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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Have you ever taken a really long walk through a neighborhood, whether yours or one where you don't live, just to absorb the vibe of the place? Walking along the streets, you might notice who lives and works there, what kinds of buildings are there, what sorts of restaurants and shops are around, where the kids hang out and play, even what it smells like. Walking, as you probably know, is a really great way to get to know a neighborhood. You'll definitely learn more about a place on a walk than you would riding through it in a car, even maybe on a bike.

I've definitely done it and so has my next guest and in a new way for him during the pandemic. Many of you know who this is. It's New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, who's got a new book called, The Walking City: Walking New York. The book is a collection of 20 walks through some of New York's iconic neighborhoods and landmarks that illustrate the complexity, history, and ever-changing nature of the city. He'll explain what the pandemic has to do with it. Michael, welcome back to WNYC. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the book.

Michael Kimmelman: Oh, thanks, Brian. It's my pleasure. Let me just say, like millions of mothers, I'm a very grateful listener and fan, so--

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. That's very nice. You wrote in the intro to the book that you started this project in March of 2020, which we all know is when the pandemic started. What inspired your walks?

Michael Kimmelman: I was like everyone else. I think shocked and a little paralyzed and fearful. I had to think what I could do with myself. I was very grateful. I was not ill and my family was okay, but my work was obviously upset. It had to be reinvented. I think crises are opportunities too. I saw it as a chance to see the city in a different light, and also to see it through the eyes of a lot of other people who lived in the city, and it would be able to tell stories about it.

That might be a kind of consolation at a difficult time. I think too, there was a time when everyone was frantic about what was happening hour to hour or minute to minute. There's something about the city and the longevity of it and the sense of it as a rock that I thought was useful. It was a bomb to me personally and I thought it would be to readers too. Plus I just wanted the chance to get out and walk around since we were all locked up.

Brian Lehrer: The book is made up of 20 walks. We're going to go through a few of them, maybe inspiring people to get out however they get out to one neighborhood or another and go walk around there for the first time. I'll tell you about one of mine during the pandemic because I had somewhat of a similar experience to what you write about, although on a much more limited basis. Listeners, what about you? Tell us about your long walks in the city. Tell us about your walks in neighborhoods other than your own.

Do you have a long walk that you have taken or a route that you take regularly that you would like to shout out? What do you notice? For that matter, how did the pandemic change your relationship to walking around New York City or anywhere else for that matter where you happen to be? Michael's book, it happens to be about walks in New York City. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's just dive right into one of the walks you write about.

Michael Kimmelman: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: One was through Forest Hills, Queens with Kate Orff, the director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University. She talked about how the forest in Forest Hills influenced the neighborhood's design. How did that walk influence your view of urbanism and nature and what did you see in Forest Hills?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, that's a really interesting case. I should say, Brian, the book is called The Intimate City partly because I wanted it to be seen through the eyes of people who lived it intimately as well. Kate lives out in Forest Hills and her husband is born and raised in Forest Hills. For her, it was also a walk through a neighborhood where she's raising her children and where her husband returned. I think Forest Hills changed a lot since her husband grew up.

One of the things that was interesting for me to hear through her was how that had changed, how the neighborhood had become so much more diverse, and how it had grown. It had started like a number of other neighborhoods in Queens a century ago as a development scheme on what had basically been farmland. That development scheme was intended to basically attract white people away from Manhattan to the inner-- You might call them the inner suburbs at that time.

In the case of Forest Hills, that meant moving to a place that was based on this 19th-century idea of the garden city that a guy named Ebenezer Howard had. How could we design this beautiful Edenic version of a city that was actually very green? Forest Hills now is a complex place that has in it high-rises. It has a very large and diverse immigrant population and it also has this core of Forest Hills gardens that remains largely intact.

I think one of the most interesting things Kate talks about there is that it's not so much a city with a garden. It's really a garden with houses in it. It feels much more like a landscape. I think the other thing about that that's very important is that the city, and you know this as well as anyone, Brian, is an incredibly complex organism in which you get out at any subway station and it's just a different place with an entirely different feel to it.

That complexity, that richness is, to me, not just the city's wonder, but also the source of its strength. The idea that Forest Hills is on the E-Train and you can get off the E-Train a couple of stops later and be in a completely different place that you can be in this garden city, which can remind you of being in England in the 19th century. Then go a couple of stops later and, suddenly, you're somewhere like Long Island City, which is completely different.

