Manhattan Unlocked (the blog) was put on hiatus in 2011 to build a repertoire of walking tours to tell the story of New York ••• almost 15 years and 6 walking tours later, the blog returns with a new look, and a better understanding of how the city developed.
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Gotham ♦ Edward G. Burrows & Mike Wallace ♦ 2001
[A] Pattern inscribed itself in the city’s skyline and streetscape. In boom times, speculative capital cascaded into real estate, generating frenzied building sprees. When the fever broke, office and housing construction halted abruptly. By the time the economy regathered its energies, a new generation of promoters and architects had come along, new cultural fashions were in vogue, new technologies and construction practices had materialized, and the latest spurt of building bore little resemblance to its predecessor. This spasmodic evolution of New York’s spatial geography allows us to ‘read’ the cityscape, rather as archaeologists decipher stacked layers of earth, each of which holds artifacts of successive eras. Here, remnants of the built environment offer clues to New York’s periodization.
Just Above My Head ♦ James Baldwin ♦ 1979
No other city is so spitefully incoherent.
Delirious New York ♦ Rem Koolhaas ♦ 1994
Manhattan is the 20th Century’s Rosetta Stone…. Not only are large parts of its surface occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the UN Building) and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall) but in addition each block is covered with several layers of phantom architecture in the form of past occupancies, aborted projects and popular fantasies that provide alternative images of the New York that exists. Especially between 1840 and 1920 a new culture (the Machine Age?) selected Manhattan as a laboratory: a mythical island where the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture could be pursued as a collective experiment in which the entire city became a factory of manmade experience, where the real and the natural cease to exist. Delirious New York is an interpretation of that Manhattan which gives its seemingly discontinuous—even irreconcilable—episodes a degree of consistency and coherence, an interpretation that intends to establish Manhattan as the product of an unformulated theory….
Bricks
People, and
Buildings through time
Patterns of Growth Accelerated after Consolidation
Every Use Moved Uptown
