Twenty Minutes in Manhattan

Author: Michael Sorkin
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 0865477582
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Every morning, the architect and writer Michael Sorkin walks downtown from his Greenwich Village apartment through Washington Square to his Tribeca office. Sorkin isn't in a hurry, and he never ignores his surroundings. Instead, he pays careful, close attention. And in Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, he explains what he sees, what he imagines, what he knows—giving us extraordinary access to the layers of history, the feats of engineering and artistry, and the intense social drama that take place along a simple twenty-minute walk.

What Goes Up

Author: Michael Sorkin
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786635151
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
A radical architect examines the changing fortunes of the contemporary city Michael Sorkin is one of the most forthright and engaging architectural writers in the world. In What Goes Up he takes to task the public officials, developers, “civic” organizations, and other heroes of big money, who have made of Sorkin’s beloved New York a city of glittering towers and increasing inequality. He unpacks not simply the forms and practices—from zoning and political deals to the finer points of architectural design—that shape cities today but also offers spirited advocacy for another kind of city, reimagined from the street up on a human scale, a home to sustainable, just, and fulfilling neighborhoods and public spaces. Informing his writing is a lifetime’s experience as an architect and urbanist. Sorkin writes of the joys and techniques of observing and inhabiting cities and buildings in order to both better understand and to more happily be in them. Sorkin has never been shy about naming names. He has been a scourge of design mediocrity and of the supine compliance of “starchitects,” who readily accede to the demands of greed and privilege. What Goes Up casts the net wide, as he directs his arguments to students, professionals, and urban citizens with vigor, expertise, respect, and barbed wit.

Supreme City

Author: Donald L. Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416550208
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 784

Book Description
An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment --

The Manhattan Nobody Knows

Author: William B. Helmreich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691166994
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
A unique walking guide to Manhattan, from the author of The New York Nobody Knows. --Amazon.com.

Gods of Manhattan

Author: Scott Mebus
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101200693
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Book Description
Thirteen-year-old New Yorker Rory Hennessy can see things no one else can. When a magician's trick opens his eyes to Mannahatta, Rory finds an amazing spirit city coexisting alongside modern-day Manhattan. A place where Indian sachems, warrior cockroaches, and papier-mƒch‚ children live, ruled by the immortal Gods of Manhattan - including Babe Ruth, Alexander Hamilton, and Peter Stuyvesant. But Rory's power to see Mannahatta brings danger, and he is pursued by enemies, chasing history and trying to free those who have been enslaved. And when he is given the chance to right Mannahatta's greatest wrong, seeing Mannahatta may not be a gift after all. . . .

City of Dreams

Author: Beverly Swerling
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743218450
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 594

Book Description
A sweeping epic of two families—one Dutch, one English—from the time when New Amsterdam was a raw and rowdy settlement, to the triumph of the Revolution, when New York became a new nation’s city of dreams. In 1661, Lucas Turner, a barber surgeon, and his sister, Sally, an apothecary, stagger off a small wooden ship after eleven weeks at sea. Bound to each other by blood and necessity, they aim to make a fresh start in the rough and rowdy Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam; but soon lust, betrayal, and murder will make them mortal enemies. In their struggle to survive in the New World, Lucas and Sally make choices that will burden their descendants with a legacy of secrets and retribution, and create a heritage that sets cousin against cousin, physician against surgeon, and, ultimately, patriot against Tory. In what will be the greatest city in the New World, the fortunes of these two families are inextricably entwined by blood and fire in an unforgettable American saga of pride and ambition, love and hate, and the becoming of the dream that is New York City.

Taming Manhattan

Author: Catherine McNeur
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674725093
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History VSNY Book Award, New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America Hornblower Award for a First Book, New York Society Library James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic With pigs roaming the streets and cows foraging in the Battery, antebellum Manhattan would have been unrecognizable to inhabitants of today’s sprawling metropolis. Fruits and vegetables came from small market gardens in the city, and manure piled high on streets and docks was gold to nearby farmers. But as Catherine McNeur reveals in this environmental history of Gotham, a battle to control the boundaries between city and country was already being waged, and the winners would take dramatic steps to outlaw New York’s wild side. “[A] fine book which make[s] a real contribution to urban biography.” —Joseph Rykwert, Times Literary Supplement “Tells an odd story in lively prose...The city McNeur depicts in Taming Manhattan is the pestiferous obverse of the belle epoque city of Henry James and Edith Wharton that sits comfortably in many imaginations...[Taming Manhattan] is a smart book that engages in the old fashioned business of trying to harvest lessons for the present from the past.” —Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times

All Over the Map

Author: Michael Sorkin
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844672204
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description
Robert Hughes once described Michael Sorkin as “unique in America––brave, principled, highly informed and fiercely funny.” All Over the Map confirms all of these superlatives as Sorkin assaults “the national security city, with its architecture of manufactured fear.”

The Address Book

Author: Deirdre Mask
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250134781
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Book Description
Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction | One of Time Magazines's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 | Longlisted for the 2020 Porchlight Business Book Awards "An entertaining quest to trace the origins and implications of the names of the roads on which we reside." —Sarah Vowell, The New York Times Book Review When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won’t get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class. In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, and how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany. The flipside of having an address is not having one, and we also see what that means for millions of people today, including those who live in the slums of Kolkata and on the streets of London. Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn’t—and why.

Report from Ground Zero

Author: Dennis Smith
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101213159
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
The tragic events of September 11, 2001, forever altered the American landscape, both figuratively and literally. Immediately after the jets struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center, Dennis Smith, a former firefighter, reported to Manhattan’s Ladder Co. 16 to volunteer in the rescue efforts. In the weeks that followed, Smith was present on the front lines, attending to the wounded, sifting through the wreckage, and mourning with New York’s devastated fire and police departments. This is Smith’s vivid account of the rescue efforts by the fire and police departments and emergency medical teams as they rushed to face a disaster that would claim thousands of lives. Smith takes readers inside the minds and lives of the rescuers at Ground Zero as he shares stories about these heroic individuals and the effect their loss had on their families and their companies. “It is,” says Smith, “the real and living history of the worst day in America since Pearl Harbor.” Written with drama and urgency, Report from Ground Zero honors the men and women who—in America’s darkest hours—redefined our understanding of courage.