It's something we can take for granted here, but I think it becomes so much more real when you're walking the streets and you're not, as you said, just in a car or even in a subway when you actually take the time and things slow down and you notice stuff. Let me just say, that was the other thing about COVID, right? It was an opportunity to really see the city often when the streets were empty. Although that was difficult and sad in some ways, it felt very special.

It felt like a moment frozen in time that would pass when everything stopped or most things stopped. Me certainly, I remember the eeriness of walking around Broadway and along 5th Avenue at that time when there was almost no one on the streets, and yet the city was there. It was a reminder that it was for us, and yet you could see it in a way that was without the hectic things that always distract us and make us not really look around and stop.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I want to apologize for misstating the title of your book when I introduced you. I think I had a tongue-oh and went to the subtitle. The book, folks, is called The Intimate City: Walking New York. I said The Walking City. The Intimate City: Walking New York is Michael Kimmelman's new book. I think Ben in Brooklyn walks New York. Ben, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Ben: Hey, Brian, it is truly an honor to be on. Yes, I was telling your screener, I am a native New Yorker. This is the reason I love New York and stay in New York is because I love going on these long walks to new neighborhoods. Every time I do, I feel like I'm just scratching the surface of just how immense the city is and what a universe it is.

Last week, my girlfriend and I walked down to Bensonhurst, where we bought a bunch of Italian food and came home and cooked it. When we were there, this wasn't too far from where we live even and it feels like you're entering just a different city and world. I feel like it's so easy to get caught in your local orbit, and I have for the past 30-some years. I've lived here my whole life. Every time I travel out, it's like it's a brand-new city.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great one, Ben. Thank you very much. That's awesome. I'll let you go one level deeper if you want and say something that you saw in Bensonhurst or wherever.

Ben: Yes, sure. Bensonhurst, it happens to be where my dad grew up. I think at the time, it was like a Jewish neighborhood where he grew up. It's known for being a real Italian neighborhood. Now, it's kind of Chinese. There's fantastic Chinese food, but there are still some great holdovers from back in the day, including a place called Pastosa Ravioli that we went to and Bari Pork Store.

I felt this way living in other cities too. When you travel beyond your normal orbit, you travel back in time because things are less likely to change in the outer boroughs. It's almost just like going backwards and it's like, "Wow, this is still here." That's totally cool. Definitely, the pandemic encourages this because I was working from home. It started out on long bike rides. It's true that walking, you really take the time to get to know the place. There's always food involved too.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Speaking of that old-world feel, Michael, I don't know if you relate to that, but that was part of the experience that I had when I started walking more at the beginning of the pandemic. I live in Upper Manhattan and I started taking walks into the Bronx north and east of me and discovered some kind of old world relative to today, co-ops. Do you know, Villa Charlotte Bronte? It's kind of an Italian-style villa. I'm not exactly sure what the connection to Charlotte Bronte is, but it's in Spuyten Duyvil.

Michael Kimmelman: In Spuyten Duyvil, yes.

Brian Lehrer: That's one and that's a--

Michael Kimmelman: It has that amazing view. Yes, I do know. Yes, incredible.

Brian Lehrer: It does.

Michael Kimmelman: You have that panorama looking down. Suddenly, it opens up onto the river.

Brian Lehrer: At the Hudson River and onto the Palisades. The housing itself, it's old world. You really do feel like you're in some small Italian village or something. Then I also walked further east up by the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Kingsbridge section and discovered something that I never knew about, which was the Shalom Aleichem co-op, which is like a century old and was affiliated originally with the Workmen's Circle, that progressive Yiddish culture-oriented group. There were plaques there describing who used to live there and famous people like Bess Myerson, I think, and others. Just very simple. I don't have much more to say about them, but they were like, "Wow, who knew this existed?" That's, I'm sure, the kind of experience that you have all the time.

Michael Kimmelman: It's so true. I get that perfectly. I was walking around in one of these walks with Andrew Dolkart around Greenwich Village, which is my neighborhood. That's where I grew up. Suddenly, you understand also why things are the way they are. I hadn't really understood why Christopher Street was askew from the grid. Then, of course, we started talking.

I realized that it had been the original border of British Admiral Peter Warren's colonial estate and that a lot of the other supposedly off-kilter streets in the West Village grew out of the boundary lines or old cow paths or whatever. For me, the more striking thing was walking down MacDougal Street. We were talking about the LGBT community. MacDougal had been a center of LGBT bars before it moved over to Christopher. I grew up around the corner from MacDougal. I had family who lived on MacDougal.

