New York City Books

[Merry]

I’ve just recently had a spending spree at Amazon.com resulting in several additions to my New York City collection. *Please excuse my nonexistent book reviewing/writing skills.

1. *New York New York by Torsten Andreas Hoffman

Hoffman had taken a series of black and white photos in Summer 2001 intended for a calendar but he decided that there were too many of the WTC. *Then 9/11 happened. *He then undertook to re-photograph (in colour) the same views post-9/11. *The result IMO is a very moving then-and-now document serving to remind us of what we all expect to be there, replaced by the eerie emptiness we see now. *I love this book – highly recommended.

2. *Requiem WTC by Hideaki Sato

Black and white photos taken before and after the WTC site was cleared and the subsequent construction of the Twin Towers from 1967-69. *Also documents life in NY at the time, from New Yorkers just going about their daily lives -- playing checkers, catching some sun, the ferry ride to work -- to anti-war demonstrations. *My favourite is one of a young girl with a placard that proclaims “War is Gory Not Glory”. *There are some nice misty shots of the completed Twin Towers from Greenwich Village, not at all an ugly juxtaposition. *Towards the end of the book are comparisons between the rubble during site clearance in 1968 and Ground Zero in 2001, heartbreakingly not at all dissimilar.

3. *212 Views of Central Park, Mick Hales (photographer)

A lovely book of images of every aspect of Central Park, from what people do in the Park, to the statuary, bridges and park benches, as well as the splendours of the plant life. *Some of the photos include built New York as a backdrop to the Park, reminding us that it’s not in isolation but surrounded by a very dense man-made urban environment, which I think complements the beauty of the Park, itself entirely man-made. *A favourite photo is a stunning view taken from the roof of a Central Park South roof of the reds, yellows, golds and a dash of green of Fall with the architecture of CPW and 5th Avenue regally standing sentinel on the perimeter. *It has become obvious to me from turning the pages of this book that one can never know just how beautiful Central Park is unless it’s experienced first-hand. *This wonderful book is second best.

4. *Harlem Lost and Found by Michael Henry Adams

A wonderful history of Harlem’s residential architecture in particular, but also discussing various other buildings, including churches and schools. *Accompanying the text (which I haven’t read yet) are gorgeous photos of building exteriors and street scapes as well as interiors. *Some of the earlier photos provide an amazing glimpse of Harlem’s former glory. *Let’s hope the current renaissance significantly contributes to its restoration. *My favourite views are of row houses on West 147th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive and on West 154th Street.

5. *A Quiet Walk in Central Park by Frederic Winkowski

Not as good as 212 Views but still a nice little book. *Interesting and engaging commentary accompanies each photo.

6. *Wall Street by Robert Gambee

This, of course, refers to the Financial District in general. *Includes photos of building exteriors and interiors (including trading floors – god, they’re messy dudes, but I don’t envy their tiny, cramped, non-personal working conditions) accompanied by extended, in-depth captions. *Includes a couple of gorgeous photos of the Twin Towers from Battery Park City and the Wall Street area from South Cove. *Also the J. Seward Johnson bronze statue of a man sitting looking into his opened briefcase, this time snow-covered, that was so poignantly depicted post-9/11 covered and surrounded by dust and paper.

7. *Above Hallowed Ground, NYPD photographers

Includes not previously published photos of 9/11 NYC. *I already have several 9/11 books but I thought this one would be a worthwhile addition, particularly for the (only) aerial shots taken of the scene by NYPD photographers. *A comprehensive and very moving account by those directly involved of that terrible day. *I always cry when I see the pathetically lonely, very recognisable, remaining fragments of the steel structure at the base of the Twins. *This image alone will forever remain etched in my mind. *Watching it live on TV was so surreal. *I still can’t believe the Twins are not there any more. *This book will remind me over and over again.

8. *Brooklyn Then and Now by Marcia Reiss

I have several other Then and Now books from this series (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston) which all provide me with endless hours of enjoyment and this latest addition is no exception. *Pretty self-explanatory -- black and white “thens” and colour “nows”. *I have several then and now books on NYC and what I find most engrossing (and fun) is examining the differences between the photos and discovering just how much and how little (or not at all) the views change over a significant time span. *That’s New York.

9. *NY-71 Daido Moriyama

I’m afraid I was very disappointed with this book. *It contains black and white photos (no captions or text) that are very grainy and often out of focus (obviously meant to be) taken by Daido Miroyama during his visit to NY in 1971. *The book is a paperback with a very minimalist exterior design that came in a thick, plain cardboard slipcase. *All very arty, but not my thing at all. *Perhaps it will become a collector’s item.

10. *New York New York by Richard Berenholtz

The ultimate coffee table book (if you’ve got an enormous, sturdy coffee table!). *This book is a numbered, limited edition (5000) which includes a separate print signed and numbered by Berenholtz. *Those familiar with Berenholtz’s photography will know that he favours detail and close-up images (gargoyles, tops of buildings, etc.) –- not my favourite style but the photos are still very evocative of the flavour and identity of NYC. *It includes several gatefolds containing panoramic views of the city which are several feet long. *Definitely a collector’s item.

11. *New York by Esther Selsdon and Klaus H. Carl

Published in 1999 (pretty old in publishing terms), this is essentially a picture book (I’m sure there’s a name for this kind of publication – mass market, el cheapo…?). *Nothing particularly special but still very New York. *I must say I was very frustrated by the less than helpful captions, for example, ”View of Manhattan”, when “Bryant Park” would have been equally economical with words but much more informative. *And another “View of Manhattan” which is unfortunately very small but a wonderful view of no less than four bridges in upper Manhattan (I think). *The section on Harlem and The Bronx was a bit perplexing. *I could be wrong, but two photos of fire escape-clad apartment buildings don’t look like they’re in Harlem. *One caption proclaims “Colourful façade in Harlem”, but I’m sure it’s a gallery in Soho and one photo is particularly puzzling. *The caption (ever unhelpful) says “Streets in Harlem” but the photo includes a street sign with “4th Ave” on it. *As far as I know (?), there is no 4th Avenue in Harlem and even after doing a bit of digging, I can’t work out where exactly it would be. *The 4th Avenues in The Bronx (Edgewater Park) and Queens (Malba? and Breezy Point) don’t seem to be contenders. *4th Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn maybe?? *The picture is taken from a side street looking towards the 4th Avenue sign and includes a rather sad rubbish-strewn, bill postered landscape with some poor soul sleeping amongst it all. *This may, of course, be an old photo. *Perhaps someone can shed some light on this. *Anyway, there’s a typo on the back cover (“costums” instead of “customs”) and a number of the larger photos are markedly (surely not intentionally) out of focus, so maybe this is an overall indication of the quality of the publication?….

12. *Access New York City

10th Edition. *I’ve always enjoyed this series since I first discovered it. *Numbered entries of hotels, restaurants, attractions, shopping and parks/outdoors corresponding with matching numbers on maps of each neighbourhood. *I’ve kept all the previous editions (I’m missing a couple) as a very interesting record of (again) how much or little New York changes over time. *Despite being obviously subjective in some respects (restaurant food choices, for example), I think this is one of the better “guides” to NYC. *Its format is easy on the eye and provides practical information for travellers, without bombarding them with (albeit sometimes interesting for armchair travellers) too much detail.

[amigo32]

WOW! *Thanks, Merry!
I love this forum, so much intelligence here.

[Eugenius]

If I am not mistaken, the only place that 4th Avenue exists in Manhattan is a small stretch between Cooper square and Union Square. *After that, it's Park Avenue. *So that should present a fairly narrow area from where that photo could have been taken.

[Jessica]

I just wanted to add a favorite book of mine for the NYC traveler...The Fodor's Guide to New York City. *I have an older version, but I noticed at Borders there is a new 2003 ed. out!

[Merry]

Quote: from Eugenius on 1:36 am on Jan. 14, 2003
If I am not mistaken, the only place that 4th Avenue exists in Manhattan is a small stretch between Cooper square and Union Square. *After that, it's Park Avenue. *So that should present a fairly narrow area from where that photo could have been taken.


Yes, I did consider this, but didn't think it looked like that area at all, despite being close to the Bowery. *And Harlem is a long way from the East Village. *I've just had another look at the photo and I can just make out a sign on a building several stories high that says "Brooklyn Home of The News". *I can't make out what the words underneath say. *This building is in the cross street running through 4th Avenue. *There's also another building on the cross street with the sign "Underberg" and an address 420 Atlantic Avenue. *4th Avenue and Atlantic Avenue do intersect in Boerum Hill in Brooklyn. * I always thought Boerum Hill was a nice neighbourhood, but having read the entry in "The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn", apparently the area underwent a period of economic decline and in the early 1960s became *less than salubrious. *I'm no expert on American cars, but the ones in the photo look 1970s-ish, too. This may not be the answer, but it's amazing what you can find when you look properly!

[Merry]

...speaking of looking properly, I think they must be going for a world record for the most mistakes in a book with this one, the number and basic basic nature of which beggars belief; not least getting bridges and buildings totally mixed up, not to mention the location of various sights being completely wrong.

[Hof]

For some good NYC eye candy,check out "Manhattan Unfurled",a fold-out,pencil sketch(with some interesting perspectives)of the entine Island of Manhattan's waterfront,by Matteo Pericoli. East Side,West Side.All around the town.
I found these in the bargain bins:
"Perpetual Motion",by Joe Mysak--"The Illustrated History of The Port Authority".It's a P.A. PR piece,but some good photos and stories of NY.--"Too Big to Fail",by Walter Stewart.Not entirely about NY,it's about the Reichmann family who owned Olympia and York,who developed the *World Financial Center.

[Merry]

I just found this site, which contains a sample of the photos in Torsten Andreas Hoffman's wonderful book of then and now photos of the WTC.

http://www.auroraphotos.com/col_GeographyPlacesTravel.shtml

Go to the "Now and Then" section and click on View as Slide Show.

[Bubble06]

Hi all

After visiting NYC for the first time in March this year, I am desparate to go back there!

I wondered if anyone can recommend any books about new york, I don’t mean the tourist ones as I have a few of those that I brought before visiting this year, but id quite like to read up some more about the history of NYC etc.

Please help

Thanks

[lofter1]

http://www.amazon.com/Gotham-History-York-City-1898/dp/0195116348

[tdp]

Try "The Historical Atlas of New York City" (Eric Homberger) Owl Books - for the basics - almost 200 pages.
"New York An Illustrated History" (Ric Burns & James Sanders with Lisa Ades) Knopf Books - getting on for 600 pages and more in-depth.

I would recommend both as really good 'coffee table' books.

Try also "The Encyclopedia Of New York City" (Kenneth T.Jackson), Yale.
This is a massive 1300 pages - and is for the inner anorak!

You should be able to find all of these on Amazon.

[pacz]

I highly recommend New York an Illustrated History by Ric Burns, James Sanders and Lisa Ades. There is also a DVD series that goes along with it.

http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=2203345&cp&keywords=new+york+city&y=9&searchId=17710923341&x=27&parentPage=search

[Front_Porch]

What year do you want your New York?

It's a wee bit cheesy, but Jack Finney's "Time and Again" is a novel about a guy who time-travels back to the New York of 1882 -- and of course it's a love story.

My husband has great things to say about "Paradise Alley," which is Kevin Baker's story of the Civil War-era draft riots; move to the turn-of-the-century and you can see fictionalized Vanderbilts and Astors running around in Edith Wharton's "House of Mirth."

For the beginning of the Twentieth Century, I'd pick "Manhattan Transfer" -- about a bunch of different characters struggling to establish themselves in the city -- and for the Roaring '20s, "You Can't Go Home Again," where a successful writer gets thrown out of his hometown and gets caught up in the NY party scene.

ali r.

[Bubble06]

Brilliant thanks everyone for your help.

Id quite like to start reading a few novels too after the history side of things. Will keep me going until i get to visit again!

they had these dvd postcards in some gift shops out there, the pictures were so good, anyone know of any good books full of pictures? we took loads ourselves but i cant get enough to be honest!

[tdp]

Not so sure about books with good pictures - I very often browse through the photos posted on this site.

Try here also:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/newyorkers/pool/page1/

You sound like me Bubble06 - can't get enough of NYC and yearn to return (soon!)

[Bubble06]

Its such a fantastic city though isnt it, you cant explain it properly to people, you have to go there! The atmosphere, the buzz, its brilliant!

I really want to go back we did everything we wanted and more in 5 days earler this year but theres still loads more to do! When did you go?

[ablarc]

...theres still loads more to do!
...and will continue to be. You never run out.

[NYatKNIGHT]

New York City Books:
http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2932 (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2932)

Books based in New York:
http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7920 (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7920)

Looking for a good read (NY History):
http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5485 (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5485)

[tdp]

Bubble06, I have sent you a Private Message to discuss further if you wish.

tdp

[tdp]

...and will continue to be. You never run out.

You said it Ablarc.
This is why we long to come back again and again - to revist the wonders we discovered on previous visits and to uncover more still.

I know that three times in five years (about 13 days in total) is never going to be enough!

I've lost count.... :o
but it's three hundred and forty-something days (and counting!) before I can return!!! D'oh!!

[GowanusGuy]

THE ISLAND IN THE CENTER OF THE WORLD by Russell Shorto

This is a fascinating look at Dutch-era NY, an era that generally gets little attention. The book is based on newly-discovered documents, painstakingly translated from the old-Dutch, which allows us a glance at the everyday life of early New Yorkers (or should I call them New Amsterdamers? )

The most interesting thing I found about the book is that it shows that New York's long-established business-friendly attitude created conditions that made religious and social freedoms essential aspects of society. This is very much unlike other early American settlements that were based on strictly religious convictions. For example, within only a few years of New Amsterdam’s establishment, over a dozen languages were spoken, varying religions were practiced, and any pilgrim would have fainted on the spot after seeing some of types of business that was conducted openly. This situation was not tolerated solely because settlers were needed for the city’s growth; Dutch tradition, for the most part, encouraged the establishment of these freedoms.

The Dutch, in founding New Amsterdam, introduced many of the values that, even now, are the cornerstone of this nation.

[GowanusGuy]

Brilliant thanks everyone for your help.

Id quite like to start reading a few novels too after the history side of things. Will keep me going until i get to visit again!

they had these dvd postcards in some gift shops out there, the pictures were so good, anyone know of any good books full of pictures? we took loads ourselves but i cant get enough to be honest!


If you are looking for books with current photos of NY, there are an awful lot of them and its hard for me to recommend one without knowing more about what you are interested in seeing.


For historical photos I recommend:

1) The Historical Atlas Of New York City: A Visual Celebration Of 400 Years Of New York City's History by Eric Homberger
(This is must buy, for its history as well as its maps and other images)


2) New York: An Illustrated History by Ric Burns, James Sanders, Lisa Ades
(recommended above as well, and I second the recommendation)


3) The Destruction of Lower Manhattan by Danny Lyon
(a great look at NY in the 60s)


4) Berenice Abbott: Changing New York by Bonnie Yochelson and Berenice Abbott
(a great look at 1930-40s NY)


5) New York Changing: Revisiting Berenice Abbott's New York By Douglas Levere, Bonnie Yochelson, and Paul Goldberger
(I’ve not seen this book but it seems pretty interesting. Its displays Berenice's photos along with current photos of the same locales.)


I'm a bit of a collector of NYC and Hudson Valley themed books so feel free to reply here or PM me if you want for more specific recommendations.

[ablarc]

Edward posted this link in another thread. It has some very worthwhile books: http://www.amazon.com/gp/explorer/1568984731/2/ref=pd_lpo_ase/102-8824071-4892100?

[brianac]

I am interested in finding out more about street and place names in NYC, and have sorted out the names of a couple of books I may buy.

a) Naming New York. Sanna Feirsein. New York University Press.

b) The Street Book (An Encyclopedia of Manhattan Street Names and Their Origins. Henry Moscow. Fordham University Press.

