When I started my first job in journalism, at the architecture and design magazine Metropolis, I was driven by my own ignorance to read compulsively about the field. Beyond the survey courses I’d endured in college, I knew nothing. So I pored over monographs, and studied Ada Louise Huxtable’s work and the marvelous collection of Michael Sorkin’s Village Voice columns from the 1980s. Both of these critics understood and appreciated aesthetics, but also pressed into deeper issues of how people live and interact in cities. Ultimately, this is what interested me, and it opened up a whole world of books. Jane Jacobs’s “Death and Life of Great American Cities†and Robert Caro’s “Power Broker†are among the canonical texts that hardly need further endorsement. Here are a few of the others that left strong impressions:
Chicago has inspired many of my favorite books, including Mike Royko’s “Boss,†about the legendary Mayor Richard Daley, and Richard Cahan’s “They All Fall Down,†the tragic tale of Richard Nickel, an amateur architectural photographer who battled to save historic buildings from Daley’s wrecking crews. But “Nature’s Metropolis,†William Cronon’s sweeping ecologically oriented history of the city, has the broadest shoulders of all. Though a little repetitive and not the most fluidly written, “Nature’s Metropolis†changed the way I see cities. It explains, with memorable detail and sharp analysis, how the entire Midwest â€" the vast farmlands and forests, the buffalo-filled plains â€" was thrust into the service ! of Chicago’s voracious commodities markets. Provincial New Yorker that I am, I had no idea that timber was transported in rivers, and that logjams could be miles long and had to be broken up with dynamite. I briefly aspired to write a book that looked at New York and Wall Street through the same lens, but now I just wish that somebody else would do that and I could read it.
“The Algiers Motel Incident,†by John Hersey, is a spare, wrenching account of the killing of three black men by Detroit police officers during the 1967 riot. I am embarrassed for the schools that educated me that until I read this book, a couple of years after college, I did not remotely grasp the severity of the urban riots of the late 190s. I was truly riveted (and horrified) by Hersey’s reporting, though I gather it was considered hasty and prejudicial by some critics. Reviewing it for The Times on July 7, 1968, Robert Conot concluded: “Mr. Hersey’s is a major talent whose overall reputation will no more suffer from this minor disaster than Beethoven’s did from the ‘Battle Symphony.’ †If this is what gets called a minor disaster, we should all be lucky enough to have one. By the way, it is worth noting that although Hersey leaves little doubt as to the guilt of the officers, none went to prison.
Growing up in Manhattan, I regarded the pre-war apartment towers of the Upper East and Upper West sides as natural formations, as if carved out of rock by glaciers. They looked like they’d always been there. Well, “New York, New York,†by Elizabeth Hawes, elegantly explains what really happened. Through the first half of the 19th century, wealthy New Yorkers lived in private houses. To them, writes Ms. Hawes, “the idea of ‘cohabitation’ was a shocking, even immoral proposition, for it offered no more privacy or propriety than the tenements inhabited by the poor.†But as forward-thinking developers started erecting palaces like the Dakota and the Ansonia (which had a fountain in the lobby with live seals), well, it was obvious that they offered a few advantages over tenements. And the high-rise Manhattan that we love (and sometimes don’t) rapidly took shape, a great deal faster than a glacier.
Hugo Lindgren is the editor of The New York Times Magazine.
