Abstract
These two recent publications offer valuable insight into the career and contributions of Albert Monroe Greenfi eld, a remarkable Philadelphia businessman, developer, and politico. Born in imperial Russia in 1887, Greenfi eld was brought to America in 1892 by Jewish émigré parents who soon settled in Philadelphia. By 1905, he entered into a real estate partnership and over the next decade accrued both wealth and reputation acting as broker for numerous high-profi le transactions. In tracing these early years, Rottenberg delineates important themes for Greenfi eld’s later career: he “refused to be pigeonholed by his Jewishness,” made a virtue of self-reinvention, seized opportunities “that seemed . . . to abound wherever a young man of limitless energy might turn,” and exhibited characteristic foresight by recognizing the future of motion pictures and the ties of that fl edgling industry to real estate (31, 22, 28, 34). Greenfi eld’s confi dence and power grew in the 1920s, and he soon advanced from broker to developer—seeking to help Philadelphia remake its anachronistically underdeveloped Center City. In the process, he became realtor to Dennis Cardinal Dougherty and forged lifelong ties to the Catholic hierarchy, became an important voice within the state Republican machine, and helped J. David Stern purchase the Philadelphia Record and transform it into a widely read organ of liberal Democratic reformism.