In 1998, an unlikely tome by two academics became the most popular narrative of New York. The 4.7-pound, 1,424-page doorstop that focused on the city’s first three centuries won the Pulitzer Prize and was instantly hailed as a definitive history.

Now, nearly two decades later, the second installment has arrived, a 4.6-pound sequel written this time without a collaborator. Producing both books (plus teaching and other projects) might have left another 75-year-old historian sapped and hoping for more laurels on which to rest. Instead, Mike Wallace is poised to complete Volumes III and IV.

The endpapers of his “Greater Gotham,” which is being published Oct. 2, epitomize the conflicts that transformed New York City during the first two decades of the 20th Century.

Inside the front cover of Mike Wallace’s magisterial sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Gotham” is a signature pink-and-mustard Sanborn Insurance Co. map of Lower Manhattan with Wall Street at its core. Inside the back cover is another building-by-building survey, this one of the Lower East Side, then the densest place on the planet.

Sandwiched between the Sanborn maps are 1,196 pages that bristle with a gripping narrative of the competing agendas that defined the two neighborhoods and reverberated from the 19th century to the 20th. “Greater Gotham” traces the historic conflicts amplified by two developments. ...