Any advice is welcome.

Also any opinions on ("The Encyclopedia of NYC". Kenneth T. Jackson. Yale University Press), would be helpful.

[Hof]

I bought the "Encyclopedia" a couple years ago,and have spent many hours since digesting what is in there.This is a dense book,a proper encyclopedia.It has heft,both in weight and information.There are nearly 1400 pages,and they are all coated with squinty print.If you buy the book,get a magnifying glass to go along with it.

The book (at least the edition I have) is somewhat dated now,having been copyrighted in 1995,but as a source for the answers to the many questions those curious about the Big City may ask,it's invaluable.
Kenneth Jackson,a New York enthusiast and architecture pundit for the "Times",was editor.

Want to know who Phil Ochs was,and why Woody Guthrie wound up in NY,or read a history of the Normandie? Do you even know about The Mad Bomber,NY's own homegrown terrorist?
There are 8 full pages about architecture and probably another two hundred seperate entries about significant buildings.
Sports gets 4 pages.So do songs about the City.
You can find out who the Bruckner Expressway was named after,then read about how Robert Moses forever screwed up the Bronx by building it.How about something concerning Malba?
Probably anything discussed on these pages is represented in this book--except pizza,and that may be in there somewhere,under "Italians" or "restaurants"...

There are tons of photos,maps,lists,population figures,notable buildings,and hundreds of biographies of New Yorkers,some very interesting.
Whatever you need to know.It's probably the last pre-digital effort of it's kind.

Last week,I stopped into a little rare and used bookstore on Broadway in the 80s.He had a copy and wanted $40 for it;I bought mine online and paid about the same,considering the shipping charges.Shipping anvils would be cheaper,I think.

[Padre]

I would definately reccommend The Mole People, by Jennifer Toth. An insight into life in the tunnels under New York. Written in the early 90's.

[GVNY]

New York In The Forties: Feininger

[NoyokA]

A few of my favorite new books:


New York Streetscapes: A great book about the fascinating history and back stories behind great buildings, many of which will be newly introduced.

Robert Moses and the Modern City: A great book about parks, highways, and housing projects built under the Moses' era.

New York 2000: I would recommend this book on the pictures alone, I doubt I'll ever have the time to finish it, great great book.

[kz1000ps]

These don't concern just New York, but they're mostly focused on it:

- Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford's writings on New York

- Form Follows Finance, by Carol Willis. It follows the development of skyscrapers in NY and Chicago and how market demands and zoning laws (literally) shaped them.

And I'm with Stern on New York 2000. I haven't bought the book yet, but I've probably spent about 5 hours in a Borders pouring myself over it. Great stuff.

[ebrigham]

About halfway finished with Gotham - History of NYC up to 1898 - so far very interesting.

[Hof]

If you want to dive into the deep end of New York's history pool,get "Island at the Center of The World" ,by Russell Shorto.

It's about the Dutch,the original settlers of Manhattan,who through the efforts of Henreich Hudson,"discovered" the perfect port in the New World and proceeded to create the City we are all so proud of today.

It's a book dense with the history of the early settlement of NY.

[abrahamtim]

quotable New York by Gregg Stebben is a great book with quotes of people from NYC about NYC like: Rudolph Giuliani, Ed Koch, Jerry Seinfeld, Donald Trump, Brooke Astor and many more

[brianac]

McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, by Joseph Mitchell.

A collection of short stories, most of them about New York City in the 1930's and 40's.

A number of very amusing tales about old time NY, and characters such as Professor Sea Gull (Joe Gould) and street preacher the Reverend Mr. James Jefferson Davis Hall.

[brianac]

Reading New York

Witness to the Poor, and a Grand Ship Undone

By SAM ROBERTS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sam_roberts/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: March 9, 2008

EVERY generation needs to rediscover Jacob Riis for itself. Born with a preacher’s passion, building on decades of prodigious research by scholars and fellow reformers and empowered by the emerging potency of photography, Riis transformed himself from a penniless Danish immigrant into the conscience of New York and a confidant of Theodore Roosevelt (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/theodore_roosevelt/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/09/nyregion/read450.jpg
Jacob A. Riis Collection
A scrub woman in 1892, from “Rediscovering Jacob Riis.”

In companion essays in “Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York” (The New Press, $35), Bonnie Yochelson, a former curator at the Museum of the City of New York (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/museum_of_the_city_of_new_york/index.html?inline=nyt-org), and Daniel Czitrom, a history professor at Mount Holyoke College (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/mount_holyoke_college/index.html?inline=nyt-org), assess Riis’s immediate and enduring impact without overlooking his weaknesses and prejudices.

“How the Other Half Lives,” the title of the work with which Riis remains most closely associated, was an understatement. The poor he chronicled probably accounted for more like three-quarters of New York’s population. An earlier version of the title was more to the point: “How the Other Half Lives and Dies.”

The authors trace Riis’s evolving reputation in the universe of fellow social activists. In the late 19th century, Riis was first and foremost an advocate for housing reform. Later, he was pigeonholed by progressives for his old-fashioned faith in Christian charity and his distrust of government. Finally, he was rediscovered as an inspiration for the New Deal.

“I had no special genius, no special ability,” Riis wrote. “I had endurance, and I reached at last the heart of men; that is all I can claim.”
“Although his innovations quickly became commonplace,” the authors write, “Riis posed a series of urgent, often implicit, questions to himself and his readers, which remain surprisingly apt today: What is the structural relationship between persistent poverty and new immigrants? If different ‘races’ and nationalities possess inherent moral and cultural characteristics, how can that be reconciled with the American creed of individualism? How does environment shape ‘character’? What are the proper roles of government, public philanthropy, and religion in reform efforts? How important is spectacle and entertainment in rousing the public conscience?”

The text is sometimes too technical and the images repetitive (though this is, after all, a book about imagery). But ultimately “Rediscovering Jacob Riis” is an evocative and valuable reminder both of one unrelenting individual’s ability to make a difference and of the relevance of his revelations to the painfully familiar problems we face today.

•

The painting on the cover of John Maxtone-Graham’s “Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Ocean Liner” (W. W. Norton, $100) depicts the fabled liner’s maiden arrival in New York in 1935. It was the beginning of a storied romance that included the ship, its crew and passengers and its host city. Seven years later, the romance ended tragically and somewhat mysteriously on the West Side of Manhattan.

Mr. Maxtone-Graham, a New Yorker whose two dozen books on the great liners of the past include “The Only Way to Cross,” describes in riveting detail the ship’s exuberant life and its agonizing death throes.

On Aug. 28, 1939, passengers from Europe disembarked at Pier 88 from the Normandie for the last time. The ship was scheduled to return to France two days later, but the voyage was aborted. That same day, the Bremen sailed home to Germany from New York. Less than a week later, the world was at war.

For more than two years, the Normandie hibernated off Manhattan, its rugs preserved with four tons of mothballs and the vessel staffed by a skeleton crew of 114. Seized by the United States and rechristened the U.S.S. Lafayette, it was being converted into a troop ship when it caught fire and capsized. Six investigations later, the liner was refloated, towed to Brooklyn and sold for scrap.

“Lafayette was upended, demeaned and undignified, like a dowager who, slipping on a wintry sidewalk, falls with upraised skirt, helpless prey for voyeurs,” Mr. Maxtone-Graham writes in one of his many eloquent passages. “Thirty thousand of them showed up that first morning alone.”

•

Washington Irving (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/i/washington_irving/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s name may not roll off the lips of Knicks fans, whose team drew its name from the author’s most memorable creation. But as Brian Jay Jones writes in his charming biography “Washington Irving: An American Original” (Arcade Publishing, $29.99), Irving ranked as one of America’s greatest writers, bon vivants and literary showmen.

It was Irving who not only wrote a “History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty” but also invented its author, Diedrich Knickerbocker, that mythological chronicler of Dutch New York, and perpetrated a literary marketing campaign that Madison Avenue might envy.

Irving, described by Mr. Jones as “the first American to earn a living by his pen,” was named after the first president (the village of Irvington, in Westchester County, was named after him), and he died not long after completing the final volume of Washington’s biography.

He left no formal epitaph beyond a literary legacy that included Knickerbocker, Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, along with the modest hope that while his writings “may appear light and trifling in our country of philosophers and politicians,” if they “possess merit in the class of literature to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the work.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company.

[Front_Porch]

Shameless plug: Diary of a Real Estate Rookie is a memoir and about half of it takes place in Manhattan, in both swanky multi-million-dollar condos and the little studio near Lincoln Center where I'm writing this now.

Less shameless plugs: There are some great New York novels -- Washington Square, A Hazard of New Fortunes, and Manhattan Transfer come to mind. Time and Again by Jack Finney is not as literary, but it is a pretty wonderful window into the New York City of yesteryear.

ali r.
{downtown broker, and, er, author, of Diary of a Real Estate Rookie}

[Merry]

Shameless plug: Diary of a Real Estate Rookie is a memoir and about half of it takes place in Manhattan, in both swanky multi-million-dollar condos and the little studio near Lincoln Center where I'm writing this now.

Less shameless plugs: There are some great New York novels -- Washington Square, A Hazard of New Fortunes, and Manhattan Transfer come to mind. Time and Again by Jack Finney is not as literary, but it is a pretty wonderful window into the New York City of yesteryear.

ali r.
{downtown broker, and, er, author, of Diary of a Real Estate Rookie}

Not shameless at all, perfectly relevant to this thread!

I really loved Finney's Time and Again too and also the sequel From Time to Time (with an eerie twist at the end).

[Merry]

Purely a feast for the eyes, just gorgeous photos and captions, Manhattan New York (http://www.amazon.com/Gerrit-Engle-Manhattan-New-York/dp/3829601573/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205243999&sr=1-1), by Gerrit Engel.

[brianac]

July 25, 2008, 9:34 am

A New History for an Old Skyscraper

By Sewell Chan (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/schan/)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/24/nyregion/wool.533.jpg
The Woolworth Building, known for its height when it opened in 1913, is being extensively renovated. (Photo: Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)

Updated, 12:38 p.m. |

On the evening of April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a tiny button inside the White House (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9907E3DA1F3AE633A25756C2A9629C94 6296D6CF), lighting up the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. It was “the tallest structure in the world, with the one exception of the Eiffel Tower in Paris,” The New York Times reported, and it was a marvel of architecture and engineering.

Of course, the Woolworth Building has been surpassed in height — by the Chrysler Building in 1930 and by the Empire State Building in 1931 — and it has at times seemed to recede into the fabric of Lower Manhattan. The building’s owners at one point considered converting the building into luxury apartments (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DEFD61030F931A35752C1A9669C8B 63), but now the structure is being refurbished as top-end offices (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/realestate/commercial/30woolworth.html).

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/24/nyregion/FenskeCover.190.jpg
“The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York.”

“The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York,” (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/219823.ctl) a book scheduled to be released next week by the University of Chicago Press, offers a new examination of the building and its significance in New York’s history.

The 400-page book is the culmination of more than 15 years of research by Gail Fenske, a professor of architecture at Roger Williams University (http://www.rwu.edu/) in Bristol, R.I., who began the project as a doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The book provides a new perspective on some of the most notable aspects of the Woolworth Building, like its eclectic design — Beaux-Arts with Gothic ornamentation, over steel-frame engineering. The building has been seen as “a throwback, a historicist building, not truly a modern building,” Professor Fenske said in an interview, adding that she instead sees the building as “in a sense emblematic of modernity,” capturing both “the excitement of the new — the breaking of technological barriers — and also, on the other hand, a discomfort with it.”

Designed by Cass Gilbert (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/cass_gilbert/index.html), the building, at 233 Broadway, between Park Place and Barclay Street, was commissioned by the retail magnate Frank W. Woolworth and constructed between 1910 and 1913. Woolworth famously financed the building without loans or help from developers. “He financed it on his own,” Professor Fenske said. “It was unnerving to speculators, because he could do whatever he wanted.”

The book contains numerous illustrations, including one showing a 1929 advertisement for the building, calling it a “Cathedral of Commerce” — a name that has stuck — and lauding its height (792 feet), number of floors (60), weight (206 million pounds), floor area (15 acres), exterior windows (3,000), tons of steel (24,000), bricks (17 million) and tons of terra cotta (7,500).

In the interview, Professor Fenske said she initially disliked the moniker “Cathedral of Commerce,” finding it glib and simplistic. But as she studied the context in which the tower rose, she said, she began to see the name as appropriate. Its Gothic gestures suggested comfort, “moralizing evocations” of the old world from which many of Woolworth’s customers had come. (Although Woolworth, the 5- and 10-cent emporium, was in some ways the Wal-Mart of its era, it also differed from today’s big-box retailers. For instance, Woolworth’s carried finely crafted products imported from Europe that would be particularly familiar — and appealing — to immigrant customers.) By turning to Beaux-Arts design, Professor Fenske writes, Gilbert and Woolworth “resisted the forces of sensationalism and spectacle” associated with advertising and mass culture.

The book places the Woolworth Building in the context of its time and place: the booming commercial culture of early 20th century New York; the often unsettling experience of modernization; advances in technology and communications; and a new phenomenon of “urban spectatorship” that made skyscrapers sources of public wonder and admiration.

Many innovations set the Woolworth Building apart. It contained a shopping arcade, health club, barber shop, restaurant, social club and even an observatory. Its use of technology — including an innovative water supply system, a electrical generating plan, high-speed electric elevators providing both local and express service and what Professor Fenske calls “the first prominent use of architectural floodlighting in the world” — also set it apart. So did the construction process, run by the builder Louis Horowitz of the Thompson-Starrett Company, who managed to avoid labor conflict, rationalize the building process and set a record for speed — paving the way for the famously rapid completion of the Empire State Building nearly 20 years later.

The building has survived the Woolworth Corporation itself. The company announced in 1997 that it would close its remaining discount stores (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9800E7D81E38F93BA25754C0A9619582 60). The company was renamed the Venator Group (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9402E4D71E3AF931A25755C0A96E9582 60), began focusing on athletic wear, and since 2001 has done business under the Foot Locker name (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9407E1DD1E30F931A35752C1A9679C8B 63).

Although there are no longer Woolworth’s stores in the United States, the Woolworths Group (http://www.woolworthsgroupplc.com/), a former subsidiary of the American company, continues to operate hundreds of retail stores in Britain.

Summarizing the legacy of the Woolworth Building, Professor Fenske writes:
The question of whether the Woolworth Building is, indeed, a great work of architecture may still be open to debate. Yet Woolworth and Gilbert’s project represented in the eyes of contemporaries more than a vulgar contraption for producing a profit, and more than a dubious expression of corporate power, egregious advertising, or an aggressive assault on New York’s new signature skyline.
As the building approaches its centennial, she argues, New Yorkers should recognize not only its “aesthetic distinction” but also how “it reflected and refracted the many dreams and obsessions of the urban society that produced it.”

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/a-new-history-of-an-old-skyscraper/#comment-403684

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

“The End of the Innocence: The 1964-65 New York World’s Fair”

NOT long ago, I wrote that New York’s last World’s Fair, in 1964-65, paled in comparison with the 1939 version, but at least “did expose
Michelangelo’s ‘Pietà’ to millions and popularized the Belgian waffle.” In his new book, “The End of the Innocence: The 1964-65 New York World’s Fair” (Syracuse University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/syracuse_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) Press, $29.95), Lawrence R. Samuel rejects similar swipes as “dismissive thinking.” Instead, he delivers an overdue and well-deserved encomium to a largely denigrated chapter in the city’s history.

