Tenements, Towers and Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City

by Julia Wertz

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book of 2017!

Here is New York, as you've never seen it before. A perfectly charming, sidesplittingly funny, intellectually entertaining illustrated history of the blocks, the buildings, and the guts of New York City, based on Julia Wertz's popular illustrated columns in The New Yorker and Harper's.

In Tenements, Towers & Trash, Julia Wertz takes us behind the New York that you think you know. Not the tourist's New York-the Statue of Liberty makes a brief appearance and the Empire State Building not at all-but the guts, the underbelly, of this city that never sleeps. With drawings and comics in her signature style, Wertz regales us with streetscapes "Then and Now" and little-known tales, such as the lost history of Kim's Video, the complicated and unresolved business of Ray's Pizza, the vintage trash and horse bones that litter the shore of Brooklyn's Bottle Beach, the ludicrous pinball prohibition, Staten Island's secret abandoned boatyard, and the hair-raising legend of the infamous abortionist of Fifth Avenue, Madame Restell. From bars, bakeries, and bookstores to food carts, street cleaners, and apartments both cramped and grand, Tenements, Towers & Trash is a wild ride in a time machine taxi from the present day city to bygone days of yore.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316480819
Publisher:	Running Press Book Publishers
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	137 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Julia Wertz is a professional cartoonist and amateur historian. She has published five graphic novels and does monthly history comics for The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine.

What People are Saying About This

author of the blog Ephemeral New York and The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910 - Esther Crain

“Julia Wertz’s New York is a city of magic and mystery—of tenements and theaters, corner bars and neighborhood hangouts, colorful characters and under-the-radar names all but lost to the ages. Her sharply detailed illustrations bring Gotham’s streets to life and reveal their secrets. Walkers and history buffs will love being part of Wertz’s world.”

author of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? - Roz Chast

"Tenements, Towers, and Trash is nothing short of extraordinary. The meticulously researched histories of the various urban landscapes are fascinating, and Wertz's drawings perfectly capture the visual poetry of the city—the ongoing struggle between past and present, and its unique blend of beauty and ugliness. A must for anyone who loves and appreciates the city, as Wertz so clearly does.”

author of Everything is Flammable - Gabrielle Bell

“A singular voice on a singular place."

author of Mama Tried - Emily Flake

"Richly dense and informative yet never dull or pedantic, Wertz’s eye for detail and obsession with minutiae pays massive dividends for the reader. Her skill at rendering cityscapes left me breathless with admiration and gut-twisting envy. It’s also funny as fuck.”

author of The Bowery Boys - Greg Young

"A completely new and refreshing way to look at New York City history. You’ll be so transfixed by this book’s extraordinary imagery that you may forget to turn the page!”

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/19/2017
New York City is a land of architectural ghosts, and Wertz (Drinking at the Movies) is a skilled and perceptive documentarian who here combines two of her talents—cartooning and urban exploration—to create a dense, informative package filled with her audacious personality. Wertz’s method for uncovering these ghosts involves a lot of wandering, sharp eyes, and tons of research that she translates into meticulous drawings of structures throughout the city, often in a “then-and-now” format to document changes not only to the structure itself, but to the culture of the city. Wertz tackles the pneumatic tube system with the same gusto as she does the life of serial arsonist Lizzie Halliday. In presenting the life of the city, Wertz captures change as the most important constant trait of New York City, with a vivid eclecticism that makes this an indispensable guidebook to places lost and found. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"A passionate anatomy of the city, a book of dramatic streetscapes and hidden histories - mostly of infamous women, like the 19th-century celebrity abortionist Madame Restell, who catered to socialites and built her Fifth Avenue mansion a block away from a Catholic church, supposedly to taunt the faithful....The city rises majestically in these pages. The crowded panels evoke the jostle of urban life. Your eye doesn't know where to settle; there's so much to absorb."—The New York Times

