On the somewhat improbable occasion of New York Review of Architecture’s fiftieth issue, we present our first-ever guide to New York City: an eccentric, emphatically incomplete survey of our five bountiful boroughs—with detours to Governors Island and Weehawken, New Jersey—shaped not by consensus but by curiosity, obsession, and affection.
The project takes its cue from the democratic effort of the Federal Writers’ Project’s New York City Guide (1939), which documented an interwar metropolis teeming with bricky texture and cosmopolitan contradiction. Published during the Depression under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, the gazetteer consciously endeavored to “indicate the human character of the city.” In that spirit, we invited contributors to illuminate places of significance—be that architectural, historical, cultural, or personal—off the well-trodden path of canonized skyscrapers and touristic landmarks. Points of interest vary: from Gilded Age ghosts to New Deal relics, leafy commons to infrastructural oddments, parklike public housing projects to bracingly modernist houses of worship.
We started with a neat premise—fifty entries for a fiftieth issue. Faced with an embarrassment of riches, we let the compendium grow. What began as an insert soon exceeded the bounds of
the issue itself, and printing constraints obliged us to spin it
off as a breakaway Baedeker. On the cover, our publication’s murine ambassador plays the part of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the mercenary musician of Westphalian legend who used his enchanter’s flute to lure away the town’s vermin for payment. Madelon Vriesendorp’s illustration fractures the fairy tale: Rather than orchestrate a medieval precursor to modern municipal pest control, our squeaky cicerone leads a sprightly parade of so-called background buildings along FDR Drive, coaxing New York’s overlooked architecture out of the shadows, and puckishly inviting us to see our city askew.
Penn South. Pete Gamlen
Featuring contributions from…
Amale Andraos, Andy Battle, Justin Beal, Barry Bergdoll, James Andrew Billingsley, Jake Bittle, Tei Carpenter, Phil Coldiron, Catherine Quan Damman, Nicholas Dames, Justin Davidson, Ben Davis, Marianela D’Aprile, Michael Abel Deng, Clare Fentress, David Gissen, Paul Goldberger, Matthew Shen Goodman, Vivian Gornick, A. S. Hamrah, Zack Hatfield, Christopher Hawthorne, Wonne Ickx, Florian Idenburg, Karrie Jacobs, Cheyenne Julien, Zain Khalid, Jonathan Kirschenfeld, Alex Kitnick, Jaffer Kolb, Mark Krotov, Alexandra Lange, Jonathan Lethem, Monxo López, Peter L’Official, Dean Majd, Whitney Mallett, Ann Manov, Samuel Medina, Samuel Medina, Mariana Mogilevich, Thomas de Monchaux, Jacob R. Moore, P. E. Moskowitz, Michael Nicholas, Andreas Petrossiants, Gail Radford, Greta Rainbow, Enrique Ramirez, Adam Rolston, Marco Roth, Dan Mahboubian Rosen, Lucy Sante, Sarah Schulman, Eric Schwartau, Lytle Shaw, Samuel Stein, Benjamin Swett, Jonathan Tarleton, Leila Taylor, Aaron Timms, Frampton Tolbert, Peter Trachtenberg, Ian Volner, Elvia Wilk, James Wines, Audrey Wollen, Dan Wood, Daniel Wortel-London, Chloe Wyma, and Sharon Zukin.
Astoria Skate Park. Pete Gamlen
“Like all good things—life on earth, for starters—it began as a swamp.”
—Audrey Wollen
“Tucked underneath the double-decker of the Queensboro Bridge at 59th Street and First Avenue is the most glorious Trader Joe’s there ever was.”
—Tei Carpenter
“Moses’s plan had his characteristic mixture of grandiosity and corner cutting, but it left behind, as a grace note, oases for children.”
—Nicholas Dames
“The Angelika is Manhattan’s most disparaged movie theater, and for that reason it is, to me, also its most romantic.”
—A. S. Hamrah
“Flâneuses beware.”
—Alexandra Lange
“Perhaps the Arnold Constable Building is more goth than Gothic. Joy Division on top and New Order below.”
—Leila Taylor
“The skeletons are still standing, piles of steel and old plush toys, a man relieving himself into them.”
—Zain Khalid
“The story of Straus Park is a New York epic, a tale of immigrant tycoons, genteel Upper West Siders, technological hubris, true love, and a doomed supermodel.”
—Justin Davidson
“If you want to experience world-class human drama, there’s no better place in the city.”
—James Wines
“If you come on the right day in early summer (full or new moon is best), you can see big piles of exuberant horseshoe crabs crawling all over each other in a festival of reproduction.”
—James Andrew Billingsley
“This is where New York ends, and America begins.”
—Aaron Timms
Russian Diplomatic Mission. Pete Gamlen
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