The Intimate City: Walking New York

by Michael Kimmelman

Overview

“‘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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593298411
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/29/2022
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	241,893
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic of The New York Times. He was the paper’s chief art critic and, from Berlin, created the Abroad column, covering politics and culture across Europe and the Middle East. He has reported from more than forty countries and founded Headway, a nonprofit journalistic initiative focused on global challenges and paths to progress. A native New Yorker, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, he is the author of The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa and Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Mannahatta 1

Jackson Heights 13

Forest Hills 27

East River 41

Brooklyn 51

East Village 65

Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center 77

Rockefeller Center 89

Harlem 99

Greenwich Village 111

The Skyscrapers of Midtown, Part One 127

The Skyscrapers of Midtown, Part Two 137

42nd Street 149

Mott Haven and the South Bronx 161

Broadway 177

Museum Mile 187

The Brooklyn Bridge 199

The Financial District 213

Chinatown 223

Mentipathe 235

Acknowledgments 247

Photography Information 249

Credits 253

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/18/2022

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

‘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

"A surprisingly uplifting time capsule and a new kind of love letter to the city seen through the eyes of those who know it intimately."—Good Housekeeping

“New York City comes alive in this scintillating collection of conversations between New York Times architecture critic Kimmelman . . . An enchanting and lyrical montage of an ever-evolving city.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“A rich tapestry of architecture, urban living, and civic resilience . . . Throughout, the author and his guides never lose sight of the people who live and work in these communities. Fascinating historical facts abound . . . An important book for readers interested in understanding New York through its architecture.” —Kirkus

From the Publisher

09/01/2022

In 20 unnumbered chapters, New York Times architecture critic Kimmelman (Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere) extols the pleasures of walking and records exchanges in four of New York City's five boroughs (Staten Island is discussed only from a distance) with a constellation of urban specialists. The author pairs himself with experts for geological, topographical, and architectural explorations from Lower Manhattan's Whitehall Terminal to the Bronx. Motivated by the isolating effect of COVID and inspired by Myra Hess's consoling outdoor piano concerts during the air raids of World War II, Kimmelman characterizes his book as a collective diary, a mental atlas, and the work of an urban epicure (the flâneur). Complementary to Michael Sorkin's Twenty Minutes in Manhattan but less exclusively architectural in focus, the book's chapters each begin with a short history of the neighborhood and an introduction to Kimmelman's cicerone, or tour guide. VERDICT With interviews often meandering into the overly personal and with incidental-seeming uncaptioned photographs (their compelling views and dramatic cropping notwithstanding), this book would be more rewarding as a series of video tours.—Paul Glassman

Library Journal

2022-06-25
Twenty tours through New York City reveal a rich tapestry of architecture, urban living, and civic resilience.

New York Times architecture critic Kimmelman originally published 17 of these 20 essays in the Times between March and December 2020. “The walks would become my own way of coping with those first months of the pandemic,” he writes at the beginning of this lively book, which includes excellent photos. His tours around the city were led by architects, historians, and preservationists. Many were conducted virtually, but all can be strolled in person, book in hand. We get street-level views of the culturally diverse neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Forest Hills; "America's first commuter suburb," Brooklyn Heights; and "the fountainhead of American bohemia," Greenwich Village. Kimmelman also devotes tours to specific streets (42nd Street) and buildings (Rockefeller Center, “New York’s Depression-era version of the pyramids…the largest private construction project in America between the World Wars”). Throughout, the author and his guides never lose sight of the people who live and work in these communities. Fascinating historical facts abound. In each one of New York's Chinatowns, for example, there is a park where the elderly can go for “fresh air and ‘san san bu,’ leisurely walks.” The East Village still shows signs of the Yiddish Theatre District of the early 20th century. The National Registry listing for the Stonewall Inn, site of a famous gay uprising, was achieved using criteria drawn for Civil War battlefields. In Harlem, architect David Adjaye demonstrates how to read the district's layers of history, architecturally: "If we walk north, through Marcus Garvey Park, along 127th Street, you'll see what I mean—houses from the 1850s to the early 1920s, which go from Romantic Classicism to Art Deco, brownstone to stucco." Adjaye's words about Harlem apply to this entire book: "Architecture is about more than shelter, after all. It’s about doing something that gives people dignity, hope, a belief in the future.”

An important book for readers interested in understanding New York through its architecture.

Kirkus Reviews