From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. New Yorkers love calamity," writes Hamill in this marvelous guide to the most expensive piece of real estate in the world. This is a look at the calamities—and the successes—that have struck downtown Manhattan since the time of the first explorers from the Old World. Hamill's Manhattan is filled with history, architecture and giant personalities. Readers will be thrust into the Civil War riots in Greenwich Village in 1863 and will rejoice in a Times Square filled with delirious New Yorkers on VJ Day in 1945. They will watch the city grow as the subway crawls northward and the big skyscrapers begin to pop up, from the Woolworth Building in 1913 to the World Trade Center in the 1970s. The city's rogues and heroes are portrayed in action—from Aaron Burr and John Jacob Astor to Stanford White, Walter Winchell and a visiting Oscar Wilde. This is a companion piece to Forever, Hamill's novel of New York, and The Drinking Life, which explored the city through the alcohol-fueled eyes of the young Hamill. It is written with insight, humor and, most of all, a deep love of the Big Apple. Perhaps Hamill's mother, Anne Devlin, best put it into perspective: "You've seen it before," she told young Peter the first time he was transfixed by the spires of Gotham. "It's Oz." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
Author, editor, and renowned journalist Pete Hamill voices in his craggy, urban style a memory and loose history of Manhattan. This is definitely a nostalgic reminiscence--the author reels off childhood memories, family history, and city legends with a fond and misty backward glance. From the Dutch burghers of old New York to the chumps and Trumps of the current city, Hamill misses little in his wry accounting of a city he calls home. If you've never been to Manhattan, visit it through Hamill's eyes; if you live there, you'll either say "thanks for the memories," or, as New Yorkers are fond of saying, "fuggetaboutit!" D.J.B. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Hamill is an excellent novelist (see in particular Snow in August, 1997), but in his latest book, he wears his hat as one of the last of the old-time newspapermen whose life and work simply define New York City. He calls this book an "essay . . . based on memory, reporting, and reading." What that amounts to is a delightfully personal, robustly informative portrait of New York, Manhattan in particular (and Lower Manhattan more specifically).Having been in the newspaper biz for four decades, he knows how to keep his eyes and ears open for the good story, the telling detail, and the quirky but exemplary character. As he escorts readers around the island of Manhattan, he takes heavy glances back into history--insisting that New Yorkers constantly experience "aching nostalgia"--as he not so much classifies but revels in the distinctions of NYC both as a "concrete place and as an idea." A marvelous read for anyone who has a hometown. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
A rich historical and personal portrait of Manhattan from the bestselling writer who is for many the living embodiment of the city. Manhattan, the keystone of New York City, is a place of ghosts and buried memory. One can still see remnants of the British colony, the mansions of the robber barons, and the speakeasies of the 1920s. These are the places that have captivated the imaginations of writers for centuries. Now Pete Hamill brings his unique knowledge and deep love of the city to a New York chronicle like no other. During his 40 years as a newspaperman, Pete Hamill has been getting to know Manhattans neighborhoods and inhabitants intimately, bearing witness to their greatest triumphs and tragedies. From the winding, bohemian streets of Greenwich Village to the seedy alleyways of the meatpacking district and to the weathered cobblestones of South Street Seaport, Hamill peels back the layers of history to reveal the citys past, present, and future. More than just history or reporting, this is an elegy by a native son who has lived through some of New Yorks most historic moments, and who continues to call this magnificent, haunted city his home.
About the Author
Pete Hamill is the author of the New York Times bestsellers A Drinking Life, Snow In August, and Forever. He has been editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. He lives in New York City.
Downtown: My Manhattan FROM THE PUBLISHER
A rich historical and personal portrait of Manhattan from the bestselling writer who is for many the living embodiment of the city.
Manhattan, the keystone of New York City, is a place of ghosts and buried memory. One can still see remnants of the British colony, the mansions of the robber barons, and the speakeasies of the 1920s. These are the places that have captivated the imaginations of writers for centuries. Now Pete Hamill brings his unique knowledge and deep love of the city to a New York chronicle like no other.
During his 40 years as a newspaperman, Pete Hamill has been getting to know Manhattan's neighborhoods and inhabitants intimately, bearing witness to their greatest triumphs and tragedies. From the winding, bohemian streets of Greenwich Village to the seedy alleyways of the meatpacking district and to the weathered cobblestones of South Street Seaport, Hamill peels back the layers of history to reveal the city's past, present, and future.
