Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York

by Justin Davidson

From New York magazine’s architecture critic, a walking and reading guide to New York City—a historical, cultural, architectural, and personal approach to seven neighborhoods throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, including six essays that help us understand the evolution of the city.

Genres: New York, Travel, History, Nonfiction, Architecture, Urban Planning, Reference

221 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 18, 2017

About the author

Justin Davidson is the architecture and classical music critic at New York magazine, where he writes about a broad range of urban, civic, and design issues. He grew up in Rome, graduated from Harvard, and later earned a doctoral degree in music composition at Columbia University. As a classical music and cultural critic at Newsday, he won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2002. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Reviews

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a complete guide. Not even an orderly guide. There seems to be no real logic or completeness to the walking tours, and the author picks and chooses what he wants to talk about. He's too obsessed with art and architecture and not enough history and culture. Don't pick this up as the first NYC walking guide or history book you try. My top NYC history book is still Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

But it was fun to look up pictures of the places he discussed. History is still history even if it's surveyed in an uneven and incomplete way. I sadly had to give this audiobook back to the library before I had a chance to do the walks myself while listening to it.

There is some good writing in here:

"...privilege makes inroads against deprivation on one block, and is beaten back on the next."
"And then New Yorkers with selective memories will start to complain that The Bronx is losing its character... of course it is! It always has been, and always will be. All over the city some dreams blare while others fade to a quiet mutter. On block after block, if you listen for a moment, you can hear one group's aspirations rub up against another's, in a constant bleet of yearning."
"...tenacious ghosts..."
"...chronic amnesia..."
"...streets into steel-sided corridors..."
"...trading one population for another..."
"...efficiently-designed, tightly-renovated cubby holes."
"Whether a neighborhood is losing its character or finding it again depends on the reach of one's recollection."
"In the furious squabbles over detail you can feel the deep and ancient currents that run through the city's history, and our own."

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Change and nostalgia.” Kudos for including Washington heights and the Bronx.

[Rich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting but not really compelling narratives... I'll probably still take the walks though.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I do not live in NY, I am interested in its history. I tend to like architectural history tours wherever I travel, so this book was right up my alley, especially since I will be visiting my daughter there this autumn. Especially compelling to me were the chapters about the Upper West Side, and the chapter about Sugar Hill and the south Bronx. I love the directional instructions and the maps. It brings the history to life, even though I am not there. I absolutely could see myself on my Davidson guided walking tours in a few sections of the city, via this book.

Note: My only wish for this book would be a section about Hell's Kitchen and also a history of the Upper East Side, (especially because my daughter lives on the UES). Might there be a second book in the works?

[Natan]

Absolutely wonderful!!

This book is beautifully written and provides a fascinating explanation of New York neighborhoods. Having long been a fan of New York, living there , I found this book to be completely engaging. I look forward to taking some of the walking tours .

[Nineveh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always really enjoyed reading about the New York City of today and decades ago, especially when the physical, social, and political are all integrated to paint a thorough peak at the city that has always captured everybody's dreams and imagination. I would give the Magnetic City a 4.5 stars -- it captures an incredible amount of the city, and the author does a fantastic job of introducing various social issues that took roles in literally shaping the different parts of Manhattan and the South Bronx. There were a few places where I felt certain movements and periods in New York's history deserved a more thorough and passionate visit, but the book most definitely does an incredible job of taking one all around parts of the city and providing beautiful context to lay the backstory for what you see before you today.

I only wish I were in NYC right now to actually do the walking tours! Perhaps next time I visit I'll have the chance to revisit the book in the proper setting.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a wonderful book to learn about places I would see on a recent (and first) whirlwind weekend trip to New York City. I loved reading about the history of various locations around the City. The only thing I would complain about is that I would have liked more pictures. I wished I had had more time to read this while I was in the city, and to actually take the walking tours. But I was able to glean a lot of information to make the places I WAS able to see more meaningful. And I didn't even get to read the whole book!

[Melissa Orth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in fits and spurts prior to and during a long weekend in NYC. Loved the history and background information given on different areas of NY, approached by focusing on a particular time period that location had its heyday. For example, a suggested walking tour of Chelsea and the meat market points out the last vestiges of the 1970s, a time of decline for the meat sellers who gave the area its name led to a rise in gay nightclubs. The author gives background to the economic and social changes of that period while pointing out the architecture to note.
Impressive research.

[Jorge Enrique Gamboa Fuentes · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book totally focuses on architecture facts, that makes you feel a little bored if you don't know anything about it.

