As befits the home of Mad Men, New York has been the most successfully advertised and marketed city in the world. Generations of outsiders have formed their picture of the city from novels, TV series, the occasional Broadway musical and, above all, from movies – the most numerous, the most atmospheric, and perhaps the least reliable of which were the old RKO and Columbia black-and-white films noirs of the late 1940s and 1950s. Through the celluloid exploits of a host of Hollywood stars, millions of us became familiar with the cabs, hotels, newspaper offices, bars and restaurants, the Subway and the El, Central Park, Grand Central Terminal and, above all, the NYPD. Those of us lucky enough subsequently to visit the real New York expected to find brownstone houses, steam rising out of vents in the road, the Jets and the Sharks, Irish patrolmen twirling what we would have called batons or truncheons, and an endless parade of water-carts.

We didn’t, of course, but over the years few of us have been disappointed in what we found. For the Big Apple is an orchard full of what is collectively the most breath-taking architecture in the world. Most famously, there are buildings that rose up not to scrape the sky but, in the words of the Reverend S. Parkes Cadman (for 35 years minister of the Central Congregational Church of Brooklyn) to’ greet’ it. On another geometric plane, there are buildings that stretched out their legs; Bruce Marshall, the author of Building New York, describes the old Pennsylvania Station as ‘one of the last grandly horizontal buildings’ in the city. And there the intimate corners, such as Bryant Park, ‘the smudge of green’ next to the New York Public Library, built on a paupers’ cemetery.

Though far too heavy to carry around – each page is of large format and quality paper –Marshall’s book is a comprehensive and richly informative guide, divided into 67 sections covering everything from the commercial and artistic palaces (the Empire State, the Rockefeller Center, the Seagram Building), to the iconic landmarks (St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Flatiron, the Guggenheim – Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘concrete snail’) and on to the relatively unknown but essential facilities (the Calvary Cemetery, the New York Yacht Club on 44th Street, the Croton Aqueduct).

Building New York is a rich mixture of historical portrait, catalogue, and storybook. Marshall has done his own excavating to come up with a whole load of ‘did you know’ snippets of information, perfect for passing on to others. He tells us what lies under these staggering edifices: the blood-soaked bedrock beneath the UN Building, previously the site of slaughterhouses for the meat industry; the rubble from a blitzed London that formed the hard-core for East Side Highway, brought over as ballast on ships returning from taking supplies to Europe during World War 2; the scrap metal from the El that was recycled to form part of the Lincoln Tunnel. Marshall also introduces us to the rogues and philanthropists, the architects and mayors, and the millions of workers who put the city together. Robert Moses, guiding force behind two disappointing New York World Fairs (1939 and 1964) appears in several sections. Seen by some as a villain, Moses was the man in charge of much of the city’s development from 1924 to 1968. He was never elected, never accountable, yet held 19 different posts in the administration of New York, and did more to shape modern New York, for good or bad, than any other person.

And then there are the photographs, all 350 of them – sunlight streaming through the high windows of the concourse of Grand Central, the building site of what was to become all too briefly Penn Station; automobiles queuing to enter the Holland Tunnel in the 1930s and Queens-Midtown tunnel thirty years later; flags and flowers in Washington Square Park for the centenary of Washington’s inauguration; Coney Island beach from the air in its prime (a million visitors in a single day); a riveter poised high above Wall Street as the Bank of the Manhattan Company Building competes with the Chrysler Building to become the tallest in the world; Margaret Bourke-White snapping gargoyles; John D. Rockefeller with his nose in the air; the San Remo apartments, seen from across Central Park lake on an autumn day; Peacock Alley in the old Waldorf-Astoria; the last brownstone in the East 60s, and the first Macy’s on Sixth Avenue; Broadway at night on Millennium eve; and the most loathed building in the city’s history.

There’s also plenty on what locals and outsiders have thought of New York architecture. Le Corbusier, designer of the UN Building, considered the entire city “a catastrophe”, though he believed the George Washington Bridge was the “most beautiful bridge in the world… blessed… the only seat of grace in the disordered city”. One critic labelled the Chrysler Building “an oversized jukebox”. Marcel Breuer, architect of the Whitney Museum of American Art, explained that he didn’t try to fit the building to its surroundings “because its neighbouring buildings aren’t any good”. Others have praised what were admittedly their own creations. Have a go at guessing what New York masterpieces were dubbed ‘the cathedral of motion pictures’, ‘the greatest room in New York’, ‘the handsomest railroad in the world’, and ‘19th century America’s greatest work of art’.

In a recently published book, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, P. D. Smith opens with the statement that ”Cities are our greatest creation”. Add that to the subtitle of Marshall’s book and we go even further, opening up the suggestion that when we are involved with New York, we are dealing with the Greatest of the Greatest. If this is true, then our thanks and our admiration should go, not merely to the Morgans, Astors, Fricks, Carnegies, Rockefellers and Trumps who financed its creation, or the Stanford Whites, Morris Hunts, Whitney Warrens et al who designed it piece by piece, but also to the sweating hordes who constructed it – floor by floor, block by block, street by street.

And perhaps we should also nod respectfully in the direction of Elisha Graves Otis, on whatever level he now resides in the life hereafter, for inventing the elevator safety device that prevented a car crashing to the bottom of its shaft if the pulley rope broke. Even the most dynamic of New Yorkers would have little energy left for a day’s work if they had to climb from street level to their executive offices.

In collaboration with Endeavour London: www.endeavourlondon.com