happen in the city. So he looks at this map and puts this together well with a sanitary report. The sanitation reform that comes out of the Civil War era, he's trying to contribute it as well, submitting reports to the city, submitting reports to the West Side Association to think about how you can make life better, specifically for the Upper West Side. So here's his West End Plateau map that he drew. And if you look at this, he's looking, there's Broadway coming up through here. There's Riverside Drive. You can see the park defined there. And he's got Central Park down here, which he still thinks he designed, by the way. He thinks he's the original designer of it. And the vision that he had was to take the money and elites from Fifth Avenue and below 50th Street and provide them an idyllic retreat up here. The only problem was his timing. So he's doing this in the 1880s. Well, what's happening down here in Bellevue? What's happened in Bar Harbor? There's other places to go with your money than up here to the Upper West Side and Riverside Drive. And so it was uneven development to the plan that he had there. But still, he's able to, and his associates, the New York associates that he's working with, they do convince to make this park work and ultimately, where does Grants 2 end up? But here, almost in Harlem at the end of this park. All right. The other piece that's going on at the same time is George McClellan. Now, George McClellan, his influence is not so much his engineering contributions and his expertise, but it's the politics of the era, right? So if you'd know anything about George, he was seen as a genius, right? To go into the Civil War for the first two years. He's studied the Crimean War in the 1850s. He's written an article about it. He's also made money in the 1850s as a railroad magnet. And he looks good. He looks good in uniform, all right? So he's head of the Army of the Potomac, leads to the disaster at Antietam, moves too slow. He seems to be countering everything Lincoln wants to have happened during the war and the Republicans want to happen. And part of it fundamentally is the strategic difference in outlooks. McClellan is okay with keeping slavery in the Confederacy. They're looking to appease, looking to make peace. And so, he's not necessarily in line with what the Republicans are looking for in the Civil War. And he's a Democrat. And we know that when he was relieved of command in 1863, 1862 and 1863, he then becomes nominated for the 1864 presidential election as a Democrat. He loses that election. He goes on a world tour, comes back, trying to figure out where he's gonna fit in. Where is he gonna fit in? Well, in New York City. Because people don't realize, New York City is a bastion for the Democratic Party. So if you followed and served under George McClellan, after the war, you had to find work, you're looking for a place to settle down, come to New York, it's opportunity, right? It's the Democrats still have a strong hold on the city. You have to be careful because you've got the Tammany Machine in Manhattan, you have to look out for the Brooklyn Machine under Boss McLaughlin in Brooklyn. But where you stood during the war determines how well you'll do in the city. And that's a large part of what McClellan did. So he was offered Comptroller position under Boss Tweed. And probably it's a good thing he didn't take it because 1872 Tweed is found out to be corrupt, loses power. But the comp, and of course the Comptroller goes down with him, but he needs to have a position that is equitable to his rank and esteem. So as Doc's commissioner, he's really looking to try and make, this is a graphic from the New York Times a couple years ago, he's only trying to standardize this. And if you look at the pictures of the history of this area, the plan was we'll have standard quays and piers along the way, you'll have a roadway, a railway, you'll have standardized warehouses and it'll look like, I guess, the 19th century version of an Amazon warehouse. Products in, products out, up the Manhattan, that's the way it's supposed to go. There's a reason I'm at the War College and I'm not well off because I don't know how to make money in New York and neither did McClellan. There's too many interests. There was too many interests. The dock workers wanted to have their interests. The guys who owned the current piece of the property wanted to have that. The railways wanted to have their way. So there's no way that the government could gain enough capital and interest to make this standardized throughout the whole peninsula. So in a large part, McClellan's contribution is not that large as an engineer, but he survives this time as a Doc's commissioner to end his career as the governor of New Jersey. Again, as a Democrat. Another guy who benefited is this guy, Henry Warner Slocum, class of 1852. Right, serves in the Civil War, comes back from the war from Central New York Delphi just south of Syracuse, thinks he can make a go as in politics and he goes to the Republican Convention and he's out of alignment in 1868 with the powers that be and he has to move and he relocates to Brooklyn and becomes a Democrat and using his war record and his fame from fighting at Gettysburg, he gets elected and he has to work with the Brooklyn machine but he's not part of the Brooklyn machine and of course the Brooklyn at the time is trying to figure out how to build a great bridge. So he's advocating and submitting bills to support the great bridge in Congress but he doesn't necessarily become the leader of that effort. The leader of that effort, as we know, as I explained at the beginning of this talk, is really Emily Warren Roebling and her husband, Washington Roebling. So how did she get hooked up