“There were,” writes Mr. Samuel, the author of several books of social history, “really two fairs in Queens in 1964 and 1965, or at least two constructions of its past. The first,” among the last gasps of the master builder Robert Moses (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/robert_moses/index.html?inline=nyt-per), “is steeped in its official memory, the business enterprise that lost money, overcharged exhibitors, offended the intellectual and aesthetic elite. The other can be found in its popular memory — the experience that most visitors found thoroughly enjoyable, if not enthralling, that sparked imaginations and reshaped people’s vision of the world.”

Mr. Samuel, like the fair itself, may sometimes overstate his case. But his book is a thoroughly enjoyable, if not always enthralling, reconstruction of both a largely forgotten era and of a society on the cusp of upheaval. No wonder, as he writes, the fair’s organizers bypassed “the uninviting near future” for a distant utopian vision.

I have my own recollections of the fair. I was 15, and my parents wouldn’t let me go on opening day because of fears that threatened civil rights demonstrations might turn violent, fears that, Mr. Lawrence writes, signaled America’s emergence from a “postwar cocoon.”

My own loss of innocence, though, was probably more attributable to the good times I enjoyed with various high school and college girlfriends during what must have been a dozen visits to Flushing Meadows over the next two years. These visits exposed me to, among other things, color television, the Ford Mustang, the Pietà and, yes, Belgian waffles.

For all of Moses’ faults, Mr. Lawrence reminds us, the legacy of his fair includes a mountain of magical individual reminiscences, along with the transformation of the part of Queens that F. Scott Fitzgerald (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/f_scott_fitzgerald/index.html?inline=nyt-per) once described as a “valley of ashes” into a great park where, even today, new memories are being made.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/nyregion/thecity/27read.html?ref=thecity

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

http://ayearinthepark.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54fcf22f08834010534a317f2970b-800wi

GRATUITOUS PLUG FOR SOMEONE ELSE'S COOL THING


The Brooklyn Historical Society (http://www.brooklynhistory.org/) was also at the Frolic today, hot off the presses with their latest publication, a Flatbush Neighborhood History Guide. (It's not yet up on their website to order, but surely will be soon.) Skimming it, I already found a nice tidbit combining two of my favorite things, Prospect Park and the Irish:

[brianac]

Reading New York

Apocalypse Forever, a Sharp-Eyed Insider and a Pointed Pen

By SAM ROBERTS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sam_roberts/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: October 17, 2008

NOW that the latest anniversary of 9/11 is behind us, with Wall Street rescued by Washington and New Yorkers sleeping easier because Mayor Bloomberg (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/michael_r_bloomberg/index.html?inline=nyt-per) has decided to run again, you can safely read “The City’s End” (Yale University Press, $37.50).Otherwise, it might be just a little bit too creepy, even tasteless, to wade into what the subtitle describes as “Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/10/19/nyregion/thecity/19read1.large.jpg
Harperweek.com

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/10/19/nyregion/thecity/19read2.large.jpg
The New Yorker Collection 1997 Danny Shanahan, via Cartoonbank.com

But rather than celebrate the city’s mostly mythical apocalypses, though, Max Page, an associate professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_massachusetts/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in Amherst, examines why these events have been repeatedly invoked as a cultural device by, among others, W. E. B. Du Bois, Upton Sinclair (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/upton_sinclair/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and Collier’s magazine in a 1950 cover that envisioned an atomic blast over Manhattan.

In this erudite but lavishly illustrated volume, Professor Page, who also wrote “The Creative Destruction of Manhattan,” points out that so much of our real and imagined havoc was selfinflicted (from 19th-century overdevelopment that would sink the island to 21st-century climate change (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) that would inundate it) by residents who had no time for history.

You can argue with some of the author’s sweeping conclusions, but his premise is provocative: “Embracing these fantasies of the city’s destruction is a reaffirmation of New York’s greatness.”

“We destroy New York on film and paper,” he writes, “by telling stories of clear and present dangers, with causes and effects, villains and heroes, to make our world more comprehensible than it has become.”

For leavening, Professor Page includes the New Yorker cartoon of King Kong and Godzilla nonchalantly strolling past urban mayhem as pedestrians flee before them. “Let’s face it,” the scaly monster says cheerfully to his furry friend, “the city’s in our blood.”

•

You don’t have to know Richard M. Rosenbaum to thoroughly enjoy his charming memoir and political primer, “No Room for Democracy: The Triumph of Ego Over Common Sense” (RIT Press, $27.95). You don’t even have to like him, although nearly everyone does.

Mr. Rosenbaum, a former State Supreme Court justice, was New York’s gregarious Republican state chairman and a national committee member during the governorship and vice presidency of Nelson Rockefeller, as well as a gubernatorial candidate himself.

He’s at his best recounting the nuts and bolts (there were plenty of both) of local politics. His advice includes “If you want to get into politics, make sure you can count” and “There is no room for democracy in politics.”

But the discerning reader is left wanting even more detail on matters like why Mr. Rockefeller disliked Jacob Javits, the state’s senior senator (ego over common sense); which political insider was the middleman in a possible bribery scheme; and the risks of crossing the Rockefeller family (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/rockefeller_family/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and the power that family wielded.

Mr. Rosenbaum recalls flying over South Dakota on Mr. Rockefeller’s private jet in 1974, eager to see Mount Rushmore, but disappointed when the plane arrived after dark. Mr. Rockefeller left his seat briefly, and by the time he returned, the monument was bathed in floodlights. “One of the most powerful men in the country,” Mr. Rosenbaum remembered, “had just worked a miracle of sorts for my pleasure.”

Although the presidency was one miracle that remained elusive to Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Rosenbaum did help him become vice president. And Mr. Rosenbaum shares Mr. Rockefeller’s thinking on the merits of that office.

“I have known well all the vice presidents since Henry Wallace,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote to Mr. Rosenbaum in 1979, “and I think it is fair to say that all of them were frustrated.”

•

“I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles,” William Marcy Tweed said in 1870. “My constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.”

Before there was YouTube and “Saturday Night Live (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/saturday_night_live/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier),” there was Thomas Nast, whose devastating caricatures in Harper’s Weekly helped produce Boss Tweed’s ignominious downfall. And in “Doomed by Cartoon: How Cartoonist Thomas Nast and The New-York Times Brought Down Boss Tweed and His Ring of Thieves” (Morgan James,$19.95), John Adler, a self-described amateur historian, along with Draper Hill (himself a political cartoonist), present Nast’s work in serialized comic book form.

Nast’s drawings are fleshed out by an informative and engaging narrative that credits his impact without overlooking his political incorrectness. The caricatures are a vivid reminder that both campaigns and political commentary have, for the most part, gotten tamer.

•

Peter Golenbock, the sportswriter who compiled a memorable oral history of the Brooklyn Dodgers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/brooklyn_dodgers/index.html?inline=nyt-org), returns to the borough and the genre with “In the Country of Brooklyn: Inspiration to the World” (William Morrow, $32.95).

“This is a recounting of the importance of immigrants to this land, with the spotlight on those who escaped war, hunger and deprivation to come to Brooklyn,” Mr. Golenbock writes. “It is also the story of those whose bigotry and narrow-mindedness caused them to fight to keep out those who were different from them.”

The book was born in a question that Mr. Golenbock asked himself one day in the shower: Why was Jackie Robinson (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/jackie_robinson/index.html?inline=nyt-per) beloved in Brooklyn, but hated just about everywhere else?

Through his interviews with an eclectic group of Brooklynites — Marvin Miller, Ira Glasser (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/ira_glasser/index.html?inline=nyt-per), Pete Hamill (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/pete_hamill/index.html?inline=nyt-per), Neil Sedaka, Bruce Morrow, John Hope Franklin (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/john_hope_franklin/index.html?inline=nyt-per), Charles Barron (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/charles_barron/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and Victor Robles, along with many others — Mr. Golenbock largely accomplishes his mission of letting Brooklynites, through their own stories, reveal the history of a borough that inspired the world and to which, according to some estimates, as many as one in seven Americans can trace their roots.

As he sums up his mission: “My goal was to try to do for Brooklyn what John Dos Passos did for America.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/nyregion/thecity/19read.html?ref=thecity

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

Ushering in the Avant-Garde

A venerable critic collects 40 years of writing on architecture

by Damian Da Costa (http://www.observer.com/2007/author/damian-da-costa)
October 29, 2008

This article was published in the November 3, 2008, edition of The New York Observer.

http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/vertical/files/dacosta.jpg

On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Chang
By Ada Louise Huxtable
Walker & Co., 496 pages, $35

The question of the day is about public taste, and whether there can any longer be such a thing. When I asked a few of my friends who are young architects what they thought of Ada Louise Huxtable, venerable critic most recently for The Wall Street Journal and for whom The New York Times invented the job of newspaper architecture critic, the response ranged from blank to neutral. One told me her parents had mailed to her clippings of Ms. Huxtable’s Journal pieces when she was studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the way parents do when trying earnestly to relate to kids launched far into the realms of professional sophistication. “It’s cute when they do that,” she said.

Older architects certainly know Ms. Huxtable, and not just because they used to read newspapers. She began her career in the 1950s at Philip Johnson’s side as he helped found the Museum of Modern Art’s department of architecture and design. That early experience says it all about Mr. Huxtable’s eye for buildings: She’s been an avid explainer of architecture’s avant-garde, ushering each new trend (usefully embodied by gods like Louis Kahn and stars like Rem Koolhaas) safely into public understanding, all the while keeping a reporter’s eye on the real estate developers, whose ascendancy Ms. Huxtable, in her new collection of architectural journalism selected from a career spanning 40 years, describes with almost eerie equanimity:

“If the modern skyscraper has resolved any of architecture’s intrinsic ambiguities, it has done so in a thoroughly unexpected and unsettling way. Today’s big building is a masterpiece of economic manipulation, a monument to the marketplace and entrepreneurial skills. These are skills that command the kind of reverence and awe reserved for theological, moral, and aesthetic issues in earlier societies.”

On Architecture contains any number of similar remarks—expressions of disdain for the corruption of humane artistic values by the forces of profit, in a style compressed by the rush of daily journalism into simple statements of value and truth. No manifestos nor shrillness nor, most importantly for the critic, any hint of dogma. As she puts it in the book’s introduction, her authority derives simply from having been there—as a chronicler of the 20th century’s revolution in architecture, Ms. Huxtable never had the luxury of deciding whether a building or style or architect was worth thinking about. She processed it all, in real time, and the result is prose as self-assured as it is unadorned with the peacock feathers of architectural theory. “Deconstruction, building as ‘text’ or ‘narrative,’ contextualism, chaos theory, all have had their day and devotees,” she wrote in a 1995 New York Review of Books essay. “A few notable examples of work driven by theory become transient landmarks or textbook illustrations; the rest make it to the New York Times style pages, where styles go to die.”

If there’s one piece in this collection that distills Ms. Huxtable’s sensibility, it’s “The Way It Never Was,” her assault on the prefab mallification of America’s public spaces. South Street Seaport in New York, Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, Disneyland and Colonial Williamsburg—all create theme-park versions of history divorced from any honest relationship with the past. Ms. Huxtable writes

“They deny imperfections, alterations and accommodations; they wipe out all the incidents of life and change. The worn stone, the chafed corner, the threshold low and uneven from many feet, the marks on walls and windows that carry the presence and message of remembered eyes and hands. … There is nothing left of the journey from there to here, nothing that palpably joins the past to the present, that makes direct physical and emotional contact with the viewer, the bittersweet link with those who have been there before.”

Like any good critic, Ms. Huxtable guards that bittersweet link with tenacity and eloquence, and it’s a principle that has filtered down to her successors at The New York Times. When Nicolai Ouroussoff recently complimented the New York Public Library for its choice of British architect Norman Foster to design its new, underground circulating library, it was pure Huxtable: “The project’s potential,” he wrote, “lies in the delicious tension that could be created between old and new.”

In fact, Ada Louise Huxtable’s standard of judgment is available to everyone, regardless of their expertise in the history and theory of architecture. It’s everywhere implicit in her decades of criticism: She urges us to ask the building if it’s telling the truth.

Damian Da Costa is on the staff of The Observer. He can be reached at ddacosta@observer.com

http://www.observer.com/2008/o2/books/ushering-avant-garde

© 2008 Observer Media Group

[roccany]

I'm reading "Gotham" by Mike Wallace and I think it is very interesting. Isn't it a Nobel-prize winner?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Pulitzer.

[Merry]

As for books specifically about NYC neighbourhoods, I highly recommend:

Neighborhoods of Queens (http://www.amazon.com/Neighborhoods-Queens-New-York-City/dp/0300112998/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228725422&sr=1-1)

Neighborhoods of Brooklyn (http://www.amazon.com/Neighborhoods-Brooklyn-New-York-City/dp/0300103107/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b)

This series will eventually include books on the other boroughs as well. The one on The Bronx was meant to be published in February this year, but the publisher informed me that publication has been delayed until November 2009 :(.

Also these:

Brooklyn: People and Places, Past and Present (http://www.amazon.com/Brooklyn-People-Places-Past-Present/dp/0810991780/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228725903&sr=1-1)

Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way (http://www.amazon.com/Greenwich-Village-How-Got-That/dp/0517573229/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228725969&sr=1-1)

Manhattan's Turtle Bay: Story of a Midtown Neighborhood (http://www.amazon.com/Manhattans-Turtle-Bay-Midtown-Neighborhood/dp/0738525235/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228726037&sr=1-2)


From the excellent historical series "Images of America":

Bedford-Stuyvesant (http://www.amazon.com/Bedford-Stuyvesant-Images-America-New-York/dp/0738550043/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228726193&sr=1-1)

South Bronx (http://www.amazon.com/South-Bronx-NY-Images-America/dp/0738510203/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228726274&sr=1-4)

Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill (http://www.amazon.com/Washington-Heights-Inwood-Marble-America/dp/0738554782/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228726450&sr=1-1)


And:

South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City (http://www.amazon.com/South-Bronx-Rising-Resurrection-American/dp/0823221997/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228726274&sr=1-2)

Harlem Lost and Found (http://www.amazon.com/Harlem-Found-Michael-Henry-Adams/dp/1580930700/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228726525&sr=1-1)

[brianac]

http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/images/features/top_guidebook_4edition.jpg
http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/includes/site_images/spacers/spacer_369_15.gif Revised Landmarks Guide Just Published!
The Landmarks Preservation Commission today announced it has just published the Guide to New York City Landmarks, Fourth Edition (John Wiley & Sons). Covering approximately 1,200 landmarks, 90 historic districts, and spanning four centuries of the City’s history, this updated and revised paperback is a walking tour guide, architectural primer and textbook all rolled into one. Packed with 200 photographs, 75 two-color maps and fresh details about the City’s newest historic districts, the Guide is the best way to get acquainted with the rich architectural history and beauty of the world’s greatest City.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/includes/site_images/misc/arrow.gifPurchase the Guide to New York City Landmarks at CityStore (http://a856-citystore.nyc.gov/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductName=Guide%20to%20NYC%2 0Landmarks%20–%20Fourth%20Edition&ProductID=6316&CategoryID=89)

[lofter1]

And the price is not so bad:

Guide to NYC Landmarks – Fourth Edition

Item No: 09400 (http://a856-citystore.nyc.gov/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductName=Guide%20to%20NYC%2 0Landmarks%20–%20Fourth%20Edition&ProductID=6316&CategoryID=89)

Price: $32.95

[brianac]

Guide to NYC Landmarks – Fourth Edition

Looks like they moved the page.

Let's try this LINK (http://a856-citystore.nyc.gov/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductName=Guide%20to%20NYC%2 0Landmarks%20–%20Fourth%20Edition&ProductID=6316&CategoryID=89)

No. I'm getting the same message as the previous two links.

[lofter1]

go to that ^ link and then click the Books icon ...

[stache]

We actually should not be direct linking in this forum, especially for a cash generating venue.

[brianac]

Then you would have to scrap most of this thread.

[lofter1]

We actually should not be direct linking in this forum ...

