By Fergus M. Bordewich

New York City has challenged legions of writers who have attempted to wrestle its teeming humanity, its ever-evolving economy and the sheer too-muchness of its more than 350-year history into literary form. With "Gotham at War," completing his epic "Gotham" trilogy, Mike Wallace, a historian emeritus at John Jay College, has come closer than anyone else and is unlikely to be rivaled anytime soon. The two previous volumes in the series were "Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898," written with Edwin G. Burrows, and "Greater Gotham: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919," which were published in 1999 and 2017, respectively.

Writing with both panoramic sweep and an acute eye for telling detail, Mr. Wallace begins his nearly 900-page behemoth with the influx of mainly Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Hitler's Germany. In 168 short chapters spanning from 1933 to the aftermath of World War II, Mr. Wallace goes on to present the city's alternately shimmering and gritty, often combative, worlds in a vibrant narrative that admirably balances the political, the cultural and the commercial. Chapter titles capture something of the book's wide range: "Nazis in New York," "The Waning of the Green," "Catholics v. 'Communists,'" "Women at Work," "You Go to War With the Capitalists You've Got," "Sex and the City," "Toward a Fashion-Industrial Complex," "The Last Subway Series," "Rumbamania." Each one is a small masterpiece of concision that combines erudition, insight and dry humor.

Colorful characters abound: the master builder Robert Moses, the imperious Francis Cardinal Spellman, the labor leader "Red Mike" Quill, the civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin, the budding black politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the columnist Walter Winchell, the New York Post owner Dorothy Schiff, the seedy leader of American Nazis Fritz Kuhn, Frank Sinatra and many, many others. Looming large among them all is the pint-size, omnipresent, ferociously liberal and hyperpatriotic mayor, Fiorello La Guardia.

A chapter on the maneuvering that led to La Guardia's third term illustrates Mr. Wallace's method. "As early as 1940, Fiorello La Guardia had had it with being mayor of New York," he writes. Having already accomplished much of what he wanted to do, La Guardia, a pilot during World War I, was sure that America would be drawn into the war already underway in Europe and was desperate to get in on it. President Roosevelt was pressuring him to run again for mayor, however. Deftly unraveling the tangled politics of the moment, Mr. Wallace vividly shows La Guardia juggling factions of fusionist Republicans, communists, interventionists, isolationists, Tammany pols and a rat's nest of the city's fierce ethnic rivalries.

To challenge La Guardia, the Democratic machine tapped William O'Dwyer, "the feisty district attorney from Brooklyn who had been mowing down members of Murder Incorporated at a fearsome and publicity-garnering rate." Mr. Wallace then segues into O'Dwyer's prosecution of that murder-for-hire gang, a pursuit derailed when the central witness in the prosecution, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles "fell" -- he was probably thrown -- from a supposedly police-protected room in a Brooklyn hotel. La Guardia handily won the November election and was later elected to a fourth term. (He was in no way implicated in Reles's death.)

The war, of course, overshadows almost every aspect of Mr. Wallace's book. Rapidly expanding war-related industries upended gender roles and affected almost every New Yorker. Anxiety filled the city's atmosphere, especially early in the war, when Allied freighters were being torpedoed off the coast, tragically framed against the city's nighttime glow. Nazi spies were discovered working from a Midtown Manhattan hotel. Fears of a subversive "Fifth Column" spurred harassment of immigrants from Axis countries, especially the city's tiny Japanese population.

Economically, the war was good for New York. With money to spend, New Yorkers -- or at least those who hadn't been already drafted -- enjoyed a booming nightlife and startling new sexual freedom. Depression-era poverty evaporated as war-related jobs proliferated along with massive government spending. Writes Mr. Wallace: "Wartime Gotham remained by far the largest manufacturing center in the nation." Its highly specialized plants excelled in making precision instruments, electronic components and all kinds of high-tech hardware. Its military contractors offered the newly completed Pentagon a "supple and flexible mix of firms -- a matrix of contractors and subcontractors jumbled together in convenient proximity," says Mr. Wallace, along with an unparalleled pool of skilled workers, testing labs and machine shops.

Once the Navy had cleared the coast of U-boats, writes Mr. Wallace, New York became "the most spectacular war port in the world." The amount of export freight dispatched from the harbor more than tripled between 1939 and 1943 -- with some 900 cargo ships arriving or departing every month. More than 3 million troops sailed from New York during the war, many of them on New York-berthed luxury liners such as the once-opulent Queen Mary, which had been camouflaged and retooled to carry an entire 15,000-man division to Europe. Labor peace on the often restive docks was ensured by unsavory -- and, of course, unpublicized -- cooperation between the military and Mafia-controlled waterfront gangs. "The Navy," Mr. Wallace writes bluntly, "was in bed with the mob." When goons broke up an independent labor rally, he reports, a naval intelligence officer enthused to the gangster boss Meyer Lansky, "Gee, you did a swell job."

The wartime city simultaneously boiled with creative energy. Peggy Guggenheim's new art gallery, which opened on West 57th Street in 1942, exposed New Yorkers to the work of refugee European modernists and fostered the careers of then-unknown American artists such as Jackson Pollock. Meanwhile, black entertainers for the first time became a major presence in once-segregated downtown clubs. "When a set of serious young Black men -- among them Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker -- began arriving" at the popular clubs along 52nd Street "playing an astonishing new music, it seemed they had exploded out of nowhere," writes Mr. Wallace. With them they brought "a cool insider bearing" and "hipster identity" that would become a lasting style in American culture.

Mr. Wallace concludes with the triumphant campaign to win the headquarters of the United Nations for New York after World War II, a twistier tale than one might imagine. He also signals, with chapters on highway-building, housing and incipient suburbanization, new forces that would radically reshape both the cityscape and patterns of living.

New York has of course evolved since the 1940s -- what city hasn't? But great swaths of the city's wartime architecture still remain, along with its irrepressible commercial dynamism and ever-vibrant cultural life. It is still a city of strivers and of minorities, even as its dominant ethnic groups have changed -- as they have several times over in the city's history. In "Gotham at War," Mr. Wallace takes us on a fascinating excursion into both the now lost yet somehow familiar human superstructure, and the sometimes sordid underbelly, of the city we know today.

--Mr. Bordewich is the author of "Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction."

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