Guides to Gotham

I'm headed on a family vacation soon to New York City, and on a bit of a whim, I picked up A Book Lover's Guide to New York. I am so glad I did. Cleo Le-Tan covers the city from the Bronx to Brooklyn, with landmarks, bookshops, and libraries(!) of interest to anyone of a bookish bent. Also, there are interviews with everyone from Otto Penzler to Gay Talese to the Chief Branch Library Officer for the New York Public Library. Lavishly illustrated by Le-Tan's brother, Pierre, this book is meant to be browsed depending on location. Staying with this theme, I have some other guides to NYC that you might not find next to Lonely Planet.

Roz Chast, native Brooklynite and iconic New Yorker cartoonist, has written a love letter to Manhattan: Going Into Town. Along with the requisite witty illustrations, there's great advice (want to avoid the crowds at museums? Go during the holidays) and observations. Originally written as a handbook for her college-bound daughter, this paean to Gotham is good for armchair travelers as well as the knowledgeable tourist.

In Walking New York, Steven Miller writes of authors who have walked New York's streets from Charles Dickens (slumming it in Five Points, naturally) to Colson Whitehead. Miller quotes these writers extensively on their impressions of the city and the experience of being a pedestrian in it while also managing to set it all in context.

Sanna Feirstein, a docent at the New York Historical Society, has written guidebook with history titled Naming New York. If you wonder how Wall Street got its name or who the Stuyvesants were and why anyone would want to name a high school, a square, etc. after them, this is your book. Friendly in tone and full of historical illustrations, Naming New York wears its erudition lightly.

Forgotten New York is Kevin Walsh's guide to the unusual in Manhattan, complete with subway and walking directions. If you're looking for streets that still have gaslight or just an obscure landmark, this book will get you there and fill you in on the history.

Nik Cohn's The Heart of the World is a bit of a historical document, but it is a guide to a lost world. Cohn strolls up Broadway in the early 1990's with a Soviet emigre and a sex worker as tour operators. While Midtown Manhattan has been thoroughly Disneyfied, anyone who's heard tales of what it used to be will find this fascinating.

When Ann Devlin, author Pete Hamill's mother, compares Manhattan to Oz, it sticks with him. So in Downtown, Hamill writes about his favorite place on earth: the outsize personalities, volatile politics, and stunning buildings that made Gotham what it is. This will give you more information on what you see on the island than Fodor's, with a journalist's ability to put you in the action of past events.

Manhattan is an island, and that means it has a Waterfront, which Phillip Lopate attempts to circumnavigate on foot in his incisive guide. Once again, history and architecture as well as anthropology are explored in an area that most tourists, and even New Yorkers, don't give much thought outside of the Brooklyn Bridge and Ellis Island. 

Gwen Kinkead is considered a barbarian in Chinatown, but with the help of a translator, she manages to get inside the largest Chinese community outside China. Kinkead documents the crime, the aspirations, and the cultural cohesion in this nation within a nation at the end of the last century.

There are lots of other books on New York City, but there's only so much room in this blog. What are your favorites?