Does that mean one should only link to the main page of any other site?

I've never really understood the theory / etiquette behind that.

[stache]

It's the policy coming from Edward.

[brianac]

I think this should be discussed in Forum Issues, because there are thousands of DIRECT LINKS given by members as help to other members, and also lots are embedded in articles.

Whoops, there goes another. You can't get Baseball Jackets here.

[brianac]

Reading New York

Page Turners Amid the Mistletoe

By SAM ROBERTS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sam_roberts/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: December 12, 2008

YOU might worry about both parties when a newspaper reporter admits to having a spiritual adviser, but it all worked out for the best for Michael Daly and especially his loyal readers.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/14/nyregion/14read.bridge.large.jpgTony Cenicola/The New York Times
The Brooklyn Bridge, from “Manhattan in Detail.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/14/nyregion/thecity/14read.tall.jpg Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
"Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings," by Judith Dupré.

Mr. Daly’s latest book is a marvelously revealing, inspirational, sensitive and surprisingly candid account of the life and good works of the Rev. Mychal Judge, the Franciscan friar and New York City Fire Department chaplain who died on Sept. 11, 2001, ministering to his extended flock at the World Trade Center.

Just in time for the holidays comes “The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge” (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, $27.95). Father Judge was larger than life, a mythic holy man. Mr. Daly is a columnist for The Daily News, and his book accomplishes a minor miracle. To paraphrase Jim Dwyer of The New York Times, Mr. Daly rescues Father Judge from 9/11’s mythic piety by exposing and exploring his humanity.

Father Judge was as disconnected from the bureaucracy of the Catholic church as he was married to the church spiritually. He was a gentle and nonjudgmental man who, a priest who ran a shelter in Harlem for homeless people with AIDS, recalled, “used to put it to me, if you descend into somebody else’s private hell and stand there with them, it ceases to be hell.”

Mr. Daly’s affecting style bestows a surprising humaneness on mayors and commissioners and, through diary entries and other sources, reconciles Father Judge’s love of people generally, including the police officers and firefighters who lionized him, and his love of individuals.

“He seemed to them to be as close as any mortal could be to Christ on earth, and they did not even think of him as a sexual being, much less as gay,” Mr. Daly writes. “The very fact he could inspire them to believe caused him to fear that if he broke that spell they would feel betrayed and lose their faith.

“That they did not suspect, even after seeing his spectrum of guests get up and dance at the Emerald Society dinner, suggested how determinedly they believed their shape-shifting priest to be who they needed him to be.”

Father Judge was always who they needed him to be, and so is Mr. Daly.

•

Dominated by the looming Super Bowl, the holidays offer a timely reminder of the oversize role that gambling plays in America. Michael J. Agovino needs no reminder. His father was a bookie.

“The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck and Family From the Utopian Outskirts of New York City” (HarperCollins, $24.95) is Mr. Agovino’s debut book. Here’s hoping it won’t be his last. A writer for various publications and Web sites, Mr. Agovino has produced a charming, evocative memoir about growing up a generation ago in Co-op City, the Bronx.

“ ‘How did we end up here?’ my mother said again and again,” he writes. “How did we end up here?” Once they had arrived (his father came from East Harlem, his mother from Bushwick, Brooklyn), “the object was to get out of this place.”

“The Bookmaker” is Mr. Agovino’s delightfully ironic New York story of how he succeeded, thanks, in part, to a 70-something yard touchdown run by Marcus Allen of the Los Angeles Raiders in the 1984 Super Bowl.

“That night, for us, Marcus Allen saved the world,” Mr. Agovino writes.

“The absurdity.” How he did so makes for an engaging story. Bet on it.

•

Here’s still another stranger-than-fiction story: “The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York” (Basic Books, $26), by Matthew Goodman.With all those ingredients, it’s hard to go wrong. Mr. Goodman’s hucksterish subtitle lives up to its remarkable promise.

In this true tale of science fiction the author, a historian, succeeds in recreating mid-19th century Manhattan in vivid fashion. He brings history to life, beginning with one of those innocuous news items that have inspired many a science fiction movie (“some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle”).

Mr. Goodman also charmingly reminds readers of yet another forgotten man who, in his day, “had been known to everyone in New York , the center, for a while, of a great hubbub.” Fame, clearly, is fleeting.

Maybe it’s fitting that the forgotten story of the patriotic Americans who rotted in British prisons in New York during the Revolutionary War is now being retold by Edwin G. Burrows, the sometimes overlooked co-author of “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/14/nyregion/thecity/14read1.190.jpg Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
From left,"Historic Photos of Brooklyn," compiled by John B. Manbeck, a former borough historian; "Times Square Spectacular: Lighting Up Broadway," by Darcy Tell, an editor at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; and "The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge," by Michael Daly.

Fittingly, the book has been published not long after Evacuation Day, the Nov. 25 anniversary of the British departure from New York in 1783. In “Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War” (Basic Books, $27.50),Professor Burrows, a Brooklyn College (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/brooklyn_college/index.html?inline=nyt-org) historian, recalls the horrific mistreatment of captured Americans and adds slyly:

“I have refrained from drawing parallels to contemporary events, but I will not be sorry if readers find themselves thinking about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, about the evasion of habeas corpus (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/habeas_corpus/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier), about official denials and cover-ups, about the arrogance and stupidity that can come with the exercise of great power. I hope they will also see that once upon a time, when the country was young, our own experience with prisoner abuse led us to believe that we are supposed to do better.”

•

The subtitle of “The George Washington Bridge” (Rutgers University Press, $22.95), by Michael Aaron Rockland, is “Poetry in Steel,” which belies the utilitarian nature of the world’s busiest bridge. Mr. Rockland’s prose poem to the bridge includes a poetic tribute but cries out for more photographs and drawings of one of the world’s most majestic spans.

•

Any book that reintroduces Jacob Riis (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/jacob_riis/index.html?inline=nyt-per) to another generation is a valuable addition to the New York canon. “The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America,” (W. W. Norton, $27.95), by Tom Buk-Swienty, does just that and through the unique perspective of a latter-day journalist and historian who lives in the Danish town where Riis was born.

Their shared roots endow Riis’s latest biographer with a special take on his subject’s motivation and his evolution from poor immigrant to accomplished photojournalist, reformer and friend of Theodore Roosevelt (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/theodore_roosevelt/index.html?inline=nyt-per).

•

Who can resist vintage photographs of Brooklyn? John B. Manbeck, a former borough historian, has compiled a resonant collection, “Historic Photos of Brooklyn” (Turner, $39.95), including rare glimpses of the 1908 Brooklyn Marathon and a triumphal arch celebrating the claim by a Brooklyn doctor to be the first explorer to reach the North Pole (“We Believe in You,” a sign proclaimed).

•

In “Times Square Spectacular: Lighting Up Broadway” (Smithsonian Books/Collins, $34.95), Darcy Tell, an editor at the Smithsonian Institution (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/smithsonian_institution/index.html?inline=nyt-org)’s Archives of American Art, recalls memorable images and their modern-day counterparts in a scholarly but lavishly illustrated look at the genesis of the Great White Way. The result is a feast of images worthy of a rave review.

•

“If the West Side does not stir you, you are a clod, past redemption,” Robert Moses (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/robert_moses/index.html?inline=nyt-per) once said. In “Riverside Park: The Splendid Sliver” (Columbia University Press, $24.95),the author Edward Grimm and the photographer E. Peter Schroeder celebrate the history and splendor of the greensward that abuts the city’s underappreciated waterfront south from Grant’s Tomb. An official map is included.

•

Nonclods who appreciate the rest of Manhattan, too, will be entranced by “Manhattan in Detail: An Intimate Portrait in Watercolor” (Universe, $17.95), by Robert L. Bowden, a landscape watercolorist. This nightstand-size book offers fetching paintings of familiar vistas that Mr. Bowden elevates to an ethereal dimension.

•

“Don’t Mind Me: And Other Jewish Lies” (Hyperion, $16.95) is Esther Cohen’s tribute to New York-style hyperbole and fibs. If these turns of phrase were ever unique to one group, they now seem universal. The author is executive director of Bread and Roses, the cultural arm of the hospital workers union. Roz Chast’s monumentally witty illustrations make this book gold-plated.

•

“Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings” (Black Dog & Leventhal, $24.95) features enough Manhattan edifices, including the twin towers of the World Trade Center, to qualify the work as a New York book. The author, Judith Dupré, skillfully couples a narrative with stunning photographs and factoids that distinguish this skyscraper-shaped book from so many touristy versions.

•

Marie Winn, the author of “Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/birds/hawks/pale_male/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier)’s Story,” now turns her attention to “Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). Her latest book is more engaging narrative than field guide, accompanied by sparse illustrations, but it is filled with keen insights and appealing anecdotes about bugs, birds and other critters that you generally wouldn’t mind meeting in the park after dark.

•

It’s been said that if you remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there. The same may be true of the Chelsea Hotel. Julia Calfee, who lived there and photographed the occupants for four years, has combined voices of guests with gauzy photographs to produce “Inside: The Chelsea Hotel” (Power House Books, $49.95).Ms. Calfee describes the Chelsea as “an Atlantis alive with myths and legends which has resisted the process of planetwide conformism” and where “the legend of reincarnation of talent and lives is still so strong that the residents are imbued with this fanatical belief.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/nyregion/thecity/14read.html?pagewanted=1&ref=thecity

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[ablarc]

Item No: 09400 (http://a856-citystore.nyc.gov/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductName=Guide%20to%20NYC%2 0Landmarks%20–%20Fourth%20Edition&ProductID=6316&CategoryID=89)
Thanks for the link, I just bought this book. Can't wait for it to arrive.

Common sense says links like this in a thread like this are fine; and I trust in Edward's common sense.

[Merry]

Thanks for the link, I just bought this book. Can't wait for it to arrive.

Common sense says links like this in a thread like this are fine; and I trust in Edward's common sense.

Is it OK to say that it's cheaper at Amazon?...

...from whence my copy is now on its way.

I have the third edition, which is marvelous, but going by the description of the new edition, some enhancements/improvements have been made.

You also can't go past Barbaralee Diamonstein's Landmarks of New York (http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_en___AU231&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&q=landmarks+of+new+york+barbaralee+diamonstein&spell=1), despite what I consider an inferior design/format in the latest edition compared to the previous edition.

Diamonstein's book is sorted in chronological order by year of construction and contains a photo of every landmark, along with accompanying text. There are maps and descriptive text for Historic Districts.

The LPC book is sorted by borough/neighbourhood and contains many photos. Each entry is numbered and appears on location maps, including Historic Districts. Several special interest sections are also included.

The two books complement one another, the former best for the armchair and the latter for that too but also ideal for walking tours. The two different formats also provide alternative means of seeking information.

[GowanusGuy]

This book is one of my favorites. I refer to it constantly.

http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Atlas-New-York-City/dp/0805078428/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229453928&sr=8-1

The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City's History (Paperback)
by Eric Homberger (Author), Alice Hudson (Illustrator)

Review:

"A beautifully produced reference work . . . here, in maps, drawings, photographs, and illuminating text, are the five little boroughs and how they grew." -E. L. Doctorow

"A treasure of a book. The historical notes are sharp, full, and often surprising. The graphics are fresh, colorful, and give one a new sense of New York, the world city in its everlasting drama." -Alfred Kazin

A New York Public Library Outstanding Reference Book

The rich and eminently browsable visual guide to the history of New York, in an all-new
second edition

The Historical Atlas of New York City, second edition, takes us, neighborhood by neighborhood, through four hundred years of Gotham's rich past, describing such crucial events as the city's initial settlement of 270 people in thirty log houses; John Jacob Astor's meteoric rise from humble fur trader to the richest, most powerful man in the city; and the fascinating ethnic mixture that is modern Queens. The full-color maps, charts, photographs, drawings, and mini-essays of this encyclopedic volume also trace the historical development and cultural relevance of such iconic New York thoroughfares as Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, Park Avenue, and Broadway. This thoroughly updated edition brings the Atlas up to the present, including three all-new two-page spreads on Rudolph Giuliani's New York, the revival of Forty-second Street, and the rebuilding of Ground Zero.

A fascinating chronicle of the life of a metropolis, the handsome second edition of The Historical Atlas of New York City provides a vivid and unique perspective on the nation's cultural capital.

[Merry]

I can't wait for this.


April 19, 2009

The Grand Cornice-and-Pediment Tour

By CONSTANCE ROSENBLUM

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/04/19/nyregion/19norv.600.jpg
Norval White, left, and Francis Leadon, authors of the fifth edition of the AIA Guide, due out next year.

NORVAL WHITE, one of the great figures of New York architecture, was cruising around Long Island City a couple of months ago when he came upon an unexpected sight. On Jackson Avenue, in this still scrappy-looking section of Queens, stood a newish co-op sheathed in luminous squares of blue glass. Its designer, Robert Scarano Jr., is one of the less beloved figures among the city’s architectural cognoscenti, and much to Mr. White’s amazement, he didn’t actually hate the thing.

“It’s definitely a cut above his other stuff,” Mr. White, his lean, 6-foot-5 frame tucked into the front seat of a gray Subaru Forester, acknowledged in his plummy baritone. “It has some quality. We’ll have to include Scarano in the guide.”

On this matter, Mr. White, 82, got no argument from his companion on this expedition, a Yale (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/y/yale_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org)-educated professor of architecture named Francis Leadon, who at roughly half Mr. White’s age represents the new generation in the field.

“Holy moley,” Mr. Leadon murmured as the car in which they were traveling rounded a corner, offering an even more dazzling view of the building. It is a phrase he uses a lot.

The guide in question, as anyone with affection for the five boroughs would know, is the AIA Guide to New York City, which is scheduled to appear in its fifth incarnation in the spring of 2010. The work, being published by Oxford University Press, will comprise 1,100 pages and include entries for nearly 6,000 buildings, Mr. Scarano’s icy blue co-op likely among them.

Over its more than four decades of existence, the guide has evolved into a New York institution, as much a city fixture among a certain crowd as Fourth of July fireworks over the East River. Born during an era in which such guidebooks were a rarity, the publication splashed onto the scene in 1967, when Mr. White and another young architect named Elliot Willensky (W & W, some people called them) produced it for conventioneers at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/american_institute_of_architects/index.html?inline=nyt-org), held that year in New York.

The original volume — “feverishly prepared,” as Mr. White later described the process — was a narrow, brick-shaped affair of 464 pages with a black and brown cover that contained entries on some 2,600 buildings. A trade version was published the following year (blue and white cover), followed by a second edition in 1978 (653 pages, brown cover, number of buildings uncertain since the authors never bothered to count) and a third, vastly expanded, in 1988 (913 pages, orange and white cover, 5,000 buildings).

In 1990, at the age of 56, Mr. Willensky died of a heart attack, leaving Mr. White, a self-confessed obsessive-compulsive who by then had developed a great fondness for the guide, as the sole author of the fourth edition, which was published in 2000 (1,056 pages, 5,000-plus buildings, mottled brick-colored cover).

There are two reasons the guide has entered the pantheon of New York books like “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/robert_a_caro/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s gargantuan biography of Robert Moses (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/robert_moses/index.html?inline=nyt-per); Kenneth Jackson’s Encyclopedia of the City of New York; and Jane Jacobs (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/jane_jacobs/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s “Death and Life of Great American Cities.” One is its encyclopedic nature, and the other is its inimitable style — “smart, vivid, funny and opinionated,” as the architectural historian Christopher Gray once summed it up in pithy W & W fashion.

But after the publication of the fourth edition, the project stood at a crossroads. Mr. White’s mind is as agile as ever, his judgments just as incisive, his wit as razor-edged. Yet, despite his robust appearance, his legs are not what they were.

For the 2000 guide, he tramped the streets of Manhattan and reinspected nearly all the buildings cited to confirm the accuracy of their descriptions. A decade later, such intensive, firsthand observation was not an option.

