Manhattan Unlocked, the blog, was put on hiatus in 2011 to build a repertoire of walking tours to tell the story of New York City on the Island of Manhattan  • • •  almost 15 years and 6 walking tours later, the blog relaunched in January 2025, and perhaps prematurely for being a first draft, unorganized first attempt. Hopefully things have been righted.

A 6-post relaunch series gives the 30,000 foot view of history.

A 3-post series, The Vortex and the Palimpsest, offers ways of thinking about the city (parts of this series are still under construction).

I hope to begin posting regular content again soon.     

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Manhattan Unlocked stands on the shoulders of countless writers, historians and tour guides.  It is informed by New York’s social, cultural, commercial, transit, and architectural past, and affixes history to the island’s geography and the grid.

It is an effort inspired by some of New York’s seminal writers, historians and visionaries, and 25 years of skating the most incredible asphalted-over island on Earth…

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….

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Bricks

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People, and

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Buildings through time

A city street with tall buildings and traffic lights.

Six Principles of New York City’s Growth

  1. Patterns of Growth Accelerated after Consolidation

  2. It’s Building Use and Technology, Not Style
  3. Bigger Buildings Replaced Smaller Ones
  4. City Hall was the Epicenter of Growth
  5. Development Followed Transit

  6. Every Use Moved Uptown

A blue and white building with fire escapes on the side of it.
A green church steeple with a cross on top of it.
A door that is very old and has graffiti on it.
A seal of the state of new york
A statue of a man in gold sitting on top of an ice rink.