"Julia Wertz's Tenements, Towers and Trash is nothing short of extraordinary. The meticulously researched histories of the various urban landscapes are fascinating, and Wertz's drawings perfectly capture the visual poetry of the city- the ongoing struggle between past and present, and its unique blend of beauty and ugliness. A must for anyone who loves and appreciates the city, as Wertz so clearly does."—Roz Chast

"[Wertz's] love [of New York] is tangible and moving."—NPR

"Obsessiveness, in a sense, is the subject of Julia Wertz's Tenements, Towers & Trash, which was flat-out the most enjoyable experience I had with any book this year."—The Chicago Tribune

"A delight for New York aficionados. Every city needs a version of this artist and her book."
—Kirkus Reviews

"In presenting the life of the city, Wertz captures change as the most important constant trait of New York City, with a vivid eclecticism that makes this an indispensable guidebook to places lost and found."
—Publishers Weekly

"Richly dense and informative yet never dull or pedantic, Wertz's eye for detail and obsession with minutiae pays massive dividends for the reader. Her skill at rendering cityscapes left me breathless with admiration and gut-twisting envy. It's also funny as fuck."—Emily Flake, author of Mama Tried

"A singular voice on a singular place."—Gabrielle Bell, author of Everything Is Flammable

"Julia Wertz's New York is a city of magic and mystery. Her sharply detailed illustrations bring Gotham's streets to life and reveal their secrets. Walkers and history buffs will love being part of Wertz's world."—Esther Crain, author of The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910

"A completely new and refreshing way to look at New York City history. You'll be so transfixed by this book's extraordinary imagery that you may forget to turn the page!"—Greg Young, author of The Bowery Boys: Adventures in Old New York

"Showcasing her extraordinary artistic talent, Wertz digs into an eclectic survey of the city's past, and the remaining architectural relics, through her large-format illustrated history, Tenements, Towers & Trash"—Shelf Awareness

"This is a great gift for the history, design, and illustration obsessives in your life... or a great gift for yourself..."—The Cut

"A celebration of city life, of living right on top of your neighbor, of those corner shops that barely stay open for a month and the storefronts that last longer than a century... When you really see a city through Wertz's eyes, you're likely to understand your own city in a different way forever after."—Seattle Review of Books

"Wertz's love of New York and its history enliven the streetscapes in her superb book, a then-and-now tribute to bookstores, music venues, movie theaters, bars and many other spots."—San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

★ 2017-07-25
In busy cartoons and archly entertaining prose, New Yorker artist Wertz (Museum of Mistakes, 2014, etc.) serves up a grandly alternative history of Gotham.There was a time, not so long ago, when Times Square was a locus of hookers and nude dance shows rather than Disney-fied tourist traps. More pointedly, writes the author, it was "a garbage covered shithole full of strip clubs, porn theaters and seedy characters"—which, naturally, she characterizes as representing "the good old days." As Wertz cautions, the sordidness hasn't entirely disappeared; you just have to know what to look for, and then look. This graphic book, rendered in a style that seems a distant cousin to that of Roz Chast, is all about looking. Wertz is a transplant from the Bay Area who came to New York, found her nirvana, and began exploring the history and actuality of the place. It's a tragic note that, evicted from her studio in an up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood, she couldn't find affordable digs anywhere in the city and returned to California, where she discovered that "it was an absolute fucking torture drawing and writing about a city I no longer lived in but desperately loved." It's easy to gauge that affection from her pages, which recount long walks through the city fueled by a steady diet of histories and trivia ("Pinball was banned in NYC until 1978! It was a ‘pinball prohibition,' and officials would smash the machines with sledgehammers, and dump them in the river") that she recounts in ever salty prose. Wertz, for instance, revisits the history of the many instances of Ray's Pizza, a synecdoche of a kind: founded by mobsters as a money-laundering site, the operation became legit in the hands of immigrants who worked there, quit, and opened their own versions of the place, name and all, so that there are now somewhere between 20 and 40 unrelated Ray's outlets in the city. A delight for New York aficionados. Every city needs a version of this artist and her book.

Kirkus Reviews