In addition, Mr. White no longer lives in New York, or even within commuting distance. Five years ago, after three decades at 104 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights and several years in Connecticut, he and his wife, Camilla, transplanted themselves to a 150-year-old mini-chateau atop a hill in the village of Roques, in southwest France, because, as Mr. White explained, “We wanted an adventure before it was too late.”

FOR a fifth edition of the guide, Mr. White knew that he would need a partner. Thanks to a deal brokered by Mr. White’s close friend Stephanie Smith, director of administration of the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture of the City College of New York (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/city_college_of_new_york/index.html?inline=nyt-org), where Mr. White taught for a quarter of a century, that partner was Mr. Leadon, a 42-year-old assistant professor at the school. George Ranalli, the school’s dean, was also an enthusiastic supporter of the idea.

Mr. Leadon, whose shock of dark hair falling over his forehead gives him a decided resemblance to the actor Hugh Grant (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/hugh_grant/index.html?inline=nyt-per), grew up in Gainesville, Fla., and now lives in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. In addition to his academic responsibilities, he provides vocals and guitar for a Brooklyn bluegrass band called the Y’all Stars.

“I was hoping that wouldn’t come up,” Mr. Leadon muttered sheepishly when the subject was raised. Yet in Mr. White’s opinion, the fact that Mr. Leadon dwells in a world so different from the prewar Upper East Side in which he himself came of age is among the things that make the partnership so productive.

“Fran has lots of contemporary ideas,” Mr. White said earlier this year during a two-week visit to the city. “He has different associations with contemporary life in New York. He knows the music, the jazz clubs, the sort of things people do, the vernacular.”

Mr. White acknowledges that this will almost certainly be his last edition of the guide, but he hopes that his new partner will carry on the torch. Given their obvious mutual affection, not to mention the way their sensibilities and sometimes their very words echo each other’s — Mr. Leadon industriously seeks to emulate Mr. White’s directive to “damn with faint praise” — this scenario seems likely.

The new generation includes not only Mr. Leadon but also 11 students enrolled in a course he is teaching specifically designed to produce many of the words and all the images for the 2010 guide. Without the efforts of the students, a group Mr. Leadon describes as “stellar,” the guide wouldn’t have a prayer of meeting its October deadline.

THANKS to Google.doc, an application that allows the two men to all but simultaneously edit each other’s words — in contrasting colors, no less — work on the new edition of the guide is proceeding briskly despite the 3,000 miles separating its two authors.

Yet, even with a copacetic partner, to update a 1,056-page work of close-in architectural detail and thousands of images tracing the lineaments of a vast and endlessly changing metropolis is a formidable task. Virtually every entry is being rewritten. Some old buildings are being dropped in favor of more interesting and important newcomers, and a spiffier and more sophisticated layout will feature the footprint of every building mentioned, based on a digital map of the city.

The authors are also restoring what the writer Phillip Lopate (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/phillip_lopate/index.html?inline=nyt-per) called the “ghoulishly fascinating” Necrology section listing lost New York glories (the old Pennsylvania Station and a litany of beloved stores and restaurants).
Despite the miles separating the guide’s two authors, Mr. White’s role is hardly insignificant. During his recent visit to the city, he blitzed around town, catching up with buildings and entire districts that had sprung up or had been transformed since his absence, notable among them the World Trade Center neighborhood, in preparation for writing an entirely new section on the area.

“The World Trade Center was a particular challenge,” Mr. White admitted, mindful that this will be the first part of the guide many people turn to. “It’s a very touchy subject, and we’re being very careful.” The previous guide, which appeared just a year before 9/11, dismissed the twin towers as “stolid, banal monoliths.”

On this cloudy Saturday in early February, the day of the sighting of the not-so-dreadful Scarano building, Mr. White and Mr. Leadon were being ferried around Brooklyn and Queens by Ken Ficara, their Web guru and designated driver and a frequent guest performer with Mr. Leadon’s band. In the front seat sat Mr. White, looking very Brooks Brothers in a tweed jacket, tan corduroys, plaid shirt and a cane. In the back was Mr. Leadon, in jeans and a parka, along with a heavily annotated and much-scribbled-over copy of the current guide, so thumbed through it had broken into two.

As they headed south on Flatbush Avenue, the first leg of what would be a four-hour tour, the two architects snapped away with their cameras while trading one-liners that sounded uncannily like pages of the AIA Guide come to life. The undertaking seemed equal parts Architecture 101 and Norval and Fran’s excellent adventure.

“That’s a really good cornice,” Mr. White announced as they passed an old warehouse and Mr. Ficara, to the accompaniment of much honking, made the first of a series of highly questionable left turns. “All the buildings around here are interesting.”

Mr. White’s visual appetite seemed boundless. “I want to look at everything in the world,” he confessed as they approached Grand Army Plaza to check out Richard Meier (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/richard_meier/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s new condominium, a major item on their to-do list.

After a few choice words for this contemporary beachhead on the otherwise traditional circle — “Oh, my God!” Mr. White gasped as 15 stories of shimmering glass swam into view — his gaze lingered on the plaza’s triumphal Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch. The sight prompted reminiscences about the old days. “When I was a kid,” Mr. White told his younger companions, “I thought Brooklyn was another planet. We never even went except on extraordinary occasions.”

A little later, they made their way to the onetime Victorian villa in Prospect Park that houses the Brooklyn parks department, not because the building was new or unfamiliar, but because Mr. White loves it so much.

“They invented their own corn-cob capitals for the occasion,” he told his companions, gesturing at the columns the 2000 guide called “Corinthian or Corn-inthian” (ouch). He reminded them of the inspirational role of the 19th-century landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, who drowned in the Hudson trying to save his mother-in-law after a steamer accident.
Mr. Leadon, no slouch himself when it comes to historical recall, marvels at this level of expertise.

“Norval is just amazing — amazing — in the depth of his knowledge about New York,” he had said in an e-mail message a few days earlier. “I’ve learned a lot over the last year of working on this, and get to feel pretty cocky sometimes about what I now know about the city. Then I talk to Norval and realize how little I know. You could literally plunk him down on any street in the five boroughs and he could tell you something about who lived there, which building was there 100 years ago, an old restaurant that no one else remembers ... on and on.”

Knowledge, however, does not necessarily translate into a sense of direction. By now the three men were driving around the park in circles, unable to find an exit. “We may have to spend the weekend here,” Mr. Leadon said cheerfully as they traveled and retraveled the same snow-bordered roads.

ALTHOUGH Mr. White knows much of the city like the back of his hand, he was unprepared for the transformation of the South Brooklyn waterfront. In his mind’s eye, the area was a desolate expanse of cobblestone streets lined with warehouses and other remnants of the city’s dying shipping industry. But that was before Ikea (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/ikea/index.html?inline=nyt-org), Fairway and the gentrifiers moved in. By the time the travelers reached Van Brunt Street, Mr. White was utterly disoriented.

“I’m looking for something I recognize,” he said wanly, not seeming to hold out much hope. But the melancholy mood did not last, and for the most part the one-liners came thick and fast.

Of a Police Athletic League community center in Red Hook that Mr. Leadon wanted to retain in the 2010 edition despite its bedraggled appearance? “Remember,” Mr. White cautioned, “it’s not the AIA Guide for Social Progress.”

Of several unsightly structures near the Brooklyn waterfront? “There’s a couple of really bad buildings,” Mr. Leadon said. “Oh, sorry, I’m not damning with faint praise.”

Of a park on Coffey Street in Red Hook whose name no one could quite remember? “I’ll check the AIA Guide,” Mr. Leadon said. “Oh, wait, I’m writing the AIA Guide.”

Of a particularly formidable monolith? “What’s the other thing they need?” Mr. Leadon wondered aloud. “Oh, wait. People.”

Of Mr. Ficara’s navigational skills as they threaded through a series of tunnels en route to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway? “One false move,” Mr. Leadon warned ominously, “and we’ll be in Battery Park.”

THE physical city has been hugely transformed since the 2000 guide. Yet the most significant change may involve something far less tangible.
Time and again, as Mr. Leadon’s students fanned across the city, snapping away with their cameras, they have been shooed away, not always gently, by anxious security guards. This is a post-9/11 city, and a young man or woman lingering on a sidewalk and gazing a little too long at a cornice or a doorway can arouse suspicion.

Amanda Chen, 22, who came to New York from China at the age of 6, was chased down the block by a doorman, and it was not even his apartment house she was photographing. Jon Fouskaris, 24, who grew up in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, said that one woman, angry because he was taking pictures of her building, tried to rip his clipboard from his hand.

This altered state of affairs was particularly in evidence a few weeks ago when Mr. Leadon and a handful of his students paid a visit to Columbus Circle to check out the new Museum of Arts and Design (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/museum_of_arts_and_design/index.html?inline=nyt-org), the Time Warner Center and the circle’s new landscaping.

Inside the center, amid hordes of tourists and shoppers, they went about taking pictures until a woman who identified herself only as Jennifer and said she was the managing concierge sought to discourage them, telling them that they were in a private space and needed permission if they wanted to photograph any commercial signs or if their pictures were going to be published.

After a few minutes, a man who identified himself as Karl Daniel and said he was the center’s director of guest services joined the conversation and said the students were free to do as they wished.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/nyregion/thecity/index.html

[brianac]

Ruthless in Manhattan

By MICHAEL KAZIN
Published: May 7, 2009

Americans have always been ambivalent about men who turn small businesses into gigantic ones. We marvel at their cleverness and daring — and envy the manifold pleasures they buy and discard at whim. Yet we assume that anyone so big must also be bad. Tycoons get blamed for making the marketplace less free, for corrupting politicians, for exploiting the ordinary folk who work in their companies. Some of the corporate rich then try to enhance their reputations with ostentatious philanthropy. No wonder that in this most capitalist of nations, our leading capitalists usually garner as much suspicion as love.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/05/10/books/kazin-500.jpgLibrary of Congress
Cornelius Vanderbilt, circa 1845.

THE FIRST TYCOON

The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

By T. J. Stiles
Illustrated. 719 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $37.50

Cornelius Vanderbilt spent little of his long life fretting over his image. If Americans were not grateful for the many steamships he built, the major railroad lines he integrated into a common system, the stock market panics he soothed and the Grand Central Terminal (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grand_central_terminal_nyc/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) he constructed with his own millions, that was their fault, not his. Vanderbilt was the richest man in 19th-century America; at his death in 1877, he possessed, at least on paper, one-ninth of all the American currency in circulation. But like other corporate giants of his era and ours, he saw no reason to apologize for manufacturing and managing commodities everyone wanted and needed.

“Vanderbilt was many things, not all of them admirable,” T. J. Stiles says in this perceptive and fluently written biography, “but he was never a phony. Hated, revered, resented, he always commanded respect, even from his enemies.”

READ COMPLETE ARTICLE (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/books/review/Kazin-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/books/review/Kazin-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business

Copyright 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Bronxbombers]

I have 1 about Book Derek Jeter, 1 New York Yankees book, Joe Torre and Tom Verducci The Yankees 2 books about New York City. I will buy and get other books about New York City as Christmas gifts and birthday gifts starting aorund Christmas vacation 2009.

[meesalikeu]

anybody know when a new AIA guide to nyc will be coming out? i think the last was in 2000.

and while i'm at it, are any of the older versions of the AIA guides any better or worse than the 2000 version? just wondering if anyone can comment on the differences/similarities of the editions over time. thx.

[Merry]

anybody know when a new AIA guide to nyc will be coming out? i think the last was in 2000.

Spring 2010. See this post (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=281238&postcount=59).

and while i'm at it, are any of the older versions of the AIA guides any better or worse than the 2000 version? just wondering if anyone can comment on the differences/similarities of the editions over time. thx.I also have the 1968 and 1988 editions (there was also a 1978 edition).

The format of the 2000 edition is more user-friendly and easier to read in my opinion. The location maps are much better and there are a lot more of them.

There isn't much difference between the 1968 and 1988 editions except that there are many more entries in the 1988 edition, of course.

The photos in the 1968/1988 editions are positioned within the building entry text and are mostly larger than the 2000 edition. The format of the 2000 edition has the photos mostly in the left/right margins and they are therefore much smaller. There are some larger photos within the building entry text. The photos differ from one edition to the next.

The symbols used to indicate architectural style are located in the (narrower) left/right margins in the 1968/1988 editions and at the beginning of and within each building entry in the 2000 edition.

As per the article in the above link, the 1988 edition contains a Necrology section, missing in the 2000 edition, which they plan to reintroduce in the new edition.

[meesalikeu]

wow, thee perfect reply -- thx so much merry!

i always look at it in the bookstore, but oddly enough i have never bought one. guess i'll hold on for spring 2010.

[Bronxbombers]

The Rough Guide To New York City

[Alonzo-ny]

http://www.amazon.com/New-York-Novel-Edward-Rutherfurd/dp/0385521383

New York - Edward Rutherford.

I havent read it but I plan to soon. Im currently reading the authors book 'London' and Im really enjoying it. His books take you through time following different families through the city's history. Its a great premise and he writes it very well. I also have his book Russka to read which is the same concept.

[Merry]

wow, thee perfect reply -- thx so much merry!

i always look at it in the bookstore, but oddly enough i have never bought one. guess i'll hold on for spring 2010.

Glad it was useful, meesalikeu. I forgot to mention that, based on a cursory look at each, apart from the odd word or sentence, the text doesn't differ much between the 1988 and 2000 editions.

From the article:

Virtually every entry is being rewritten.So, I guess we may get a completely new take on things with input from Francis Leadon and his students. I'm glad I have the 2000 edition just for comparison, and to look back at the original, often very amusing, "damn with faint praise" approach.

Some old buildings are being dropped in favor of more interesting and important newcomers...Well, if they dispense with any of my favourites, I'll still have the 2000 edition :).

[Merry]

New book depicts New York City's efforts to shelter the Great Depression homeless

http://www.prlog.org/10339686-new-york-city-in-the-great-depression-sheltering-the-homeless.jpg (http://www.prlog.org/10339686-new-york-city-in-the-great-depression-sheltering-the-homeless.jpg)

New York City in the Great Depression: Sheltering the Homeless

During a time when fear of a second Great Depression lingers in the minds of America’s people, it is important to remember what was done over 80 years ago. Following the stock market crash of 1929, the rising unemployment rate and widespread depression made it necessary for the city of New York to provide more commodious quarters for the city's homeless.

In a new book by Arcadia Publishing, local author Dorothy Laager Miller uses vintage photographs to present the faces of New York citizens dealing with poverty, unemployment and homelessness during one of the worst economic times in recent history.

Highlights of New York City in the Great Depression: Sheltering the Homeless:


Features over 200 vintage photographs from the archives of Joseph A. Mannix, the New-York Historical Society and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Showcases the Municipal Lodging House and its annexes in Manhattan, the farm colony at Camp LaGuardia and the rehabilitation center at Hart Island
Includes images of the famous Great Depression breadlines, Tammany Hall, the city's immigrants and tenement housing
Spotlights Mayor Jimmy Walker, Gov. Al Smith and other pivotal city leaders


Dorothy Laager Miller has worked as a teacher on Long Island for 30 years and is a member of the Three Village Historical Society. She began researching New York City’s Great Depression after the discovery of her grandfather’s archive of photographs documenting the Municipal Lodging House, where he was the superintendent.

http://www.prlog.org/10339686-new-book-depicts-new-york-citys-efforts-to-shelter-the-great-depression-homeless.html

[Merry]

New York Books to Look for this Fall

Greg Mortimer

Posted: September 17, 2009 11:27 AM

The five boroughs have never been lacking in their own body of literature, and so far 2009 (the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage) has given us several books worth celebrating. Among many are E.L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley (http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400064946) (Random House, $26) about the infamously reclusive Collyer brothers and their Fifth Avenue mansion; Colum McCann's acclaimed Let the Great World Spin (http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400063734) (Random House, $25), a kaleidescope of New Yorkers' lives during the tumultuous summer of 1974; and Bronx zoologist Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta (http://www.abramsbooks.com/Books/Mannahatta-9780810996335.html): A Natural History of New York City (Abrams, $40) which traces the ecological evolution of the island with an astonishing array of charts, maps, drawings, and photos.

