Center of it all
A map is a handy tool, but it can also be a showcase for original ideas. Rebecca Solnit has spent the past few years demonstrating as much in a series of atlases devoted to great American cities. Her third, a collaboration with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, focu
Like the trilogy’s first two entries — “Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas” and “Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas” — the New York installment is eccentric and inspiring, a nimble work of social history told through colorful maps and corresponding essays. Together, Solnit, Jelly-Schapiro and a host of contributors — writers, artists, cartographers and data-crunchers — have come up with dozens of exciting new ways to think about the five boroughs.
“New York is a triumph of coexistence interrupted by people yelling at each other,” Solnit writes. Accordingly, this book is full of interesting juxtapositions.
A good example is the map titled “Harper’s and Harpooners,” which was designed by Molly Roy, the book’s lead cartographer. It highlights the role that Lower Manhattan played in whaling and publishing during the life of Herman Melville, “one of the few people foolhardy enough to try his luck at both enterprises,” novelist Paul La Farge writes in the accompanying essay.
An evocative blend of blue, aqua and turquoise, the map depicts important landmarks from the author’s varied working days. In 1839, Melville departed from a pier in the East River, starting “his life at sea on the St. Lawrence, bound for Liverpool,” the map notes. Twelve years later and just a few blocks away, Harper and Brothers published “Moby-Dick.” The novel, La Farge writes, garnered “famously bad reviews, and it sold poorly — but nowhere near as poorly as Melville’s next novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, which is about a young man who brings a great deal of suffering on himself by becoming a writer and moving to New York.”
I’ve lived in New York City for 13 years. It’s a cliche, but I’m still awed by the remarkable diversity, the amazing parks, the indie movie theaters, the subways, the food. And I’m still baffled that so many people spend so much time talking about real estate and price-persquare-foot. Do I love “Nonstop Metropolis” because its talented, imaginative writers and artists seem to have similar feelings? Sure. But at the same time, I think it’s a book that will speak to a reader who’s never spent a second here.
Who wouldn’t be fascinated by a map that charts the riots that occurred during the Civil War, the Vietnam era and the 1977 blackout? Or one that uses the city’s curvilinear subway routes as a means of locating the homes and workplaces of prominent New York women? And how about a map that estimates each neighborhood’s contribution to NYC’s global footprint? Or one that explains how financial institutions have succeeded in annexing the southern tip of Manhattan and, every so often, toppling the economy? As a notation on this latter map says, the “New York Stock Exchange founded in 1817 (and crashes in 1837, 1873, 1893, 1929, 2008).”
When New York is written and talked about, Manhattan and Brooklyn get the limelight. But “Nonstop Metropolis” is just as interested in the city’s other boroughs. There’s a map, for instance, that shows the correlation between an epidemic of fires in the Bronx in the 1970s and the rise of hiphop. In a complementary essay, philosopher Marshall Berman, who died in 2013, puts it succinctly: “Our first rappers know something that Hegel said modern men and women had to learn: they know how to ‘look the negative in the face and live with it.’ ” Another map focuses on the vibrant pluralism of Queens, where several hundred languages and dialects are spoken, among them Malayalam (a southern Indian language), Khoekhoe (Namibia’s national tongue), Amuzgo (southern Mexico) and Piedmontese (northern Italy).
The book’s most idiosyncratic map illustrates the influence that Staten Island’s Asian population had on the Wu-Tang Clan, the hip-hop group whose albums were infused with references to martial arts and Eastern religions. In bright yellows and reds, it shows the locations of the borough’s Chinese Scholar’s Garden, Shaolin Kung-Fu Temple and WuShu Martial Arts Center. RZA, Wu-Tang’s leader, lived near all three. Inspired by the local mores and the kung-fu movies he saw in Times Square, a 20something RZA didn’t “leave his basement” for three years in the 1990s, according to the map, “making all the Wu’s breakout albums and their beats.”
In an interview with Jelly-Schapiro, RZA talks about how New York’s least famous borough shaped his group’s singular worldview: “Our slang became isolated; we had our own thing.” But Staten Island didn’t have everything he was looking for as a young performer. Some specialty items could be only be found in certain Manhattan neighborhoods. “If you wanted gold teeth,” he says, “you had to go to Chinatown.”