Archive by Tag
New York City
“Weegee: Murder Is My Business”
An excerpt from and link to my review of “Weegee: Murder Is My Business,” an exhibition at the International Center of Photography.
“The Greatest Grid”
An excerpt from my review of “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” on view at the Museum of the City of New York.
“Jill Freedman: Street Cops, 1978-81″
In a city troubled by crimes both petty and spectacular, photographer Jill Freedman sought to counter the largely negative opinion of cops on the beat, to humanize the men and women behind the badge.
short take
Stanley Greenberg
Urban Omnibus has published an interview with Stanley Greenberg, whose “photography explores hidden systems, infrastructures and technologies, both state-of-the-art and antiquated. New York City’s unseen workings, the region’s complex water systems, architecture mid-construction, physics labs, telescopes and a decommissioned dam have all been the subject of Greenberg’s careful eye.” A slideshow of Greenberg’s photographs accompanies [...]
short take
Michael Greenberg
For several months I have read, in a fugitive manner, Michael Greenberg’s essay collection Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life. A compilation of roughly thousand-word essays he has published in the Times Literary Supplement, the book, so far as I can tell, amounts to a haphazard index of New York, a careful and sympathetic accounting [...]
David M. Henkin, City Reading
David M. Henkin’s City Reading (Columbia), the last book I read in 2009, comes close to my current ideal of the historian’s first book, offering a novel and ambitious argument within well-defined parameters.
short take
STACKD
Designer Sidney Blank created STACKD, a website that allows registered users to get in touch with other tenants in their office building, when his design company moved into a new twenty-story building on 28th Street in Manhattan. He describes the project at Urban Omnibus: “On a map, it shows which buildings belong to the network. [...]
Interview: Michael Sorkin
Michael Sorkin is a New York–based architect, urban planner, educator, and the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Variations on a Theme Park (1991), Exquisite Corpse (1994), and After the World Trade Center (2002). His latest book, which examines the history and changing face of New York through the lens of [...]
Interview: William Chapman Sharpe
William Chapman Sharpe, professor of English at Barnard College in New York City, is the author of Unreal Cities (1990) and coeditor of Visions of the Modern City (1983). His new book, New York Nocturne (2008), examines images of the city after dark in literature, painting, and photography from 1850 to 1950. To get a [...]
