“Architecture and Urbanism” Series
“The five-volume series opened with a city embroiled in civil war and a century that ended with the tallest building barely living up to the name skyscraper. While the millennium seems like a convenient stopping point, the final chapter actually ended on Sept. 11, 2001.”
Reading New York, Making No Little Plans, February 2007
Read the New York Times reviews of this monumental series:
New York 1880 New York 1900 New York 1930 New York 1960 New York 2000
World Trade Center
After September 11th, 2001, the Ground Zero site in New York City was classified as a crime scene and only those directly involved in the recovery efforts were allowed inside. The press was also prohibited from the site, but with the help of the Museum of the City of New York and sympathetic city officials, award-winning photographer Joel Meyerowitz managed to obtain unlimited access. By ingenuity and sheer determination, he was the only photographer granted unimpeded right of entry into Ground Zero.
For 9 months, during the day and night, Meyerowitz photographed “the pile,” as the World Trade Center came to be known, and the over 800 people a day that were working in it. Influenced by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange’s work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, he knew that if he didn’t make a photographic record of the unprecedented recovery efforts, “there would be no history.”
Amazon.com Review
This is not a book only about September 11; the towers’ collapse begins on number 236 of 337 pages of narrative text. New York Times reporters Glanz (science) and Lipton (metropolitan news) instead deliver a thoroughly absorbing account of how the World Trade Center developed from an embryonic 1939 World’s Fair building to “a city in the sky, the likes of which the planet had never seen”.
In this lively page-turner, intensively researched and meticulously documented, a world of international trade, business history, litigation, architecture, engineering and forensics comes clear…“
Publishers Weekly
The World Trade Center Remembered
by Sonja Bullaty, Paul Goldberger, Angelo Lomeo
New York September 11
by Magnum Photographers, David Halberstam (introduction)
Twin Towers Remembered
by Camilo Jose Vergara
Men of Steel: The Story of the Family That Built the World Trade Center
by Karl Koch III (author), Richard Firstman (contributor)
Skyscrapers in New York
Art Deco in New York
Skyscraper Style: Art Deco New York
by Cervin Robinson, Rosemarie Haag Bletter
The Art Deco Skyscraper in New York
by Norbert Messler
New York Deco
by Carla Breeze
Art Deco Architecture in New York 1920 – 1940
by Don Vlack
New York Art Deco Skyscrapers
by Katsuhiko (editor)
Ornament and Style
Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York: A Photographic Guide
by Margot Gayle (author), Edmund V. Gillon (photographer)
Residential Architecture
(plus some history and gossip)
Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan: An Illustrated History
by Andrew Alpern
New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930)
by Elizabeth Hawes
Living it up : a guide to the named apartment houses of New York
by Thomas E. Norton, Jerry E. Patterson
Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments
by Elizabeth Collins Cromley
Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century
by Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Mansions in the Clouds: The Skyscraper Palazzi of Emery Roth
by Steven Ruttenbaum
A History of Housing in New York City
by Richard Plunz
New York City has been, and continues to be, a city of contrasts when it comes to housing: elegant mansions of merchant millionaires coexist with the squalid tenement slums of immigrant workers, and garden apartments coexist with high-rise apartment towers. In this revealing study, Plunz traces the history of housing in New York from 1850 to the present, examining the complex roles that city planning, real estate development, housing reform, building codes, contruction technology, and government policies–and politics–play in the process. Plunz shows how specific housing types developed over time and analyzes their successes and failures in meeting the diverse needs of their occupants. The book’s comprehensive scope and high degree of detail makes it recommended reading for anyone interested in housing.
- H. Ward Jandl, National Park Service , Washington, D.C.
Prominent Architects in New York
Miscellanea
Over 300 black and white photographs – buildings, architecture, architectural details, parks, street scenes, construction, art, sculpture, theaters, bridges, schools, church buildings and other subjects.
A celebration of the buildings of New York City and their history with over 600 color illustrations. Manhattan is studded with spectacular buildings—the Woolworth Building, the Flatiron, the Chrysler, the Empire State Building, and the World Trade towers. It is the home of scores of clubs, churches, commercial and industrial buildings, and private houses whose history or unique architecture make them especially noteworthy. With over 600 full-color photographs and descriptions of existing structures, New York for New Yorkers tracks the rich architectural history of the city as well as trends in style and construction to provide us with a better understanding of what we see, who built it, and why. And by explaining how monuments, streets, and districts were named, this book makes us more aware of the people who most influenced New York City’s past. Not just for New Yorkers, this book is for anyone who is fascinated by the architecture of the physical city.
The Architecture of New York City: Histories and Views of Important Structures, Sites, and Symbols
by Donald Martin Reynolds
New York Architecture: A History (Universe Architecture Series)
by Richard Berenholtz (photographer), Amanda Johnson (author), Carol Willis (author)
Although old and out of print, these titles often by well-known authors in the field are still worth seeking out:
Broadway: From the Battery to the Bronx
by Carin Deschsler-Marx, Richard F. Shepard
The City Observed
by Paul Goldberger, photography by David W. Dunlap
Essential New York
John Tauranac
A house in the city; a guide to buying and renovating old row houses
by H. Dickson McKenna
