When the City Went Still

It’s publishing season. The books are arriving at the traditional height of the fall deluge, but this year feels slightly different. We’re two and a half years removed from the great global lockdown, those days, weeks, and months when everything went still. That grim time seems strangely distant now, although it wasn’t so long ago. Still, we’re in a different place, however tenuously perched. In my little corner of the world, I’ve noticed a discernible wave of what I would call pandemic-induced tomes. This new publishing category has two subgenres. Books written (in some cases, finally written) because of Covid-19, forged as exercises in mental health. And subgenre two, a slightly smaller sample size, I think, are books written in direct response to the pandemic itself, texts that grapple with the larger meaning of the event.

Michael Kimmelman’s new release, The Intimate City: Walking New York, manages to deftly straddle both genres. The book is a compilation of conversations the New York Times architecture critic had during walks he took with notable New Yorkers in the early days of the pandemic, as death rates were spiraling and the refrigeration units had begun to appear on streets. People who could afford to escape had largely done so. Office towers stood empty. The subways carried essential workers and virtually no one else. The pundits weighed in as usual: Cities faced an existential threat; “density” was over; the suburbs were ascendant; New York was probably doomed. Much of this chatter was nonsense but, given the unprecedented circumstances, understandable nonsense. Who knew? The long-term prospects for the city seemed as grim as anytime since the 1970s (when I moved here, thrilled to be living at the center of the universe— garbage, crime, and dog shit be damned). In an attempt to maintain his sanity and sense of purpose, Kimmelman sent out an email to architects, designers, historians, and writers, inviting them to go for a walk in an area of the city that was meaningful to them.

Many potential tour guides agreed. From early April to early December of 2020, Kimmelman took seventeen walks in four boroughs (skipping Staten Island, the auto-centered enclave located off the coast of New Jersey). Seven of them were with notable architects. He strolled through an empty theater district with David Rockwell; reminisced with (NYRA sponsors) Tod Williams and Billie Tsien about living atop Carnegie Hall; toured Harlem with David Adjaye; roamed the canyons of Midtown Manhattan with Annabelle Selldorf; traipsed through a ghostly financial district with Claire Weisz; crossed the Brooklyn Bridge with Marian Weiss and Michael Manfredi; walked the East River Esplanade with Deborah Berke. They were strange walks—it was an unavoidably bizarre moment—the participants masked and socially distant, walking empty streets, the city suddenly an intricately exposed backdrop, full of layers, a stage set without actors. Yet they were oddly optimistic in tone and almost historical in sweep. (One of them, with Eric W. Sanderson, a senior conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Conservations Society, envisioned the island of Manhattan in 1609, a bucolic paradise inhabited by the Lenape, on the day when Henry Hudson’s ship arrived.) Kimmelman’s walks took the long view—and seemed to imply that while the present moment was fraught, the city was likely to survive it, as it had other perilous moments, including another pandemic, in 1918.

When the Times started publishing the walks in the spring of 2020, I was still living in New Orleans, where I had moved in 2011 after 34 years in New York. Prior to the pandemic, I had visited the city often and always left feeling that it was doing just fine without me. Now, barred from travel, frightened like everyone else, locked down in New Orleans (the world’s most convivial city, caged like a grounded teenager), fourteen hundred miles removed, I wasn’t so sure. I’d been around for 9/11, but during that tragedy, we’d had each other. We were in a state of shock, but we weren’t alone. Pundits then were quick to (very incorrectly, as it turned out) predict the End of Tall Buildings, but most New Yorkers don’t really care about tall buildings and could easily live without them. No, the pandemic was an even graver threat. The very idea of New York felt under attack. A city based on random and serendipitous interactions suddenly became the epicenter of an exploding health emergency that required people to stay isolated. Even if you’d never stepped foot in one of those glorious theaters, how do you contemplate a New York without Broadway? At some point—between reading the fortieth tedious version of the New York–Is–Doomed story, watching the intense and exuberant George Floyd street demonstrations, our son abruptly ending a phone conversation one night because he had to grab his pot and spoon to join neighbors in a salute to first responders, and the spontaneous eruptions of pure joy post-election—my wife and I started to feel the stirrings of an unfamiliar emotion: homesickness. If New York was going down, we thought, we wanted to go down with it. Maria began calling the city “the Mother Ship.”

