About My Work
My research interests are centered on four areas: urban history, spatial history, U.S. social and economic history, social science history methods. The main site of my research is 19th-century New York City. My publications include: 1) Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790-1860 (Princeton UP, 2016); 2) various articles on urban food access, land use, residential patterns, the Manhattan grid, and historical GIS in journals including the Journal of Urban History, Urban History, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Planning Perspectives; 3) and as part of a team, a large-scale public facing spatial history project, "Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas" (https://mappinghny.com). I am currently at work on a new spatial history atlas, Transitional City: An Atlas of Social Distance in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York. I am also at work on several coauthored articles using large GIS data, exploring density and social heterogeneity in American cities in 1880, measuring socially meaningful distance in the historical city, and mapping Copenhagen in the late 19th to early 20th century.
Citations
Book:
Gergely Baics, Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790–1860 (Princeton University Press, 2016).
Digital History:
Gergely Baics, Wright Kennedy, Rebecca Kobrin, Laura Kurgan, Leah Meisterlin, Dan Miller, Mae Ngai, "Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas," (New York, NY: Columbia University, 2021). Available at: https://mappinghny.com
Peer-reviewed Articles:
Gergely Baics, "The Social Geography of Near and Far: Built Environment and Residential Distance in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City," Urban History 47, no. 3 (2020): 512-34
Gergely Baics and Leah Meisterlin, “The Grid as Algorithm for Land Use: A Reappraisal of the 1811 Manhattan Grid,” Planning Perspectives 34, no. 3 (2019): 391-414
Gergely Baics and Mikkel Thelle, “Introduction: Meat and the Nineteenth-Century City,” Urban History 45, 2 (2018): 184-92.
Gergely Baics and Leah Meisterlin, “Zoning Before Zoning: Land Use and Density in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106, 5 (2016): 1152-75.
Gergely Baics, “The Geography of Urban Food Retail: Locational Principles of Public Market Provisioning in New York City, 1790-1860,” Urban History 43, 3 (2016): 435-53.
Gergely Baics, “Meat Consumption in Nineteenth-Century New York: Quantity, Distribution, and Quality, or Notes on the ‘Antebellum Puzzle,’” in Institutions, Innovation, and Industrialization: Essays in Economic History and Development, eds. Avner Greif, Lynne Kiesling, and John V.C. Nye (Princeton University Press, 2015), 97-127.
Gergely Baics, “Is Access to Food a Public Good? Meat Provisioning in Early New York City, 1790-1820,” Journal of Urban History 39, 4 (2013): 643-68.
Journal Special Issue:
"Meat and the Nineteenth-Century City,” [guest editor with Mikkel Thelle], Urban History 45, no. 2 (2018), 184-274
Public Scholarship:
Gergely Baics and Leah Meisterlin, “Myth 10: Example of Laissez-Faire Planning,” in “The Manhattan Street Grid Plan: Misconceptions and Corrections,” series by Jason M. Barr and Gerard Koeppel, The Gotham Center for New York City History Blog (April 2019). Available: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/gridplan10exp
Gergely Baics and Leah Mesiterlin, “Myth 9: System of Block and Lot Divisions," in “The Manhattan Street Grid Plan: Misconceptions and Corrections,” series by Jason M. Barr and Gerard Koeppel, The Gotham Center for New York City History Blog (Jan. 2019). Available: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/gridplan09exp
Gergely Baics, “Mapping as Process: Food Access in Nineteenth-Century New York,” Global Urban History (May 2016). Available: https://globalurbanhistory.com/2016/05/17/mapping-as-process-food-access-in-nineteenth-century-new-york/#more-1139
Gergely Baics and Leah Meisterlin, “Old Maps, New Tricks: Historical Maps and Data Visualization,” Urban Omnibus (June 2015). Available: http://urbanomnibus.net/2015/06/old-maps-new-tricks-digital-archaeology-in-the-19th-century-city/