But we still have a few months until the holidays. Here are some of the books that should be on the radars of New Yorkers this fall:

Chronic City: A Novel
October 13th / Doubleday, $27.95

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2009-09-17-ChronicCity.jpg

Some early reviews are in for Chronic City, the latest from Motherless Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem. The Daily Beast calls it "realistic and fantastic, serious and funny, warm and clear-eyed." Publishers Weekly deems it "a luxuriously stylized paean to Gotham City's great fountain of culture that is drying up." Bookforum was more skeptical, saying that "for all the sprightliness and wit, it's too good-humored to attain real satiric bite." No matter -- Chronic City will give readers a vision of Manhattan that's as ambitious as its author.

Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York October 13th / North Point Press, $30

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2009-09-17-AppetiteCity.jpg


It's hard to imagine a time when New York wasn't the capital of great food, but then again, it's also hard to imagine what it was like before the diverse culinary explosions of the last couple of decades, when celebrated establishments like Tavern on the Green, Lutece, and Delmonico's seemed to outshine everything else. Former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes (http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes/index.html) dishes up a historical tour of New York's ever-evolving culinary culture, from the days of "the boisterous beef-and-beans joints" to the Automat and beyond, complete with over a hundred photos and rare menus. With early blurbs from Jacques Pepin, Bobby Flay, and Mark Kurlansky (among others), Appetite City will undoubtedly whet the appetite of true-blue New York foodies.

Mapping New York
October 20th / Black Dog, $49.95

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2009-09-17-MappingNewYork.jpg

Manhattan map-o-philes, rejoice. If you're like me and wouldn't mind poring over an atlas all day, this book is for you. Mapping New York will be a lavishly-produced book, not unlike its successor from two years ago, Mapping London, and it'll remind readers just how simultaneously mammoth and intricate the city really is -- and how it continues to grow. Here you'll find maps from New Amsterdam to the present day, but the cartographic focus is on the 20th and 21st centuries, arranged thematically from commerce, water, transportation, military, and crime.

Only in New York: An Exploration of the World's Most Fascinating, Frustrating and Irrepressible City
by Sam Roberts, with an introduction by Pete Hamill
October 27th / St. Martin's, $23.99

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2009-09-17-OnlyinNewYork.jpg

Roberts, urban correspondent for The New York Times, collects 40 of his "Only in New York" (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/category/only-in-new-york/) podcasts into a book that's "street-smart, informative and occasionally hilarious" (Publishers Weekly). This is a punchy panorama of the city: Among his many stories, Roberts explains the reasons behind the Manhattan baby boom, the gender gap and proliferation of testosterone below 14th street, the city's pooper-scooper law, and Jimmy Breslin's and Norman Mailer's 1969 political quest to see the five boroughs secede from the rest of the state.

New York: The Novel by Edward Rutherfurd
November 10th / Doubleday, $30

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2009-09-17-NewYorkRutherfurd.jpg

Rutherfurd is known for his sweeping, geographically-focused, brick-width sagas (Russka, The Princes of Ireland, London), and his new novel New York is no exception, clocking in at 880 pages and promising to traverse every genre as it chronicles the history of the city, with cameos by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, J.P. Morgan, Babe Ruth, and others. If you were a fan of Pete Hamill's Forever, Kevin Baker's Paradise Alley, or Dennis Lehane's The Given Day, you'll want to check this one out.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin
December 18th / Oxford University Press, $27.95

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2009-09-17-NakedCity.jpg

Brooklyn College and CUNY sociologist Zukin shows us New York's transformation (i.e., gentrification) since the early 90's in Naked City, whose subtitle echoes Jane Jacobs' seminal work from 1962, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Indeed, this sounds like a valuable follow-up to that book, though in addition to looking at what gives neighborhoods like Harlem, Union Square, Williamsburg, Red Hook, and the East Village "a sense of place," Zukin argues that a civilian-driven craving for an authentic urban experience -- galleries, high-end food stores, quirky ethnic restaurants, the antiquity of buildings, among others -- is the very engine behind the city's trend towards localized homogeneity.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mortimer/new-york-books-to-look-fo_b_289933.html?view=print

[Hof]

I think the "Manhatta" book was also featured in a recent issue of "National Geographic".
I'm not sure what the date of the mag was, or even if it is the same author since it was read in a doctor's office and discarded as soon as my name was called. (...I thought about stealing it so I could finish the article, but it was gone when I came out of his office...).
The article is cool. There were a dozen interesting photos (and computer renderings) of Manhattan Island "on the day before the Dutch first landed", being compared to the same locations today.
One graphic was was a beautiful 3-page foldout of aboriginal New York on one side and a contemporary map on the other.

The author had done reverse-engineering on Manhattan, based on old English & Dutch maps from the 1600s, then he worked towards the past by identifying topographic features from them and determining what used to grow wild there.
Then he made digilital maps and renderings of what it must have looked like v. what is there now. The illustrations look like photos. The maps look like paintings.

New York was a dense forest, littered with ponds and well-sliced up by little streams.
Did you know that Times Square was once an oak and cedar swamp? Broadway and 7th was the source for a small creek that wound down to the Hudson...
And the City Hall/ Financial District had at least 5 ponds and lakes that were filled in in the 1700s to make geography for the growing City?

I'll have to make another Doctor's appointment and go back and get it...

[ablarc]

^ Hof, I steal journals from my doctors' offices all the time.

A recent one revealed that Woodrow Wilson was having micro-strokes the whole time he was negotiating the Treaty of Versailles.

The article suggested that consequently his diseased mind set up the conditions for the Third Reich.

[Merry]

(...I thought about stealing it so I could finish the article, but it was gone when I came out of his office...).

I'll have to make another Doctor's appointment and go back and get it...

No immediate sudden illness/theft required :cool::

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/09/manhattan/miller-text/1

For those who haven't seen the Mannahatta (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16819) thread.

[Merry]

Recent acquisitions:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51w7YXmZYEL._SS500_.jpg

The Rowhouse Reborn, Andrew Scott Dolkart (http://www.amazon.com/Row-House-Reborn-Architecture-Neighborhoods/dp/0801891582/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253339252&sr=1-1)


From the wonderful Postcard History Series:

New York City's Financial District in Vintage Postcards (http://www.amazon.com/Citys-Financial-District-Postcard-History/dp/0738500682/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253339312&sr=1-2)

Along Broadway (http://www.amazon.com/Along-Broadway-NY-Postcard-History/dp/0738550310/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253339556&sr=1-6)

The Upper West Side (http://www.amazon.com/Upper-West-Side-Postcard-History/dp/0738563161/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253339607&sr=1-1)


This one is out of print, but I got a lovely copy second-hand:

http://www.bucklandbooks.co.uk/assets/images/Special%20Offers/TerraCottaSkyline.png

Terra-Cotta Skyline : New York's Architectural Ornament, Susan Tunick (http://www.amazon.com/Terra-Cotta-Skyline-Yorks-Architectural-Ornament/dp/B00013AX8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253339704&sr=1-1)

Not quite so recent (but a favourite):

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41adgGa8%2BLL._SS500_.jpg

New York: A Historical Atlas of Architecture, Alejandro Bahamón (http://www.amazon.com/New-York-Historical-Atlas-Architecture/dp/157912786X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253339923&sr=1-1)


Coming soon:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QTYpGiwdL._SS500_.jpg
Intersections: The Grand Concourse at 100, Antonio Bessa (http://www.amazon.com/Intersections-Grand-Concourse-at-100/dp/0823230783/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253339022&sr=1-1)

http://www.nyupress.org/images/Rosenblum_Boulevard.jpg

Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, Constance Rosenblum (http://www.amazon.com/Boulevard-Dreams-Heady-Heartbreak-Concourse/dp/0814776086/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253340850&sr=1-1)

[Merry]

Coming Soon: Updated Version of Legendary AIA New York Guide

September 23, 2009

By C.J. Hughes

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/images/090923aia_ny_guide4.jpg

Today in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, 20 people aimed cameras at a three-story row house, snapped photos, and cheered. Part of the reason for their excitement may have been that the building was once the home of Jane Jacobs, the writer and activist. More likely, though, is that the picture-taking session marked the official end of the lengthy research phase for the fifth edition of the AIA Guide to New York City, the wryly written block-by-block directory of landmarks that’s become an essential reference for architects, planners, and developers, as well as residents.

About half of the new book, which is due in April from Oxford University Press, features content from earlier editions, most of which were written by architects Norval White and the late Elliot Willensky. A third contributor, Fran Leadon, AIA, a teacher at the City University of New York, joined the effort this go-around, roaming the five boroughs’ sidewalks over an 18-month period to research and photograph a good percentage of the book’s 9,000 buildings. Many of his former students also contributed to the new guide.

“It’s fantastic that it’s come to a close,” Leadon said during today’s event, attended by various contributors. “I’m so happy.”

The guide was first printed in 1968, with updated versions released in 1978, 1988, and 2000. A key reason for refreshing the book now is that since its last printing in 2000, an epic construction boom has transformed New York, adding scores of office towers, condos, and parks, Leadon said.

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/images/090923aia_ny_guide3.jpg
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/images/090923aia_ny_guide2.jpg
Today’s photo shoot of Jane Jacobs’ house marked the conclusion of research for the fifth edition of the AIA Guide to New York City, due out in April.

These get their due in the latest edition, as do burgeoning neighborhoods like Gansevoort Market, also known as the meatpacking district. Plus, the book will now feature “necrology” items about gone-but-not-forgotten buildings, similar to those that appeared in the third edition. Morever, the book’s 6,000 photos, which are being whittled down from a stack of 41,000, are larger on average than previously.

But, at 1,100 pages, the book is expected to be only slightly longer than the 1,056-page version released in 2000, which may explain the layout’s more compact font and smaller margins.

Although the new “AIA Guide” will predictably rhapsodize about, say, Grand Central Terminal, it also honors less-monumental places, like Jane Jacobs’ old home, which debuts in this edition, because overall the book is a celebration of neighborhoods, Leadon says. Similarly mentioned is Downtown Auto and Tire, a repair shop ringed by barbed wire at Great Jones Street and the Bowery, which is noted for its dying-breed status.

“The world is changing,” said owner Saeed Choudry today, gesturing to a gleaming hotel across the street. “There are no empty old lots left.”

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/090923aia_ny_guide.asp

[Merry]

40,000 Photos Later…

By Fran Leadon, AIA

http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Fran-Group.jpg
(Left): Fran Leadon, AIA, last winter in Midtown, with student Adrian Hayes and New York Times writer Constance Rosenblum. (Right): AIA Guide Research Assistants, December 2008. (L-R): Adrian Hayes, Amanda Chen, Christopher Drobny, Katja Dubinsky, Calista Ho, Marina Ovtchinnikova.

This week we completed the photography for the upcoming fifth edition of the AIA Guide to New York City (Oxford University Press, 2010), with help from 22 student assistants from the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at City College. Our combined efforts over the past year have yielded well over 40,000 new photos of more than 6,000 buildings and parks from the northern tip of the Bronx to the southern end of Staten Island.

We began with a group of four undergraduate architecture students (Calista Ho, Katja Dubinsky, Amanda Chen, and Marina Ovtchinnikova) and three Master of Landscape Architecture students (Jon Fouskaris, Christopher Drobny, and Adrian Hayes), and tackled Midtown, the Upper West and Upper East Sides during the fall 2008 semester. The photos students began to bring back to class were extraordinary. Years of design studios had trained their eyes to analyze and question. They didn’t simply drive by and shoot the buildings; they really studied them. Beautiful details emerged: courtyards, faded signs, lanterns, cornices, pediments, friezes.
Their work was extremely time-consuming and dependent on good light and weather.

Jon, Amanda, and Christopher continued their work into the spring semester, joined by two undergraduates, Glenn DeRoche and Douglas Moreno, and two Master of Architecture students, Bradley Kaye and Jason Prunty. Together we photographed the remainder of Manhattan (the Villages, the Lower East Side, Harlem, Upper Manhattan). Shooting photos in the winter months proved to be arduous. There were fewer good hours of light, and last winter’s temperatures were brutal (I almost got frostbite trying to shoot Yorkville one frigid week in January). As Manhattan neared completion, I redeployed three students (Bradley, Amanda, and Jon) to Brooklyn, and wonderful shots of Park Slope, Gerritsen Beach, Coney Island, and Sunset Park were added to our photo database.

By May we had finished all of Manhattan, and an enthusiastic group of undergraduate architecture students (Andrea Barley, Cinthia Cedeno, Mary Doumas, William Eng, Jaimee Gee, Tiffany Liu, Adrian Lopez, Ross Pechenyy, and Billy Schaefer) joined Jon for a summer ramble through the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, cameras in hand. Their work was painstaking. The students would make multiple visits to sites to get exactly the right shot, waiting for the light and shadows to cooperate. Frequently they were told to stop photographing by a homeowner or security guard (a constant, vexing problem).

As research assistants, the students weren’t acting only as photographers. We asked them to take notes on each place they visited, as we rewrote, updated, and added to the new edition’s text. It would not have been possible for us to complete the new edition in just one year without the help of our students. To commemorate their work over the last year, we will simultaneously snap one last “ceremonial” photo on September 23 at 11:00 AM. The building I have chosen was not included in the last edition of the Guide, but is a humble landmark and deserving of our undivided attention: Jane Jacobs’ house at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. I hope that AIA members and e-Oculus readers will come out to witness our “last photo.”

Down Under

By Fran Leadon, AIA

http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/DownUnder2.jpg
(L-R): Gair Building No. 5; Eskimo Pie Building; and 135 Plymouth Street in DUMBO.

Early in the morning on August 11th I visited the neighborhood known as Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass (OK, fine, let’s just call it DUMBO) to shoot some photos for the upcoming fifth edition of the AIA Guide to New York City (Oxford University Press, 2010), which I am completing with Norval White, FAIA. For those who experienced DUMBO in those long-forgotten days of the 20th century, a visit today can be a bit of a shock. Back then, circa 1994, the place was deserted. Most neighborhood activity seemed to revolve around the now demolished Between the Bridges bar on York Street and within Rudolph Daus’s 1901 former tin can factory at 135 Plymouth Street. That beautiful Romanesque pile, with monumental brick arches, was headquarters for a carting company that noisily compacted garbage on the ground floor. (I am somewhat happy to report this aromatic activity is still taking place there; the neighborhood hasn’t completely given itself over to cappuccinos and Jacques Torres chocolates.) After a series of shootings in front of 135 Plymouth in the early 1990s a police cruiser was positioned there 24 hours a day. That’s when I first visited DUMBO; a classmate of mine had a sculpture studio in the building. I had trouble sleeping.

Had I fallen asleep then, in 1994, and slept for 15 years and woken up last Tuesday, I would have thought I was in the middle of a film set for some happy, romantic comedy. Cafés? Restaurants? Children? Playgrounds? Bookstores? Pet stores (”all dog sweaters on sale this week only”)? Where am I? I still get a profound feeling of amnesia no matter how often I go to DUMBO. There are actual people streaming to and from the previously deserted and terrifying York Street station! (One indication of how quickly DUMBO has changed is the fact that the last edition of the Guide, in 2000, barely mentions it, and then only as an aside within the Fulton Ferry section of the book.)

