Tag: illustration

The Loveliest Love Letter to New York

“This is the best place in the world, an experiment, a melting pot, a fight to the death, an opera, a musical comedy, a tragedy, none of the above, all of the above. We’re a target for seekers and dreamers and also nuts. We live here anyway.”
—Roz Chast

Roz Chast declares in the beginning of her charming book Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York that it is neither a “definitive guide book” to Manhattan nor an “insider guide” to the “hippest clubs, the swankiest restaurants, the edgiest neighborhoods, the coolest gyms, or the store where the best people buy the most exclusive books.”

Thank god she is right. Because the book is so much more than any guidebook or vapid top 10 lists we see today. In this witty and quirky graphic memoir of her beloved hometown, New Yorker cartoonist (and, frankly, an American treasure) Roz Chast employs her signature shaggy drawing style to show us all the wonderful, weird, charming, and gross things New York has to offer.

LOL “gluten-free pho”

The book actually evolved from a personal guidebook to the city for Chast’s suburban daughter—who was heading to New York for college—in the hopes that her daughter would fall in love with the city, too. Chast’s New York is full of wonder and goofiness, featuring sidewalk craters and gum, mystery stores selling boxes of saltines next to cartons of hair spray, talking siamese standpipes, and tips on how to hail a cab (yes, she knows some people prefer Uber/Lyft, but Chast likes the instant gratification of the yellow cab: “You need a cab, you hail a cab, you’re in a cab.”).

There are so many laugh-out-loud moments in this book. For example, Chast warns us to stay away from an empty train car when all the other ones are crowded:

Also, we have “wonders of nature” beyond the city’s parks:

Chast gives some great tips on navigating the city streets, too. She tells her readers not to neglect buses, which is my second favorite mode of transportation in the city (after walking, of course). I fully agree with her that buses are awesome for seeing the people, stores, and architecture when you’re not in a rush. It also offers a great way to familiarize yourself with the city if you’re new.

Knowing the cross street of where you’re going is important, but you don’t need to lose too many brain cells over it:

Embedded in the pages of this book, underneath the colorful and whimsical drawings full of hilarious and poignant moments, is Chast’s deep affection for New York. If you currently live in New York but are a little tired of it, this book will remind you why you fell in love with it in the first place. Those of you who have left, I bet Going Into Town will trigger your nostalgia and make you smile at least a little bit. Or maybe it’ll make you glad that you left? I don’t know. Lastly, for those New Yorker wannabes or faraway admirers, I can think of no better introduction to my incredible city.

The Must-Have Classic Illustrated Book for New York Lovers

I love illustrated children’s books. The wondrous and delightful visual narratives within them are not only charming but also insightful. 

One of my favorite illustrated children’s books of all time is the timeless classic This Is New York by Miroslav Sasek. Inspired by a trip to Paris, Sasek decided to create a children’s travel book for it, a project that he would later expand to include cities like Rome, London, and New York.

This Is New York was first published in 1960 and re-published in 2004, and you can see from the illustration style that it has that retro watercolor look that a lot of people love and try to emulate today. These visuals are really gorgeous and take the reader on a little journey of the city. The book opens with the sale of Manhattan—$24 worth of housewares, apparently—to a Dutchman and goes on to talk about some of the seminally “New York” things: Times Square, Central Park, markets that cater to people from different corners of the world, fire hydrants, the traffic, fire escapes, etc. It’s surprising how much of New York is packed in the book’s 60 pages.

Since the book was published almost sixty years ago, it also offers a glimpse into a New York that I’m not really familiar with. For example, the NY Giants used to play in Yankee Stadium. And there was one mailbox for mail going to Manhattan and the Bronx and another for mail going to all other destinations. I wonder why Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island were lumped in with all the out-of-town mail?

It is also interesting to see how some of the landmarks have changed since the book’s original release. An illustration of Columbus Circle, a neighborhood that I used to live in, is almost unrecognizable to me as Time Warner Center and the Trump building are both absent on the page. 

Back in the day, The Weather Star on top of a building on Broadway near Carnegie Hall indicated the weather for the next by changing colors: green for fair weather and orange for cloudy.  The star is still perched atop 1740 Broadway today but no longer used to display the forecast for the next day.

The book contains a gaping omission in both the original and updated editions: the World Trade Center. It was not done by design, though. The WTC towers were built in the 1970s so didn’t exist when Sasek was working on the illustrations. They were not mentioned in the annotated notes of the re-issue in 2004 because they’d already been destroyed by then. Still, it is so jarring that a book about New York does not have any mention of these iconic structures. My heart still aches a little bit thinking about this.

This Is New York is beautifully illustrated and informative. I’ve gifted many copies over the years for Christmas and on birthdays. If you know any New Yorker lovers, then this would make a great addition to their book collections.