Having a conversation and looking around about how does the village had developed and how south of Washington Square Park in that part of the village, you had had immigrant communities settle, first of all, freed Black slaves, but then also waves of German and Italian immigrants. Whereas the north side of the park had remained the enclave of wealthier, older American families who then moved uptown. I realized I'd walked this street a million times, but I'd never really looked at how different MacDougal Street is on the south end of the street compared to what happens when you get to the park and north, how those buildings changed.

What I'm saying is that, suddenly, the penny dropped for me even on a street I'd walk up and down my entire life because I just stopped to look and suddenly had a little bit more information about it. I don't know. Maybe that's not the most revelatory thing if people are not clear on what I'm talking about. That, for me, is the joy too. That idea that, suddenly, things open up, history opens up, and the city opens up. You see it as this very layered, textured, complex unfolding story.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another caller, Jim in Manhattan, but talking about walking in Queens. Jim, you're WNYC with Michael Kimmelman, New York Times architecture critic and author of the new book, The Intimate City: Walking New York. Hi, Jim.

Jim: Hi there, Brian, good morning. Good morning, Mr. Kimmelman. My favorite walk is where I grew up in Astoria, Queens. What it is, is if you're familiar with the Astoria Park, which is a beautiful American vista. You've got two bridges: the Hell Gate, the great classic, and the Triborough. They're bracketing the Astoria Pool, the largest pool in America. I can walk down along the river and it's just so magnificent. I've taken friends from St. Louis and Pittsburgh there and the Crocodile Dundee movie. Some guy points a knife at the crocodile and the crocodile says, "No, that's not a knife. This is a knife." I say to people from St. Louis and Pittsburgh, "No, you don't have rivers. We have a river."

Brian Lehrer: [laughs]

Jim: I find that the view there-- and also if you ever have an Australian friend who comes to New York, take them to Astoria and let them look at the Hell Gate Bridge because, of course, you may know, it was the model for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Every kid growing up in Astoria when we saw the Sydney Harbour Bridge, we said, "They stole our bridge." I'm curious if Michael has ever taken that walk in Astoria and he's familiar with the "grandiosity," might be too much of a word, of the two bridges bracketing the pool.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I'll throw in that confluence of three rivers in Pittsburgh is glorious. Go ahead, Michael.

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, of course, I have. I know that area well and you're 100% right. It's just magnificent. In fact, one of the walks in the book is with the dean of the architecture school at Yale, who's a woman named Deborah Berke. Deb lives on the east side of Manhattan. Her daily walk is along East River Park along the water. For her, she grew up, I think, also in Queens. Her great view is across the water to the Hell Gate Bridge and the Triborough as well. That incredible vista across the water, across the East River.

The Hell Gate Bridge is one of the greatest engineering marvels of its era and certainly in New York. I love it. I got a chance to talk to her about that. The engineer was a guy named Gustav Lindenthal. As you say, it's this incredible bowstring truss that inspired a million other bridges, including the one in Sydney. I'm 100% with you about that spot in Astoria. I hadn't realized the pool was the largest pool in the world, but there you go.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Thank you for that call. Let's do another one. Elizabeth in Midtown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Hey, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. During the pandemic, I walked and ran a lot. I had not run as many years. I picked up running again. One of the things actually I did mention to your screener, but I think your guest mentioned seeing the city empty and Broadway and things. I used to run downtown. I used to run all the way down to the end of the island. I live on the east side.

I'd run down to the Staten Island Ferry and then loop back. I run up Broadway when it was completely empty. It was winter of 2020. It was freezing. I would always tell myself, "You're not going to regret this. You're going to remember. This is going to be so awesome that you ran these streets with nobody else around." It's still just an amazing thing to remember. It sounds, I suppose, like a light silver lining.

It was an amazing opportunity in such a terrible time. When else would I ever get that chance? I used to do walks through East Village. Now, I walk to work. I'm back in the office in Midtown. One thing I really realized is you take the subway. If a place you're going is only 30 minutes away, somebody really doesn't save much time. Basically, if I'm going anywhere in Manhattan now, I pretty much walk. It's awesome. It's great.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Great story, Elizabeth. Thank you very much. Let me get one more from you from the book before we run out of time because a few of your walks touch on gentrification around the city and how it shaped neighborhoods. On your walk through Jackson Heights in Queens with Suketu Mehta, who I love having as a guest on this program from time to time, a journalism professor at NYU and author of This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto, as well as other writings, he said there's good gentrification and bad gentrification. Can you expand on that idea and your walk with Suketu Mehta in Jackson Heights?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, so Suketu is just wonderful and a good friend. That was just a joy to do. He moved to Jackson Heights when he was a teen with his family from India and it remains very close to his heart. He's a wonderful storyteller. That particular chapter of the book is full of incredibly wonderful details about his growing up. To some extent, I'll just say the book is not just about architecture, of course.