But New York won’t go down. Its raw, obstinate energy, despite the still empty office towers, huge budget deficits, spiking crime, rising rents, dirtier streets, homelessness, glaring income inequality, and rising seas, courses like a river through Kimmelman’s book. I’ve been back for a year and, like any good New Yorker, obviously have a litany of complaints: I hate the supertalls on Billionaire’s Row. (How on earth did they combine such extreme height and extreme banality?) I hate the city’s ambient noise, which is literally ear shattering. (A doctor once famously told Lou Reed that his hearing was “pretty good—for a New Yorker.”) I hate the disappearance of my neighborhood deli. (They sold out to a developer who’s building thirty stories directly across the street.) I hate that our streets still prioritize the movement of vehicles over the safety and ease of people. (I live in fear of getting run over by the deliverymen on battery-powered bicycles, riding at hellish speeds, in the bike lanes—and sometimes even on the sidewalk!) I hate the incoherent bluster of Eric Adams. I hate that hedge funds are buying up rental properties and jacking up the rents. (Haven’t they ruined enough?) And I especially hate the god-awful plans for Penn Station, the rezoning of the surrounding area, and the use of Robert Moses–like eminent domain to clear a path for supertalls that the city doesn’t even need. (I would love to hear Kimmelman, the Architecture Critic, weigh in here, before the heist is complete.) In other words, I was away for ten years, and nothing and everything changed. It’s the perpetual lament of longtime residents and why the designation of “best era in New York” is always the New York of your youth. Unless you’re young and have no point of comparison, it’s rarely now.

When the walks first appeared in the Times, they were accompanied by an excellent array of haunting photographs of an empty New York. For the book, Kimmelman has added three walks: Greenwich Village, where he grew up; the South Bronx; and Forest Hills. Revisiting the walks in book form, more than a year and half after the darkest days of the pandemic, isn’t as emotionally powerful. In fairness, there’s no way it could be. The static and linear format of books imposes an order that the individual walks can’t deliver. Since the walks are essentially twenty chapters all written in the same format, the reading experience feels somewhat muted and repetitive. It reads like a collection of short stories with similar plotlines. The guides and neighborhoods change, but the format and tone remain constant. After reading the book from front to back, like a dutiful book reviewer, I realized the experience might have been every bit as engaging if I’d jumped around, picking a favorite (or, just as well, unfamiliar) neighborhood and mixing up the order. The walks work well as discrete objects because the guides are knowledgeable and articulate, the introductions uniformly well written, and the questions by Kimmelman sharp and companionable (although he occasionally starts to sound like an overly informed tour guide on the Circle Line: “The New York Coliseum, a brick fortresslike Robert Moses extravaganza from the 1950s, now gone and unmourned, which served as a convention center, with an office tower attached. Replaced, ultimately, by the huge, glassy high-end mall by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill originally christened the Time Warner Center”). Though much thought was likely given to the order of the walks, they don’t build to a climax or a conclusion— they just can’t, it’s a compilation. Each one simply ends, and the next one begins.

But the book’s underlying message— how the city of today that we both love and hate is the product of the ingenuity, struggle, and brutalities of the past—is powerful and instructive. New York has never been an easy city to live in. You don’t move here or stay here for any period of time to have an easy life. All of the clichés—all of your mother’s fears—have an element of truth to them. All of us pay a steep cover charge just to enter. And for what? There are more architecturally distinguished cities. More beautiful cities. More civilized cities. In Kimmelman’s walk with Rockwell, the Tony Award–winning architect spends nearly as much time talking about the relationships he’s made inside the theaters as he does about those amazing buildings themselves. They’re incomplete without people. We come to New York—we stay here—for some heightened level of engagement. “The philosopher Immanuel Kant associated human cosmopolitanism with hospitality and a common understanding that all human beings are equal members of a universal community with a shared right of humanity,” Kimmelman writes in the book’s introduction. “By this definition, New York City might just be humanity’s greatest achievement.” On my best days in the city, when I’m not whining about the disappearance of another piece of my past, I’m inclined to agree with him.