The Landmarks Commission designated DUMBO a historic district in 2007, and there are many notable industrial buildings in the neighborhood in addition to 135 Plymouth. The former Grand Union Tea Company on Jay Street (between Front and Water Streets) was designed and built in phases from 1896 to 1907 by Edward N. Stone, and features an intact mosaic in the floor at the Jay Street entrance. Louis E. Jallade designed the onetime Eskimo Pie Building, originally the Thomson Meter Company, at 100 Bridge Street (between York and Tillman Streets) in 1908. Its beautifully arched façade has glazed terra-cotta decoration and was possibly inspired by Auguste Perret’s 25 bis rue Franklin in Paris. The Gair buildings, all seven of them, are extraordinary early (1888-1908) reinforced-concrete lofts erected by Robert Gair, a pioneering entrepreneur in the corrugated box industry. The Gair buildings form a solid mass that defines much of DUMBO and makes it feel as if the neighborhood’s cobble-stoned streets are spaces carved from a single piece of stone. Recent buildings by Scarano Architects, Gruzen Samton, and CetraRuddy tower above the bridges and don’t fit in as well as the older industrial buildings. Lately, we’ve been calling the area RAMBO (Rising Above the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).

The High Line is Real

By Fran Leadon, AIA

http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/HighLine-COMBO.jpg
The High Line

On July 9 I went for a stroll on the High Line, from West 16th Street to Gansevoort Street. It was crowded on a sunny Thursday afternoon, and the people seemed to be divided into two groups: those who lounged casually about, reading or chatting as if the High Line had always been there, and those who seemed, like me, to be in a daze with dumbfounded expressions thinking, “I’m on the High Line. I’m actually on the High Line.” The long-awaited linear park has finally come to pass.

In preparing the new edition of the AIA Guide to New York City (Oxford University Press, 2010), Norval White, FAIA, and I have eagerly anticipated the completion of new projects (Atelier Jean Nouvel and Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners’ 100 Eleventh Avenue, Morphosis Architects’ Arthur Nerken School of Engineering at Cooper Union), but perhaps none so much as the High Line. I remember first seeing the High Line in the early 1990s when I was a student at the Yale School of Architecture. Back then, both the High Line and the area around it seemed like one of Anton Furst’s stage sets from the 1989 “Batman” movie. Far West Chelsea, circa 1992, was in a kind of suspended industrial time warp: beautiful and romantic but also decaying and crime-ridden. Exploring beautiful relics like the High Line was risky. Intrepid friends would scale the elevated railroad track and report that it was sublime, covered by wildflowers, but I was too cautious to try it.

The thing the High Line always had going for it was its strength. Designed to accept the weight of two freight trains, it was highly unlikely to fall down on its own. Thankfully, the sturdy structure stayed where it was, snaking in and out of old factories and warehouses from Gansevoort Street up to 34th Street. Abandoned in 1980, photographers, artists, and urban adventurers attracted to the beautiful desolation began describing it as a 1.45-mile-long elevated meadow, and visions of a linear park began to form in earnest during the 1990s. A community group, Friends of the High Line, ultimately saved the winding trestle through ceaseless lobbying and fundraising.

When the first plans for a High Line park were unveiled, I was, admittedly, a little nervous. I feared the master plan left too little of the actual trestle. The further the design by James Corner of Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro was refined, the more cautiously optimistic I became, and as I hiked around Gansevoort Market and Chelsea during the past year, shooting photos of the High Line in construction for the Guide, the more I liked what I was seeing. As a linear park, the new High Line is meticulously thoughtful, perhaps even a bit over-designed. Many of the original rails were preserved and re-presented as artifacts, and native plant species have been arranged in beds with considerable care. The trail bed is a series of interlocking concrete strips that seem to grow and dissolve as needed, occasionally curving upward to form a bench. There are wooden lounge chairs that roll on tracks, and a plunging amphitheater where the High Line briefly widens at 17th Street.

It’s all extremely well done, but the surprising thing is that the wonder of the High Line isn’t in the design work. It’s seeing a familiar landscape (Chelsea) from a new vantage point, above, beside, and through the neighboring buildings. It remains to be seen how the delicate details will endure trampling by millions of human feet. The High Line, inevitably worn and frayed by continuous use, may find its most natural and profound beauty 10 or 20 years from now.

How It Began

By Norval White, FAIA

http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/howitbegan.jpg (http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/howitbegan.jpg)
Convention edition cover (left); notes on the second edition for the third.

In the Fall of 1965, the AIANY Chapter, preparing for AIA’s 100th anniversary in 1967, called for proposals for a guidebook to NYC. Elliot Willensky, FAIA, and I were figuratively waiting at the doorstep, having talked of such a guide since we first met in the office of Lathrop Douglass in June 1955. We were commissioned to prepare a prototype sample that would serve to show advertisers how they could participate, front and center, at the convention. Chapter PR consultant Andrew Weil sold 80 ads that paid for out-of-pocket expenses, a secretary, photo processing, a graphic designer, mechanicals (pre-digital), and the printing of 10,000 copies given to every convention attendee. We were effectively, in the name of the Chapter, the publishers.

For that convention edition (and its duplicate trade edition, complete with ads that MacMillan found too expensive to remove) Elliot and I acted as authors of parts, editors of the whole. John Morris Dixon, FAIA, had a major role, covering much of Midtown Manhattan, Lincoln Square, and Grand Army Plaza/Prospect Park. Richard Dattner, FAIA, wrote Upper Manhattan; Roger Feinstein, Harlem and the Bronx; Mina Hamilton, Staten Island; Greenwich Village, Ann Douglas; Central Park, Henry Hope Reed and Sophia Duckworth. The balance was split between Elliot and me. But a horde of supporters in all editions added detail that none of us could have produced alone. Since 1966, when research on the first version of the Guide began, innumerable individuals have contributed information, ideas, comments, corrections, and considerable moral support.

Previous editions and reprintings have recognized their contributions in the acknowledgments. This fifth edition is a linear descendant of the original, self-published version feverishly prepared over a nine-month period for the 1967 AIA convention in NYC. Because its approach profoundly influenced subsequent updates of the Guide, it seems appropriate to credit once again those who helped the authors to set the first edition’s tone: writers John Morris Dixon, FAIA, Ann Douglass, Mina Hamilton, Roger Feinstein, Henry Hope Reed, Jr., Sophia Duckworth, and Richard Dattner, FAIA.

The second edition by MacMillan, and the third with Harcourt Brace were jointly rewritten and expanded by Elliot and myself, again with an expanded legion, upwards of 180 supporters, who contributed anything from a correction of punctuation to a suggestion for a new entry.

The 4th edition, with Crown, I did alone, as Elliot had tragically died at an early age in 1990. Elliot had been not only a friend and colleague for 45 years, but had served New York as a public servant — first as Deputy Administrator of Parks and Recreation under Mayor Lindsay; then, at the time of his death, both Borough Historian of Brooklyn and Vice Chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The fifth edition by White & Willensky and Fran Leadon, AIA, will appear Spring/Summer 2010 with Oxford University Press.

The City in Transition: The Bowery

By Fran Leadon, AIA

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(L-R): Bowery Poetry Club, New Museum, Fruit Stand at Bowery and Grand.

On Sunday, May 10, I set out to photograph the Bowery for the upcoming fifth edition of the AIA Guide to New York City (Oxford University Press, 2010). I had just re-read Low Life, Luc Sante’s 1991 social history of 19th-century Manhattan and was curious to walk the Bowery’s length, from Chatham Square in Chinatown north to Cooper Square, and see what had changed since the Guide’s last edition in 2000. I knew that the infamous old McGurk’s Suicide Hall had been torn down in favor of a new project by Arquitectonica, but I was curious to see what else was still there from the old days, and what was being built that was new and interesting.

De Bouwerie had originally been an Indian trail, then a bucolic lane winding through the farms, but it had become virtually synonymous with skid row by the 1850s, mythologized in comics and dime novels (and later in films) as a seedy district of flop houses, brothels, vaudeville theaters, and pawn shops. Today, little of the old skid row Bowery remains. The southern end of the Bowery is mostly discount jewelry outlets, Chinese jitneys (Fung Wah Bus at 139 Canal), and electronics stores. I passed a vacant lot at the corner of Hester Street, where the Music Palace Theater, reportedly designed by McKim, Mead & White, was recently demolished. Known in its later years as the Chuan Kung Theater, it was the last of the neighborhood’s Chinese language cinemas. Covered with sheet metal and murals, who knew a McKim, Mead & White building lurked underneath?

The Lighting District starts as the Bowery crosses Grand Street, and the Restaurant Supply District begins in earnest just north of Kenmare Street (Chairs! Tables! Stools! Dishes! Pots! Pans!). Colorful, wordy signs are the main feature here, but there are some architectural treasures as well, notably two landmark banks: Stanford White’s 1895 Bowery Savings Bank, just north of Grand, and Robert Maynicke’s 1898 Germania Bank, at Spring Street.

I began noticing more and more hipsters as I walked north, and new modern buildings began appearing in quick succession: Keith Strand’s skinny condo at 195 Bowery, SANAA’s stacked mesh New Museum, and the shiny glass boxes of Arquitectonica’s Avalon development on both sides of East Houston Street. In the midst of all the new glass and steel, I noticed the Bowery Mission, at 227, still soldiering on, helping the homeless since 1879.
Just to the east of Bowery and East 1st Street, surrounded by the Avalon development, I peeked into Extra Place, a notorious little alley, formerly cobble-stoned and garbage-strewn, now paved and cleaned up (but still empty). Extra Place is just outside the back door of what used to be CBGB’s, at 315 Bowery. That renowned club closed in 2006, and while the building is still there the energy is not. Across the street is the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in Henry Engelbert’s old Bond Street Savings Bank at 330 Bowery. (Much recent building behind the theater on Bond Street, but that is another story.)

Further north at East 3rd Street is the fritted-glass and steel Cooper Square Hotel, swelling at its middle, by Carlos Zapata, and finally the buildings of Cooper Union, including the main 1859 building by Frederick A. Peterson facing Cooper Square, and an exciting new building behind it by Morphosis, all peeling steel scrims, just nearing completion. At Cooper Square the Bowery disappears, splitting into Third and Fourth Avenues, so I caught the IRT at the Astor Place station, crowned by Rolf Ohlhausen, FAIA’s replica cast-iron kiosk.

Photographing the City

By Fran Leadon, AIA

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(L-R): Charles McKim’s University Club on Fifth Avenue at West 54th Street; Hong Kong Bank Building, Canal Street; Giorgio Cavaglieri’s Engine Co. 59, Ladder Co. 30, West 133rd Street; Former Forward Building, East Broadway.

Since last September my students and I have walked virtually every street in Manhattan. We’ve snapped 25,000 photos, visited just about every construction site in the city, poured over hundreds of architect’s websites, searched planning documents, and read miles of real estate blogs. It’s a huge project: we’re photographing new buildings and re-photographing old ones for the new AIA Guide to New York City, all 1,100 pages of it, one borough at a time.

Author Norval White, FAIA, (his original co-author Elliot Willensky, FAIA, died in 1990) needed someone to walk hundreds of miles of city streets, re-photograph everything from the fourth edition (Three Rivers Press, 2000), note significant changes (a favorite old café that’s gone under or a brownstone that’s bitten the dust), and to look through the peepholes at new construction sites and figure out what’s being built and if it’s notable enough for inclusion in the new Guide, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2010.

When White enlisted me as co-author, I knew that I would need a lot of help if we had a chance of meeting our publication deadline. It was his idea that I would lead a squadron of my eager students from the City College of New York School of Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture, fan out across the city, and (photographically speaking) wrestle Manhattan to the ground. I realized this was an opportunity to not only get the Guide done on time, but a unique new way to teach a class “in the field.” I hoped our perceptions of the city would change, as a succession of façades, gardens, streets, squares, statues, sidewalk clocks, signs, and people took up residence in our memories.

When I arrived for the first day of the fall semester, I discovered that the administration had, because of space constraints, given our classroom away to a seminar in construction technology. With no place to meet, I saw no reason why we couldn’t move our base of operations to the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. The Shack, designed by James Wines, was ideally suited as a place to launch our assault on the city. It provided everything a modern classroom requires: benches, trees, wireless Internet connection (so we could “skype” White and upload photos to our database), new coin-operated public toilets, and delicious hamburgers.

My students soon discovered this was a ton of work, time-consuming, physically tiring, rewarding but often frustrating: a doorman gets territorial (”no photos, no photos!”), a moving van blocks the perfect shot, the sun doesn’t cooperate. But the 14 students who toughed it out have been stellar, conquering Midtown (over 800 buildings!), the Upper West Side, and the Upper East Side last fall, and Harlem, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and the Village this spring. 25,000 photos later, we are scheduled to finish shooting Manhattan by May 1. The students have also been instrumental in reporting from the field, noting additions and demolitions, and more subtle changes (for example, a façade described as white stucco in the fourth edition has been painted bright yellow: ouch!)

I am constantly amazed at the quality of my student’s photos. Included here is a preview, in color, of a few of the best of my student’s shots from the new Guide.

The City in Transition: Gansevoort Market

By Fran Leadon, AIA

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Matthew Baird’s 829 Greenwich Street (left); Junya Ishigami’s Yamamoto boutique (right).

New York City has gone through tremendous changes since the last edition of the AIA Guide in 2000. The upcoming fifth edition (Oxford University Press, 2010) will reveal a city in transition: the aftermath of September 11, the Boom, the Bust, and the emergence of neighborhoods (Gansevoort Market, West Chelsea, DUMBO) that were barely even mentioned in the fourth edition.

The Guide’s fourth edition dedicated only one short paragraph to Gansevoort Market; it wasn’t really a neighborhood. In 2000, it was still very much the city’s gritty meat market, punctuated here and there by a hipster bar or a design studio. It was a world populated by butchers in blood-soaked smocks taking cigarette breaks on loading docks. The rusty, abandoned High Line snaked overhead. It was, according to the fourth edition, “busy, chaotic, earthy from before sunrise well into the day…empty, eerie, scary at night.”

For the fifth edition we have created an entire section devoted to Gansevoort, joining parts of the Village and Chelsea, and using the High Line as a thread that links the new neighborhood to the emergent enclave of West Chelsea. We are trying to describe Gansevoort at this particular moment of transition, when supermodels and butchers occupy the same space, side by side. Here are some excerpts from the upcoming edition:

Gansevoort Market, also known locally as the Meatpacking District, lies roughly between Ninth Avenue and the Hudson River, from Gansevoort Street north to 14th. From these wholesale meat markets came the beef for many of Manhattan’s restaurants and institutions. The cobblestone streets remain, but no longer run as deeply with the blood of sectioned livestock, although you may still encounter cattle carcasses hanging out to dry. Gentrification has been happening for at least a decade here, but the conversion of the High Line to a linear park promises to preserve its melancholy vistas while connecting the area to West Chelsea and spurring even more development.

829 Greenwich Street (house), bet. Horatio and Gansevoort Sts. 2005. Matthew Baird.

A small but uncompromising exercise in weight and weightlessness from the modernist Baird. Impossible to miss is the forty-foot high rusted steel “billboard” bolted to the facade. A funny take on privacy: the residents can peek out, barely. Don’t feel bad for them, though: the entire back of the building, not visible from the street, is glass. Baird’s billboard, emphasizing the vertical, works surprisingly well with Morris Adjmi’s horizontally-obsessed building next door at 40 Gansevoort.
Yamamoto (clothing boutique), 1 Gansevoort St. at crossing of W.13th & Hudson Sts. 2008. Junya Ishigami.

A drastic, but ingenious, approach to the adaptive re-use of old buildings. Japanese architect Ishigami has performed invasive but beautiful surgery on an existing brick shed, removing layers of green paint, punching big openings in the façade, and last but not least, slicing the building into two parts. One half is now a light-filled showroom and the other half provides storage and office space. The showroom gleams like a lantern at night, and comes to a razor-sharp point where Gansevoort and West 13th meet.