It's about a lot of different kinds of people who've made up the city and their memories, and that's a good example. Suketu is a wonderful writer. His memory of Jackson Heights as a boy growing up years ago is the way in which you experience that neighborhood in the chapter. He's definitely noticed how the neighborhood has changed. Gentrification, I think what he's talking about there, and I agree with that absolutely, is that gentrification doesn't mean necessarily a bad thing in many places.

I remember talking to the mayor of Detroit a few years ago, who was boasting about the gentrification of some of the neighborhoods that had really been devastated in that city. The way in which we've come to think of gentrification is, I think, that it's a synonym for displacement. I think it's displacement that most people really feel most concerned about and appropriately. That is that neighborhoods change in ways that make it no longer affordable, not only for them to live there but also for the corner bodega, the shops, and the other things that make up a neighborhood that are part of the lifeblood of a community to remain in place.

There isn't necessarily anything wrong with the idea that wealth and new businesses will come into a neighborhood so long as there are protections for the people who have always called it home. That's really the challenge facing New York now. I think the lesson of COVID in some ways for the city was that all of the prognosticating about the doom and gloom, how the city was ending, no one would move back, blah, blah, blah, we go through these paroxysms of concern all the time.

Then, miraculously, the city somehow finds its way back. It happened after 9/11 when people said, "Nobody would ever build a skyscraper again," and then we had the biggest skyscraper boom in history. I think the lesson here was that the city is a kind of wonderful and enduring place larger than ourselves, but what threatens it, I think, is the idea of this becoming a place that is really only available to an increasingly few people who can afford it.

That is an undercurrent, I think, a melancholy undercurrent that runs through the book as well because what is it that we love about the city? We love this rich history that has continued to multiply the meanings of the city. What we don't love about it is the idea that it is becoming, in some way, homogenized or taken over by just a few big real estate interests. It's one reason why, for instance, I didn't take a walk through Hudson Yards.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, of all places. One more from Twitter. Listener writes, "Year one of what they call #Trumpandemic. One fave walk straight up Central Park West around Frederick Douglass Circle, then through Harriet Tubman Plaza, over to Townhouse line Manhattan Avenue, back to home. Every step, we're all, 'Look at that. You ever noticed that,' and we've lived on the Upper West Side since '81."

That's from one listener. To wrap it up, you characterize the 20 walks that you took in describing the book as about 540 million years of history, which is to say there's plenty the book fails to get to, countless voices left unaccounted for. Besides buying your book, what would you recommend for people who want to learn more about the city?

Michael Kimmelman: Well, thank you for teeing that up, Brian, because, of course, I really think walking the streets, it's an odd thing. Because as New Yorkers, most of us don't own cars. I've never owned a car, though I like to drive, and so I've always walked. I think a lot of us have just forgotten the joy of walking, not necessarily walking with a particular purpose that you've got to get to work or something, but walking with the idea of keeping your eyes and ears and, as you say, your nose open too.

It's just a way of seeing and thinking and experiencing the city that opens up these whole universes that are right there in front of you. I think that's the wonder. It's different than taking a walk in the country, I think, which has its own joys. In the city, it's something that it never really ends. I think the best thing to do is just basically take a walk. Go someplace where you've not been before. I'll just end by saying I had a friend who unfortunately died not so long ago, a man named Alex Garvin.

You may know that name, Brian. He worked in the city administration going back to the Lindsay years and was in city planning and a true deep-in-the-bone New Yorker. Alex grew up basically by, every weekend, going to a different subway stop and just getting out and looking around. It's a hard thing to imagine doing, but I found that inspiring. I think it was a life for Alex and a full and rich life. That's the city. It's an infinite place.

Brian Lehrer: Michael Kimmelman, New York Times architecture critic. It's not just an infinite place. It's an intimate place because his new book is called, The Intimate City: Walking New York, out today. If you want to see him in person, he'll be chatting with Suketu Mehta, the aforementioned, at the Strand tomorrow. Then take out your 2023 date books, he'll be speaking with Sam Sifton about the book at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on Wednesday, January 25th. The Strand tomorrow, the Niarchos Foundation Library on January 25th. Michael, this was great. Thank you very much.

Michael Kimmelman: Thank you, Brian. Pleasure.

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