A NEW YORK PICTORIAL
STATE OF MIND

You Are Here: NYC
—Princeton Architectural Press. 2016

I wrote the essay “A New York Pictorial State of Mind” along with editorial research for YOU ARE HERE: NYC by Katharine Harmon, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Excerpts from the essay:

Fast-forward to a decade later, and the city needs a fresh vision. Bold free-love colors advertise Norman Mailer’s campaign for mayor, alongside Jimmy Breslin for city council president, in the 1969 Democratic primaries. In New York City: The 51st State, the duo propose a monorail, free bicycles, and neighborhood empowerment. Pictorial maps have been used before as campaign propaganda, but conveying a serious political vision in pictorial form is a gutsy act, and somehow appropriate for these candidates. Created by Abe Gurvin, the map is a loud affair, yet its execution is relaxed. There is a festive grandiosity to the scroll and insignia, and a kind of hippie branding to the neighborhoods’ logos. An airplane-morphed Capitol building delivering money directly to the city is the icing on the utopian cake. Another slogan for the map could be one of the campaign’s emphatic statements: “New York Gets an Imagination—or It Dies!” Though Mailer failed to get elected, the map lives on as a kaleidoscopic relic of sixties optimism.
[...]

Jason Polan’s The Best Spots to Sit and Read a Book in Manhattan has a similarly geeky appeal. The map is a kind of personal taxonomy of urban street furniture, and an invitation to indulge in playfully monomaniacal adventures in the city. Much like New York, it gives off a neurotic vibe and a cool exuberance at the same time. Romanticized benches mingle with designer chairs and unsung industrial paraphernalia—crates, bins, buckets, cinder blocks. The Bertoias in Midtown, the High Line’s peeled-up benches, the humble plastic folding chairs, all have distinctive stories to share. I imagine their day-to-day interactions with a succession of bodies in awkward postures. Pick one, open a book, sit back (or lean, or lie, or squat), and read.