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Cargando... Gone to New York: Adventures in the Citypor Ian Frazier
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Welcome to Ian Frazier's New York, a city more downtown than up, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who climbed the World Trade Center, and an eighty-three-year-old typewriter repairman whose shop on Fulton Street has drawers full of umlauts. Learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey. Like his literary forbears Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, Frazier, in his bewitching, inimitable voice, makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again, the way he did, arriving as a young man from Hudson, Ohio. In classic evocations of the F train, Canal Street, and Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in his iconic "Bags in Trees" essay, Frazier gives us New York again, in all its vital and human multiplicity. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)917History and Geography Geography and Travel Geography of and travel in North AmericaClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.83)
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As with most collections, I liked some of the essays better than others and I struggled a bit with my rating. They started off captivating me, especially the one about Canal Street (“The traffic on Canal Street never stops. It is a high-energy current jumping constantly between the poles of Brooklyn and New Jersey”). In the 1970s, Frazier lived in a loft above an Army Navy store on Canal and he describes the whole length of the street ending with a history of the Holland Tunnel.
There are three essays on his efforts over the years to remove plastic bags from trees. He creates a Bag Snagger and has it patented and spends his free time plucking bags out of trees (“The snagger worked great--a twist of the crooked metal fingers would inveigle the bag, then the sharpened hook would cut it free. . . . The sensation was like having your arm suddenly extended sixteen feet, and the satisfaction like getting something out of your eye”). Eventually, he also creates a device to retrieve the helium balloons that people let go in the main concourse of Grand Central Station where they mar the beauty of the constellations on the ceiling.
I could go on about my favorites (the stories about the manual typewriter repairman, Frazier’s 12 mile walk along Route 3 in New Jersey to the Lincoln Tunnel, the quiet oasis of Butler Library at Columbia University, Frazier’s childhood growing up in Hudson, Ohio) but I’ll stop. As I mentioned, I struggled with my rating because there were occasional essays that didn’t engage me and I put the book down for a month but the last 100 pages were so good that I’m going to give the book 4 ½ stars.
Highly recommended for anyone with some knowledge or affection for New York City. (