The Intimate City
Walking New York
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“‘The Intimate City’ is a joyful miscellany of people seeing things in the urban landscape, the streets alive with remembrances and ideas even when those streets are relatively empty of people.”—Robert Sullivan, New York Times Book Review
From the New York Times architecture critic, his celebrated walking tours of New York City, now expanded, covering four of the five boroughs and some 540 million years of history, accompanied by some of the people who know it best
As New York came to a halt with COVID, Michael Kimmelman composed an email to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk. Wherever they liked, he wrote—preferably someplace meaningful to them, someplace that illuminated the city and what they loved about it. At first, the goal was distraction. At a scary moment when everything seemed uncertain, walking around New York served as a reminder of all the ways the city was still a rock, joy, and inspiration. What began with a lighthearted trip to explore Broadway’s shuttered theater district and a stroll along Museum Mile when the museums were closed soon took on a much larger meaning and ambition. These intimate, funny, richly detailed conversations between Kimmelman and his companions became anchors for millions of Times readers during the pandemic. The walks unpacked the essence of urban life and its social fabric—the history, plans, laws, feats of structural engineering, architectural highlights, and everyday realities that make up a place Kimmelman calls “humanity’s greatest achievement.”
Filled with stunning photographs documenting the city during the era of COVID, The Intimate City is the ultimate insider’s guide. The book includes new walks through LGBTQ Greenwich Village, through Forest Hills, Queens, and Mott Haven, in the Bronx. All the walks can be walked, or just be read for pleasure, by know-it-all New Yorkers or anyone else. They take readers back to an age when Times Square was still a beaver pond and Yankee Stadium a salt marsh; across the Brooklyn Bridge, for green tea ice cream in Chinatown, for momos and samosas in Jackson Heights, to explore historic Black churches in Harlem and midcentury Mad Men skyscrapers on Park Avenue. A kaleidoscopic portrait of an enduring metropolis, The Intimate City reveals why New York, despite COVID and a long history of other calamities, continues to inspire and to mean so much to those who call it home and to countless others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York City comes alive in this scintillating collection of conversations between New York Times architecture critic Kimmelman (The Accidental Masterpiece) and architects, historians, artists, and others as they go on walking tours of 19 neighborhoods. The author and his interlocutors stroll through the bustling immigrant communities of Jackson Heights, Queens; visit the Stonewall Bar and other gay landmarks in Greenwich Village; imagine the ancient forests and streams of the pre-European "ecological wonderland" that was once the Bronx; coo over Broadway theaters; crane their necks at Midtown skyscrapers; and peer down at the brickwork of an Upper East Side street. Illustrated with vibrant color photos, Kimmelman's loose-jointed text and dialogues oscillate between beguiling lore—Sands Street "used to be a dense, vibrant, diverse street teeming with sailors... packed with stores, barber shops, cafés, bars, restaurants, gambling dens, tattoo parlors, and brothels"—and piquant evocations of the New Yorkish soul ("I would join my father to check in on his surgical patients at his hospital on 14th Street before he and I meandered slowly back through the Village streets, Dad musing on his days traveling with the Freedom Riders, dreams for a communist future, and whether the Times was run by the CIA"). The result is an enchanting and lyrical montage of an ever-evolving city.
