cover image Lost New York

Lost New York

Marcia Reiss. Anova UK/Pavilion (IPG, dist.), $18.95 (144p) ISBN 978-1-86205-935-1

In her latest, journalist and historian Reiss (New York Now and Then) leads us through New York’s vanished architectural heritage. From the first Metropolitan Museum of Art, engulfed by additions in 1895, to SoHo’s Moondance Diner, trucked to Wyoming in 2007, the book’s catalogue of disappeared landmarks evokes an alternate reality in which elaborate gothic mansions, elevated train tracks, floating bathhouses, first generation skyscrapers, and copious pleasure gardens dotted the city’s grid. Pithy, though sometimes elliptical, summaries of genesis and destruction accompany astounding black-and-white photographs of New York’s illustrious past, including the opulent interiors of Vanderbilt mansions and Coney Island’s generations of pleasure-seekers. The cumulative effect of these images is less a sense of loss than the recognition of the fluidity of fortune. Monuments to the robber barons and extinct newspapers of yesterday are demolished or transformed into the hospitals, hotels, office buildings, and apartment complexes of tomorrow. Reiss shows that change is not itself a bad thing, though some “improvements”—like the dismantling of the old Penn Station in 1966 for the monolithic Madison Square Garden—display the shortsightedness that can afflict any era. Although the book could use a general introduction and conclusion to frame the entries, the pictures alone are worth the price of admission. (Mar.)