with Washington Roebling? Washington Roebling during Gettysburg was his chief of staff. So here's the Warren family. They grew up across the river at Cold Spring, New York, across the river from West Point. She is used to hearing the parrot artillery rifles going off and testing at the crow's nest there at West Point. She's used to socializing with cadets and army officers. She's used to hearing that sort of talk. She is sent down to the school in D.C. for, at her brother's behest after the parents passed away where all women went to go, fine young ladies would go for schooling in the 1850s. During the war, she meets Roebling and they end up getting married. And so after the war, her brother stays on as an engineer and ends up becoming the main, the chief engineer for the Newport area. And so he's living here at the historic point. So in between directing the bridge and helping her husband convoy us, they would travel up here and visit her brother here in Newport where he ends up dying at age 52 suddenly. So he's buried, he's buried there in our cemetery here at the north of the burial grounds. You can visit that grave. But what is interesting about Emily, she's the only woman who's really noted on the bridge and if you read McCullough's book on the history of the Great Bridge, she's one of the central characters. And there was a nice documentary done several decades ago now by Ken Burns on her. But what's interesting is this plaque, there's two plaques on the Brooklyn Bridge. One has 65 names including Slocum and the others, Seth Lowe and all the politicians that made it happen. But for the Robelings, she gets top billing. There's Washington Robelinger and her husband and there's John Robelinger, the father who started the Robelinger Bridge Company. And if you remember the story, he ends up dying after his foot gets crushed while visiting a bridge site. While Washington Robelinger's visiting bridges at Cincinnati, his foot gets crushed by a peer and ends up dying a few days later. But it says, the back of every great work, we can find the self-sacrifice and devotion of a woman, right? So this is, so in reality, she is the one who builds a bridge. And I would contest that it's part of this culture that this system produced during the war. So we're getting close to the end here with the cast of characters I want to introduce you to. This is the quintessential West Point engineer from the 19th century. John Newton, class of 1842, goes into the Corps of Engineers. During the Civil War, he fights at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, he's part of the Atlantic Campaign. He was back into the Corps of Engineers and surveys all the development around New York City. And ultimately figures out, as I said earlier, how to remove Hellgate. Here's just a diagram to show you how dangerous it is. Has anybody sailed through here? Was it fun? Yeah. Yeah, I think about that as we, and whenever I drive over this bridge, I kind of look over there and think, I don't think I want to be down there. This summer, my wife and I were visiting folks in Long Island and we bought a paddle board. And the woman we bought the paddle board, who owned the paddle board store, every year she circumnavigates Manhattan Island on a paddle board. And I think about Hellgate. I was like, well, maybe she's pretty happy that John Newton got rid of that rock because especially before steam navigation, it was a major problem to making this work, the infrastructure of the city. He retires in 1886, Newton does, but he spends two years as the Commissioner of Public Works in the city. So again, same trend. You'll see either in privately, but mostly as public works commissioners, you'll see these folks come in, come into the city. I highlight this because this is interesting. This completes the infrastructure, arguably, for the city. When they opened that Harlem Ship Canal in 1895 that connects the Hudson River with the East River. And it makes it possible now for the whole island of Manhattan to be commercially viable, to have an infrastructure with not only the Brooklyn Bridge, but now ferries can come through. And you've got other bridges that are under construction and that have been built by this point. In 1894 was the bill that approved the consolidation of the five boroughs to happen in 1898. So without that infrastructure, I would argue it's not possible for there to be the greater New York that we have today and understand. And it's certainly recognized in the anals of the American Society of Symbol Engineers. And it's looked at upon as these West Point engineers as being not necessarily the leaders, but certainly significant contributors to that effort. This is the Dewey Parade for Elmo Dewey's Victory of the Manila in 1899. I like it because it's coming down Riverside Drive with the core cadets to celebrate that. And 1902, three years later, it's the Centennial of the Academy. And as you can imagine, it's a big event up there at West Point and they invite the president. So Teddy Roosevelt comes to the Centennial and his remarks are well known. Everyone's familiar with the quote that West pointers are absolutely American, 100% American. But he also noted in that same speech, he said, your duty here at West Point has been to fit men to do well in war. But it's a noteworthy fact that you've also fitted them to do singularly well in peace. The highest positions in the land have been held, not exceptionally, but again and again by West pointers. So when you think about this, it really is that this lost or not really identified contribution outcome of a system of military education that led to this modernization of New York 100 years ago. So that's what the book is about. I welcome any questions. Thank you. Thank you.