Twenty Minutes in Manhattan

Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is an account of the author’s daily walk to work from his Greenwich Village home to a Tribeca studio. From reaktionbooks:

Over the course of more than fifteen years, architect and critic Michael Sorkin has taken an almost daily twenty-minute walk from his apartment near Washington Square in New York’s Greenwich Village to his architecture studio further downtown in Tribeca. This walk has afforded abundant opportunities for Sorkin to reflect on the ongoing transformation of the neighbourhoods through which he passes. Inspired by events both mundane and monumental, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan unearths a network of relationships between the physical and the social city.

Here’s a chapter listing:

The Stairs
The Stoop
The Block
Washington Square
LaGuardia Place
Soho
Canal Street
Tribeca
145 Hudson Street
Alternative Routes
Espri d’Escalier

Robert Campbell, the architecture critic for the Boston Globe, says of the book:

Not since the great Jane Jacobs has there been a book this good about the day-to-day life of New York. Sorkin writes like an American Montaigne, riffing freely off his personal experience (sometimes happy, sometimes frustrating) to arrive at general insights about New York and about cities everywhere.

Sounds great!

• architecture
• books
• cities
• Michael Sorkin
• NYC