Writing the New AIA Guide

By Fran Leadon, AIA

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Leadon and White on Bleecker Street, January 30, 2000 (left); 40 Gansevoort Street (right).

The first edition of the AIA Guide to New York City was published on the occasion of the AIA’s annual convention, held in New York in 1967. That original version of the Guide, a slim 464 pages, was “feverishly prepared” by Norval White, FAIA, and Elliot Willensky, FAIA, and a team of contributors, including John Morris Dixon, FAIA, Ann Douglas, Mina Hamilton, Roger Feinstein, Henry Hope Reed, Jr., Sophia Duckworth, and Richard Dattner, FAIA. The Guide was all original field work: the team divided up the neighborhoods, hiked the streets, did the research, snapped the photos (thousands of them), and wrote the descriptions (”smart, vivid, funny, and opinionated,” according to the New York Times). It was true research and eyewitness reporting, covering all five boroughs, one church, school, row house, park, restaurant, and statue at a time.

For the second (1978) and third (1988) editions the collaboration continued between White and Willensky. White might write about Greenwich Village while Willensky wrote about Sheepshead Bay, and then they would swap for the following edition, revisiting each other’s territory and rewriting each other’s text. Willensky passed away in 1990, and the fourth edition (2000) was completed solo by White. My involvement in the Guide’s upcoming fifth edition (Oxford University Press, 2010) offered a chance for White to re-establish a true collaborative writing process, but a new mechanism for that collaboration had to be discovered, since White now lives in France and I live in Brooklyn. Sending a 1,200 page Word document back and forth was out of the question. Then, last summer, we discovered Google Docs.
The beauty of Google Docs is that our text resides on the Internet, where both of us can access it simultaneously. If one of us finds an interesting building we hadn’t noticed before, we post an initial description and then wait for the other to rewrite it. Many of the descriptions in the new Guide have been written equally by both of us, and rewritten so many times I can no longer tell which parts I wrote. Here are some examples from the new Guide in progress:

40 Gansevoort Street, SE corner of Greenwich Street. 2006. Morris Adjmi.

Gansevoort Market boasts unique vernacular architecture: block buildings with loading docks, canopies pendant over the sidewalk: their steel joists and translucent vinyl panels cabled to the facade. Here Adjmi, a disciple of the late, great Italian architect Aldo Rossi, attempts new canopies, using the same vocabulary.

Bar 89 (restaurant), 89 Mercer Street, between Spring and Broome Sts. 1995. Ogawa/Depardon.

89’s two stories of crisp steel and glass reveal a double height dining space (a mezzanine in the far corner). The skylight overhead, a parabola, washes the space with natural light, the curve of the bar repeating the trigonometry above.

Constructing the AIA Guide to New York City

By Fran Leadon, AIA

http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/k_leadon_article11.jpg (http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/k_leadon_article11.jpg)
Leadon’s dog-eared copy of the fourth edition of the AIA Guide to NYC, showing the many changes to the SoHo section (left). Leadon used a newspaper stand as a temporary desk while tracking down new construction sites in Tribeca (right).

Last spring Norval White, FAIA, asked me to co-author a new version of the AIA Guide to New York City. The fifth edition, the first new edition since 2000, will be published in 2010 by Oxford University Press. White, now living on a hilltop in the south of France, needed someone with time and energy to do the groundwork in New York. Every café, newsstand, cornice, mural, and stoop mentioned in the Guide would have to be re-visited, re-photographed, and reappraised, I told him I would be happy and honored to do it.

I remember first seeing the Guide when I was a graduate student at the Yale School of Architecture in the early 1990s. It was intimidating in its girth and weight, a book you couldn’t possibly read in less than five years, ridiculously ambitious in its scope. It included not only the physical facts of the built environment (the cupolas, pediments, gables, and mullions), but people and stories, too: the rivalries between long-dead architects, the unsuccessful fight for Penn Station, the hubris of Stanford White, the East Village tenement where the outlaw Butch Cassidy lived, the Upper East Side tenement where the Marx Brothers were born. What started in 1967 as a thin volume for an AIA convention, the Guide, tall and narrow, roughly brick-shaped, theoretically pocket-sized, has gradually become an epic poem.

Each edition has become both thicker and more astute in its appraisal of the city. The Guide explains things in layers. It tells the tale of just about every significant building on every block in each of the five boroughs: who designed it, when they designed it, why they designed it, in which style and with what materials, what was there before it, what is planned there in the immediate future, and what might have been ill-advisedly planned there at some point in the past, but (”happily” White would say) ended up as a future that never happened. Buildings, architects, and clients are generally treated by the Guide with the analytical respect of an archeologist as much as the razor edge of a critic. The writing, reduced to a prose more spare than Hemingway, is terse. “Prune and distill,” White tells me.

My involvement in the new edition represented an opportunity for White to re-establish a collaborative process with a co-author (founding co-author Elliot Willensky, FAIA, passed away in 1990 and the fourth edition was completed solo by White). One tradition of the Guide has been that it’s all eyewitness reporting: either White or Willensky personally visited and photographed each site. So I go out each day with a list of sites, camera in hand and good walking shoes on my feet. I check to see if the building is still there, jot down any alterations (additions, renovations, demolitions), and then upload the photos to our database. We’re completely re-writing the existing text and adding descriptions of significant new construction. One of us writes a new description, and the other re-writes it, back and forth.

In the coming year, I’ll offer a monthly preview of the new Guide in progress leading up to its publication in 2010, including excerpts from a revised SoHo section, a new Gansevoort Market section, and an expanded Brooklyn section.

http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/?cat=30

[BrooklynRider]

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America
by David von Drehle

From Publishers Weekly
It was a profitable business in a modern fireproof building heralded as a model of efficiency. Yet the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City became the deadliest workplace in American history when fire broke out on the premises on March 25, 1911. Within about 15 minutes the blaze killed 146 workers-most of them immigrant Jewish and Italian women in their teens and early 20s. Though most workers on the eighth and 10th floors escaped, those on the ninth floor were trapped behind a locked exit door. As the inferno spread, the trapped workers either burned to death inside the building or jumped to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Journalist Von Drehle (Lowest of the Dead: Inside Death Row and Deadlock: The Inside Story of America's Closest Election) recounts the disaster-the worst in New York City until September 11, 2001-in passionate detail. He explains the sociopolitical context in which the fire occurred and the subsequent successful push for industry reforms, but is at his best in his moment-by-moment account of the fire. He describes heaps of bodies on the sidewalk, rows of coffins at the makeshift morgue where relatives identified charred bodies by jewelry or other items, and the scandalous manslaughter trial at which the Triangle owners were acquitted of all charges stemming from the deaths. Von Drehle's engrossing account, which emphasizes the humanity of the victims and the theme of social justice, brings one of the pivotal and most shocking episodes of American labor history to life.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Von Drehle has embedded the intense, moving tale of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in a fascinating, meticulously documented account of a crucial period in U.S. history. In addition to using an impressive list of secondary sources, the author has drawn heavily on newspaper articles, author Leon Stine's interviews with survivors, and trial transcripts. In a short prologue, he provides a poignant account of stunned, grieving relatives trying to identify burned bodies. To show why the tragedy occurred, he then goes back two years to the beginning of the 1909 general strike. The stifling, dingy tenements and the horrific conditions of the factories where immigrant workers toiled for 84-hour workweeks are described in evocative detail. Stories of the hardships they left behind in Italy and Eastern Europe contribute to the portraits of the victims and villains. Readers unfamiliar with Tammany Hall, the Progressive movement, or the rise of trade unions benefit from clear, concise background information. The account of the fire, the investigation, and the trial are both heartbreaking and enraging. The courtroom drama of defense attorney Max Steuer brazenly defending the factory owners overshadows any modern comparison. After concluding with the announcement of the trial verdict, the author provides an epilogue covering the final years of the key figures. An appendix gives the first complete list of victims. Eight black-and-white photos are included.

[Alonzo-ny]

This (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Works-Anatomy-City-Kate-Ascher/dp/0143112708/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254848297&sr=8-1) book is an extremely in depth analysis of the city.

[Hof]

I haven't been this excited about getting my hands on the new AIA Guide--or anything, really for years--at least not since The Beatles stopped releasing new albums.

The 2000 edition has been one of my primary resources for understanding the architectual diversity in NYC, and it is my touchstone for information before and after I visit.
Before I visit, I'll spend some time perusing, and I'll decide "Yep, I'm gonna find THAT building, and this other one, and I'll look closer at this one...", and I wind up with a page of notes and twenty yellow sticky notes in the book.

Often, on my trips to The City, I'll roam around long enough to see a building--or a park, or a historical site that I never heard of, or whatever-- and I'll usually be able to find it in the AIA Guide once I get back to my room. ( the book is really too unwieldly to always carry around, although it does come with me often when I roam).
One day, I saw an unusual apartment building in the 70s, off Broadway. A few blocks later, I spied a used bookstore and I went in and found the AIA book, then I found the building. I put the book back and went back to the apartment, filled with new, instant knowledge of the place.
I await the new edition with heightened anticipation. I'm buying sticky notes in bulk.

I just recently got a copy of "New York City Landmarks", a 2009 publication of the NYC Landmarks Commission. It's got 450 pages and it's filled with photos. It describes in detail all the things that are landmarked around the 5 boroughs, and there are some very interesting studies of entire neighborhoods and Historic Districts that have been Landmarked. There are also pages devoted to lamp posts, off-Broadway theatres and how new buildings are integrated into older neighborhoods, among other trivia that only dedicated students of Things New York would obsess over and clearly understand.
...Bloomberg wrote the Foreward...

--Did I say lots of photos???

You bet, and maps too. It's almost a miniaturized version of the AIA Guide, just more specialized. I spent a rainy Sunday comparing all the AIA photos and text with the entries in the "Landmarks" book ( most are in both books, but there are some glaring omissions in both efforts as well) and it convinced me that the 2000 AIA edition has gotten WAY long in the tooth.

[Merry]

Book shines light on NYC’s underappreciated locales

Village author lives in landmarked home, champions local treasures

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512A18HMMVL._SL500_AA240_.jpg


By Paula Rosenberg

It’s fitting that Judith Stonehill lives in a historically protected house in the West Village. “New York’s Unique and Unexpected Places”— her latest book — hit the shelves last week. “The house was landmarked before the Village was,” Ms. Stonehill informed me as we sat down in her living room (with her daughter/collaborator Alexandra) to discuss her book — and her life as a longtime Village resident.

The book, published by Universe, highlights fifty lesser-known landmarks throughout the five boroughs. “The original idea was that some of the forty seven million visitors who come here every year would be intrigued and want to go beyond Midtown and Ground Zero, but in fact I’ve discovered that a lot of New Yorkers are just as interested and haven’t ever been to some of these places,” said Ms. Stonehill. She set out to write a book for “adventurers and dreamers.”

It was important that all of the locations in the book be close to public transportation. Half of the spots are located below 14th Street (such as Economy Candy, Merchant’s House Museum and Film Forum). “There could have been five hundred places,” said the author. “The hardest part was cutting back.” It was also important that every place mentioned be open to the public.

The majority of the stunning photographs that accompany Stonehill’s descriptions of the featured locations were taken by the author’s daughter, Alexandra. This is not their first mother and daughter collaboration. Alexandra also enjoys finding archival photographs from the city’s past. These photographs were used in her mother’s prior books: “Greenwich Village: A Guide to America’s Legendary Left Bank” and “Brooklyn: A Journey Through the City of Dreams.”

Alexandra is no stranger to the Village. She grew up in the home that her mother currently resides in and now lives in the East Village. Judith Stonehill was reminded of E. B. White’s quote on the three different types of New Yorkers: “the ones that are born here, the commuters, and those that came from somewhere else with a dream.” Ms. Stonehill, who moved here in 1960 from the Finger Lakes region with her husband — the late architect John Stonehill — falls into that last category.

The book documents a mix of museums, cultural centers, and family-owned shops that are not visited by throngs of people on a daily basis. Some of the highlighted spots are locations within a location. Judith pointed out that “Everyone has been to the New York Public Library, but many people have not been to the Map Room — which has an incredible collection.”

A number of green spaces were also deliberately featured. As Alexandra pointed out, “Many tourists think that the only green space in the city is Central Park.” Some of these outdoor areas include Battery Park City’s Irish Hunger Memorial, The Museum of Jewish Heritage’s Garden of Stones, and the Lower East Side’s Hua Mei Bird Garden.

In addition to forgotten treasures, the book also highlights some newer attractions. The mother and daughter team noted that Lower Manhattan’s Poets House, SoHo’s Museum of Chinese in America, and Washington Street’s High Line were only opened to the public after the book was sent to print.

The longtime Villagers also included some of their favorite local spots — such as the Gardens at St. Luke in the Fields and Three Lives & Company. On a mini-tour of both locations, Judith explained: “Many people walk by and think this is a private property.” It was easy to tell that the space is well cared for and a hidden refuge that would be enjoyable in all four seasons. When we entered Three Lives & Company, owner Toby Cox was delighted to see two of his favorite customers and provided the time and attention that one would never see at a franchise bookseller.

Of course there are other locations, not listed in the book, that the Stonehills frequent. Alexandra likes to go down to the piers and also enjoys the Strand Bookstore. “I think one could easily do fifty places in the Village,” Judith comments — clearly regretting that the room afforded to her within the context of one book meant some worthy gems didn’t make it into print.

More so then any particular spot, she loves the character of the neighborhood she’s called her own for over four decades. Stonehill has always been attracted to the color of Greenwich Village. “My husband thought of the city as one building and in general the colors are silver, and gold, and grey; but the Village is red. Rosy, brick red.”

Judith and Alexandra also reminisced about places in Gotham City that are now defunct. Judith misses some of the antique stores that used to line Bleecker Street. She also remembers the old candy store on West 11th, and a comic book store that her son, David, liked to visit as a kid. She still misses her favorite restaurant — Trattoria da Alfredo — which used to be on Hudson and Bank. Alexandra points out that not all change in the neighborhood over the years has been bad — noting how a lot of the new stores that have opened up in recent years try and include the neighborhood with gestures such as having candy ready for children Trick or Treating during Halloween. “It is easy to think about all the ones that are gone, but it’s also important to focus on what’s there.”

Judith Stonehill has always had an interest in preserving the city’s past and future. She has sat on the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation for years. In the past, she served as a vice-president for the South Street Seaport Museum and as the director of the Corporate Fund at Lincoln Center. She was also co-owner of New York Bound Bookshop — which was located at Rockefeller Center for over twenty years. She reminisced, “It was completely and obsessively about New York.” Alexandra was involved there too — having found over nine-hundred archival images of the city that were sold as prints. Judith pointed out that, “When Michael Graves designed [the New York Hotel] for Paris, all of the photographs were from our collection.” The store was also instrumental in bringing formerly out of print books on New York back to the market at prices most consumers could afford. This included Miroslav Sasek’s classic children’s book, “This Is New York.”

Appropriately, the first event for “New York’s Unique and Unexpected Places” was held at the New York City Fire Museum — one of the places mentioned in the book. At first, I was afraid the book party would be poorly attended. It was at that point I realized Judith and Alexandra’s friends and fans were gathered around the security guard’s 13-inch TV — attentively waiting for a local news feature on the book that was set to air. Once it did, the party truly started.

The Stonehills have upcoming book events on Thursday, October 15, from 6-8 p.m., at Bowne & Company (between Fulton and Bleecker Streets, at the South Street Seaport Museum) and on Wednesday, October 21, from 7-9 p.m., at Idlewild Books (12 West 19th Street, near Fifth Avenue).



http://www.thevillager.com/villager_337/bookshineslight.html
(http://www.amazon.com/New-Yorks-Unique-Unexpected-Places/dp/0789320118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255700252&sr=1-1)