However, is really interesting some landmarks and spots that Justin Davidson remark on the book, the way that he tracks maps at the end of each chapter makes easy understand what he is talking about.

[Sam Bowman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Davidson has a fun, lightly literary style, and picks interesting places and topics. I expected the book to go into the history of the city in quite a bit more detail than it did, though. Much of the narrative is personal/subjective, but Davidson doesn't get into enough of his own backstory for that to be especially compelling.

[Cherie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great info, interesting walking tours, but...

The information in this book was great. The wading through the pompous and verbose sentences was bothersome. At one point he lists 4 lines of jobs people in a neighborhood had and then writes "I could go on". My first thought was that I was surprised he didn't and grateful he hadn't.

[Mike He · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best way to deeply explore the Big Apple, old and new, on foot, is with a copy of Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York. Justin Davidson knows what and how he likes to present the best of the city to the reader, New Yorker or non-New Yorker alike.

[Brenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Problematically blasé on gentrification and the sweeping elimination of an entire neighborhood of mostly poor people of color to make way for Lincoln Center. But I learned a ton about my adopted city and can’t wait til it’s warm again so I can go look at some of these buildings.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you take the time to read this dense guide to NYC, you will be rewarded with many treasures~ history, social commentary and architectural details you might not read elsewhere. However, I'd barely call this a walking guide, at least not in the usual sense. Better for urban armchair traveling.

[Christine Himmelfarb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly written and informative, this book is by no means one to bring on a walking tour, but Davidson is a thoughtful companion to teach you about the city he knows and loves. Read it THEN wander with the neighborhoods knowing the history and savoring the views.

[Conrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best and most beautifully written books about New York I have had the pleasure to read. Through its architecture, Davidson delves deeply into the psyche of New Yorkers and how its history (and that of its buildings) have shaped the greatest city in the world.

[Carrie DelaPena · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was far too detailed in its historical background of each location to be of use or interest to anyone who is not a long-term resident of NYC and a devoted historian. Some of the sections prompted me to look up photos of buildings, but overall, this book was a drudge to read.

[Phyllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non fiction walking guide to new york city. The author has divided the city into walkable districts complete with historical and cultural information.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

some chapters were interesting, others were too abstract for my tastes.

[Jubin Chheda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Davidson pours in a huge amount of information about the vibrant city of New York! Entertaining read.

[Gwen A · Rating 4 out of 5]

a fun guide to listen to while walking around NYC

[Shiloh Frederick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not too functional as a guide book, a little on the verbose side, but it captures New York's spirit.

[Marc F. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love nyc, and the park, and more...this is a book that seeped under my skin and made me want to get off the plane and follow his guide....Loved the book!

[Derek Henderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A great style does not a great book make. The persistent focus on architecture becomes wearying.

[Peter Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Magnetic City: a walking companion to New York,” by Justin Davidson (Spiegel and Grau, 2017). Justin Davidson is a flaneur and glad of it. He is, an artist-poet of the modern metropolis. “For the perfect flâneur,” said Charles Baudelaire in 1863, ”for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” Davidson expands the term to include his fellow New Yorkers, for they “walk and walk, cataloguing the people whose paths we cross, noting architectural flourishes, eavesdropping on the accidental poetry stuttered into mobile phones…..” And so he does in an exhilarating set of walks---walking tours of seven parts of the city he so wholeheartedly loves. He takes the reader from the Financial District, the “city of money,” along the resurrected waterfronts of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Upper West Side, up through Sugar Hill in Harlem and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. This journey does not call for an easy-going perambulation, but a real New York stride, jammed with information presented in glitteringly clever and engaging language. One tends to rush along even while wishing to take it slow and soak in the scenery. For these walks are not merely strolls along broad streets and packed sidewalks. They turn out to be a compact history of the city---at least of Manhattan and narrow strips of the two nearest boroughs. Davidson is the architecture critic of New York magazine (although he won his Pulitzer as music critic of Newsday), and his judgments of the old and the new, the lost, the preserved and the constantly under construction are shrewd, sharp-eyed, and entertaining. Although he does not hesitate to show the back of his hand to buildings he considers less than they should have been, he always manages to find something positive (except, perhaps, for those ridiculously wealthy people who spend multiple millions on sky-high apartments they will rarely inhabit). Even for those who have lived their lives here and thought they knew the place, he takes the familiar and displays within it fresh and surprising new facets. And with all that, “Magnetic City” is actually a practical tour guide. The walks are carefully mapped and diagramed, complete with directions to, for example, “Continue on Water Street, turn left on Fulton Street, then immediately right on Front Street….” Perfect.

https://justindavidsonauthor.com/