BOOK REVIEW
The coolest urban book of the year isn't a book at all.
City Walks Architecture: New York, by Alissa Walker, is a "book" of 25 laminated cards, each leading to a walking tour in New York.
The 3 3/4 inch by 5 1/2 inch cards come in a deck, like playing cards, in a holder shaped like the old Crayola crayons beveled-top box.
Living up to her name, Walker loves to walk. She lives in Los Angeles, that most car-dependent of cities, and has a website dedicated to her beloved LA and the pursuit of happiness.
The not a resident of, she obviously is at home among the classical, modernist and everything in between architecture of the Big Apple.
The cards themselves are fabulously-designed. Each has a front cover photo, many taken by Walker, and a color walking map on the back cover.
The two inside pages contain a long paragraph of introduction to the neighborhood, then a step-by-step waking guide -- with exact addresses and the significance of each site the tour leads you to.
There also is quad-folded master card that explains the scale of the maps and how most of the 25 tours link into adjacent walking tours listed on the next information-packed card.
Our favorites are the High Line, the "reclaimed 1.5-mile elevated railway that snakes through New York's west side" that functions as a greenway and public park in the sky, hovering 30 feet above street level.
We get a kick out of Walker's keen eye for detail, noting that along with restored Chelsea and Meat Packing District warehouses, the High Line is now framed by "Starchitect Row" -- blocks of ultra modern structures designed by star architects such as Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Shigeru Ban, Robert A.M. Stern and Neil Denari.
Other favorites include: The Rising Lower East Side, Sustainable Skyscrapers, Hip Hotels in Times Square and Harlem Revival.
Manhattan dominates, but the boroughs are represented with tours of Art Moderne in the Bronx, A Land of Tomorrow in Queens, Brooklyn's Brownstones and Staten Island Victorian.
We love the Greenwich Village Tour (#7 of 25), which launches at the former house of late, great urbanist and author Jane Jacobs.
"The Village has long been home to alternative-minded folks of various kinds: writers, revolutionaries, and bohemians have always gathered here," starts Walker's intro. "But it's also known for the tenacity of its residents, who rallied against the city's "master builder" Robert Moses, when he slated the area to be bulldozed for a new expressway in the 1960s. The result is that, today, Greenwich Village is one of the most fiercely protected neighborhoods in the city."
At a list price of $18.95, this Chronicle books, City Walks Architecture: New York is super-affordable and essential for New York visitors, natives and souvenir seekers.
The entire set of walking tour cards fit easily into even a small handbag or messenger bag. So you can easily tote your graphically-pleasing guide to buildings, parks, monuments and more.
Better still, if you know you are going be in a certain area on a certain day, you can pull maybe three or four cards from Walker's deck and have a wealth of information and graphics that's light as a feather.
For those of us who still like to look at real pictures and feel real pages -- and dread a publishing world taken over by Kindles, I-Pads and forms of non-printed material -- City Walks Architecture: New York is a welcome touchstone.
www.chroniclebooks.com
www.gelatobaby.com (for Walker's wonderful world on a website)
Wright is the author of 5,000 published articles on urban life, architecture, public policy, planning and design. He is active in working to make sure universal design, which provides barrier-free access to people with disabilities, is incorporated to the essential and rapidly-evolving practice of sustainability.
