A block in time A New York City history at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Third street

Journalist Bird (The Sultan's Shadow) sheds light on the evolution of Manhattan from the 17th century to today in this colorful history of "the block between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth streets, Fifth and Sixth avenues." She sketches the island's natural history before introducing the block's human inhabitants, including Solomon Pieters, who, in 1680, was awarded "the largest land grant ever given to a Black man," 30 acres on which the block later developed. A chapter focusing on real estate tycoon Amos Eno, who opened the Fifth Avenue Hotel at the corner of 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue in 1859, gives insights into the early days of the city's hospitality industry. Perhaps the most intriguing story is that of surveyor John Randel Jr., "a young, inexperienced, dark-haired man with a temper and a passion for details and math," who spent three years making measurements and pounding 1,600 bolts and markers into the ground in order to create the 1811 grid that formed the basis for the current layout of Manhattan's streets. Elsewhere, better-known historical figures including financier James "Jubilee Jim" Fisk and architect Stanford White, who kept a "love nest" on the block and was shot and killed in the rooftop theater of the nearby Madison Square Garden, make appearances. Enriched by Bird's brisk character sketches and copious research, this is an entertaining and eye-opening snapshot of New York history. (Mar.)

Following A Thousand Ships, which was short-listed for Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction and a best seller in the United States, Haynes's Pandora's Jar belongs to a growing number of titles that put the female characters of Greek mythology front and center as less passive or secondary than they've been regarded (25,000-copy hardcover and 30,000-copy paperback first printing)

A native New Yorker recounts the history of the city by way of a microcosmic block. "Bordered by Twenty-third Street to the south, Twenty-fourth Street to the north, Sixth Avenue to the west, and Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the east, the block once lay far north of the settled city, then at its epicenter, and then on its cultural periphery once again," writes Bird in the preface. At the center of this urban world stood a hotel that was the scene of political glad-handing, deal-making, prostitution, and other such activities. Perhaps the most famous of the characters inhabiting these pages is the doomed architect Stanford White, gunned down during an affair with a woman whose husband suspected him of "blackballing him from New York's elite clubs." The woman in question slipped away into the shadows of the demimonde, at first commanding the tabloids for her "drunken brawls, arrests, evictions, unpaid bills, suspected abortions," and then largely falling into oblivion. Other of Bird's subjects are better-heeled, including Marietta Stevens, a social climber who amassed a fortune sufficient to have made her the model for Mrs. Lemuel Struthers in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. She owned much of the aforementioned hotel and plenty of other chunks of downtown, having acquired through various means a treasury of about $86 million in today's dollars, albeit mostly administered through a trust. Stevens made enough of a stir in life that "at a time when few newspapers ran obituaries for women, all the major New York papers ran one for Marietta, a testament to her hard-earned social status." Not so for the grifters, drifters, and other lowlier denizens of the block. Bird offers a lively account packed with memorable NYC characters, though it's less useful in sussing out the tribes of modern New York and a touch less well written than Ada Calhoun's St. Mark's Is Dead, based on a similar conceit. Students of an ever changing Gotham will take pleasure in Bird's well-researched narrative. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.