by Jesse Richards
Art by the author/artist
Workman Publishing
A division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
2024
240 pages
Publication Date: September 10, 2024
Jesse Richards discovers Manhattan and becomes a New York aficionado, exploring interesting places on her weekend walks. Always an artist at heart, she starts an art group to sketch in Central Park. As her group grew, she began to look for new places to sketch and found that many members kept returning because of the new locations she found. The group grew to over 8,000 member and Richards found that she loved to delve into the history of the places she found.
In chapters like "Hidden New York," she includes The Daily News Building with its rich history and iconic placement in the Superman films of the 70s and 80s as The Daily Planet where Clark Kent meets Lois Lane. She includes the facades of buildings like the Cable Building and the Roosevelt Building and the Shinran Shonin Statue which was gifted to New York in 1955 by a Japanese industrialist. The statue has red burns marks on it from the atomic bomb at Hiroshima in 1945.
The art and historical details give rich descriptions of each choice in the book. Anyone going to New York should take notes from this gem of a book. Even New Yorkers will discover places they've never heard about or visited.
An interesting tidbit is there are still buildings in New York that use mail chutes: over nine hundred, in fact. A pneumatic tube system connected all of Manhatten across the Brooklyn Bridge and all of Brooklyn. It was too expensive to run and by 1953, the city began using cars and carriers to move the mail.
Other chapters include Humble Parks, On the Street, Central Park and Excursions. A section at the back of the book includes walks were you can see all the places mentioned in the text. For the seasoned adventurer or new New Yorker, Hidden New York is a treasure trove of information and unlikely places to visit.
Highly recommended for anyone planning to visit or live in New York and those who love to read about travel and history.
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