Twenty Minutes in Manhattan

Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is a must for anyone interested in the architecture and social fabric of life in New York. My son and I found it fascinating and although a bit dry n places - well worth the time. Can be read in small chunks as time allows.Twenty Minutes in Manhattan

Michael Sorkin has written the best book on architecture and cities I have read in thirty years. The groaning tables of books on architecture and its vulgar opposite, real estate, have been near collapse from useless piles of theories, career promotions, trashing old houses, freezing relics, flipping toxic properties, making tidy fortunes by deceiving yearning home buyers, and most of all boosting the pathetic dreams of new urbanists out to out-do Disneyesque fantasists. Sorkin shows that cities are far better than they have been made out to be by defilers of the landscape who want to ruin them in order to sell new, improved cleansing soapsuds. By walking daily from his home to studio along a small chunk of lower Manhattan, historicized Greenwich Village to tonified Tribeca, Sorkin has gestated thousands of eye-widening insights about what works in cities and what doesn't. He gives little credit to aggressive professional planners in thrall to rich developers, instead he bestows awards on street entrepreneurs and neighborhood believers. He wonderfully and informatively describes details of large failures and small successes in New York City, the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere he has traveled to lecture and study -- many sure to start as headshaking before erupting as in belly-laughs. Incivil discourse -- urban warfare -- gets special attention, the worst and the best, the enduring homicidal threat of infernal vehicles against pedestrians fighting for their lives. The cellphone yakkers, the widebody baby strollers, the second-hand smokers, the Formula 1 jerks in from Jersey, the national security bollards, the the homeland security aggressors, the corporate haters of trees, the venal, cruel, landlords at home and work, the fancy architects without scruple, what else have you always wanted somebody to challenge, ridicule and perfectly plan for extinction. Sorkin handily provides tips for winning exclusive use of an elevator, what to enjoy in cities no tour guide knows, who to be forever angry at for damaging our habitats, what each of us can do to contribute to -- demand of our elected representatives, designers and educators -- places to live and thrive under our own guidance, free of orchestrated interference by exploiters of cities and their covert lobbyists and financiers. Get this heart-warming, mind-stretching book, take a hike with Sorkin, dodge insane traffic, dump garbage in front of your landlord's office, pray for rent control to spread around the world.