Review: 'The Intimate City,' by Michael Kimmelman

If you were in the next room while I was reading this book, you might have heard me emitting a series of exclamations: Wow! Huh? Hmm. Really?

Michael Kimmelman's "Intimate City: Walking New York" — a collection of dialogues from walks taken in New York City with urban historical and cultural experts during and after the pandemic, modeled after a series of public concerts given in World War II London during the Blitz to uplift traumatized citizens — has an eye-opening factoid or anecdote in practically every sentence.

These facts are not just idle trivia; the pieces of information Kimmelman disburses have narratives behind them. Did you know, for instance, that the Mafia owned many of the gay bars in New York in the 1960s? Did you know that when Rockefeller Center was being built, the building's developers rented out one floor of the building for $1 a year to the United States Passport Agency because of all the foot traffic the agency could bring to other businesses in the building?

The stories here are embedded, and part of Kimmelman's substantial accomplishment is unearthing them from their sources again and again, the ultimate goal being to show the active, charged pasts that will always be a part of New York's landscape, regardless of whatever crushing sadness might be attending it.

The dialogue format Kimmelman has chosen is a curious one. His repartees with experts — ranging from Billie Tsien, an architect who lived with her husband upstairs at Carnegie Hall for 30 years, to Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of the Museum of the Chinese in America — have in common a sense of discovery but also of active exchange, as if each participant were trying to get out an interesting observation before the other.

Obviously, the specialists carry these conversations, but Kimmelman holds his own, even if at times his introduction of data might feel a little overaggressive. What's energizing about these dialogues (many of which appeared in the New York Times) is that they're held within the perpetually shifting and challenging context of the city itself. Even considering diminished pandemic-style crowds, you might very much get the sense of the walkers' stepping over, around and through the urban features in their path.

The depth of the research here, in which it seems like every detail has been plumbed and every corner has been trawled, is of course part of the book's magic. But the sense of transformation and ceaseless historical movement we see here is just as powerful.

Even something small, like the story of Kim's Video, with its start on the Lower East Side and its end, after closing down, in a massive archive in Italy speaks to the importance of evolution to the city's very personality. Alice B. Toklas said of the Chrysler Building, in so many words, "It's not the way the building goes up into the air, it's the way it comes out of the ground."

It's not so much the empty streets Kimmelman might have walked through, it's what lay beneath them.

This book is historical spelunking disguised as a series of strolls through New York City, and as such it is well with the descent.

Max Winter is a freelance critic.

The Intimate City

By: Michael Kimmelman.

Publisher: Penguin, 272 pages, $30.