More than just history or reporting, this is an elegy by a native son who has lived through some of New York's most historic moments, and who continues to call this magnificent, haunted city his home.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Hamill has spent most of his life in New York City, and he knows its history and its pulse intimately. In this paean to his hometown, he moves from southernmost Manhattan to its center, and from the city's origins to its current state. Each CD focuses on one area, beginning with Battery Park and working through Trinity Church, the Bowery and the Villages before jumping to the city's heart: Times Square. The only sound effects (brief jazzy riffs) can be heard at the beginning and end of each disc, and the stark quiet of Hamill's narration seems odd for a book about such a noisy city. However, his gruff, seen-it-all voice, filled alternately with wonder at the beauty of a building, disdain for modern trends and indignation at how some worthy historical character has been forgotten, is that of a wise older relative revealing the true past of a place he loves. He speaks often of the "human alloy" of new and old immigrants that comprises Manhattan, and intersperses his own experiences growing up in Brooklyn and coming of age in the Lower East Side. Hamill's narration is somewhat monotonous, but his way of traveling seamlessly through neighborhoods and years, relating fascinating anecdotes and little-known facts, keeps the tour lively. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Forecasts, Nov. 15, 2004). (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Former editor in chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News, Hamill spent his adult life in downtown Manhattan. A highly literate and eloquent writer (see also his memoir A Drinking Life), he thoughtfully guides readers through that borough's neighborhoods, which he knew as a young man and still walks. Threaded throughout is the idea of loss and nostalgia: New Yorkers pay an emotional price for the city's constant, irreversible change, he writes. Yet his vision is ultimately uplifting, that of "New York alloy." Hamill masterfully includes many astonishing facts, e.g., Washington Square was built on the graves of a potter's field; the first branch of the New York Public Library, the Ottendorfer Branch, founded in 1884, still stands doing its job, on Second Avenue. The book ends with Hamill generously sharing his sources for readers wanting to continue learning about the city. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/04.]-Elaine Machleder, Bronx, NY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
AudioFile
Author, editor, and renowned journalist Pete Hamill voices in his craggy, urban style a memory and loose history of Manhattan. This is definitely a nostalgic reminiscence—the author reels off childhood memories, family history, and city legends with a fond and misty backward glance. From the Dutch burghers of old New York to the chumps and Trumps of the current city, Hamill misses little in his wry accounting of a city he calls home. If you've never been to Manhattan, visit it through Hamill's eyes; if you live there, you'll either say "thanks for the memories," or, as New Yorkers are fond of saying, "fuggetaboutit!" D.J.B. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
Manhattan south of 42nd Street (with a handful of excursions north), rendered in all its delirious human evidence by veteran newsman Hamill (Forever, 2002, etc.). "New York," Hamill writes, "is a city of daily irritations, occasional horrors, hourly tests of will and even courage, and huge dollops of pure beauty." For this native son, it is also "infused with a mixture of memory, myth, lore, and history, bound together in an erratic, subjective way" by a man who has lived within the mysterious mixture of those elements. Hamill's delightful, informative, and elegantly shaded account starts with his mother, who took her children on excursions through Brooklyn and one day stopped while viewing the Manhattan skyline to say to her thunderstruck son, "You've seen it before . . . It's Oz." Our very own wizard then proceeds to take readers on a historically rich, memoir-laden walking tour of the area below Times Square, covering not just the architecture and anecdotes that grace each of the city's parishes, but their emotions, from greed to explosive anger. The city's continuous changes prompt what New Yorkers have come to recognize as their own special sense of nostalgia. "In some unplanned way," Hamill finds, "part of the Battery is now a necropolis." The current Trinity Church stands on the site of two previous houses of worship. The Commissioner's Plan of 1811 imposed "rigid order on wildness" with a street grid but could not truly impose technique over topography; Broadway, with its "honking velocity", simply ignores the grid as it angles southeast to northwest. Historian, geographer, and frequenter of emporia, Hamill revels in everything from the Jewish Rialto of Second Avenue to theonce-vibrant newspaper district of Park Row. Most of all, he hails a citizenry that refused to be lectured about sin and knew from the beginning that "the only way human beings could live together here was by practicing tolerance."A finely etched and hand-colored portrait from one of those rare reporters who has lived long and hard in his beat. Agent: Esther Newberg/ICM
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