Michael Kimmelman has been the architecture critic of The New York Times since 2011, writing about cities, public space, infrastructure, community development, public housing, equity, and the environment. He joins to talk about his extraordinary career in journalism and his new book, “The Intimate City: Walking New York.”
Debbie Millman:
When the pandemic first hit, New York City, the city that never sleeps, took a long, long nap. Shortly after that happened, Michael Kimmelman wrote an email to some architects, historians, writers, and friends, asking them to go for socially distanced walks around the city, to places that spoke to them about the city that they loved.
Michael Kimmelman is The New York Times architecture critic, and these walks with friends and colleagues through the sleeping city worked their way into his newspaper column. Now they’ve made their way into a new book, The Intimate City: Walking New York.
Michael Kimmelman has had an extraordinary career in journalism. He was The New York Times longtime chief art critic. He has reported from 40 countries and he has helped shape the conversation around cities, sustainability, and climate change. He’s also got a side hustle I can’t wait to ask him about. Michael Kimmelman, welcome to Design Matters.
Michael Kimmelman:
Thanks, Debbie. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Debbie Millman:
Michael, in addition to your Pulitzer Prize-nominated writing, I understand you’re quite an accomplished classical pianist and have been a longtime student of Seymour Bernstein, one of the most sought-after teachers in the world. When did you start playing piano?
Michael Kimmelman:
Oh, I started with Seymour when I was five years old. So he’s my third parent, I think, is what I would have to say. How can I put this? I was talented enough that he didn’t fire me as a student, even though I didn’t practice year in and year out. Then I became more serious later on.
Seymour and I have had a very … A lifelong, obviously a lifelong relationship, and it’s been one of the most wonderful not just relationships, but aspects of my life to be able to continue to play and to be able to give some concerts occasionally too, because it’s always good to put yourself out there, especially if, as a critic, you are talking about other people who put themselves out there. It’s a reminder of how much is on the line and how much people care about these things.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I want to talk to you about that sense of being a critic versus being a creator of the things that people can critique in a little bit. You’re a native New Yorker, as am I. Your father was a physician and your mother was an artist and a sculptor and was also one of the founders of the peace activist group Women for Peace.
Michael Kimmelman:
Women Strike for Peace. That’s right. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I understand that they were both civil rights advocates and activists, and that it was likely that the entire McCarthy hit list probably came to your house to have dinner or to strategize at one point or another. What was this like for you to be surrounded by so many interesting activists and people that were making a big difference in the world?
Michael Kimmelman:
It was, of course, normal until I realized it wasn’t normal. I’m very grateful for that upbringing. My dad was with the Freedom Riders. He was a physician who went with the Freedom Riders. He was very close to many of the leaders of the civil rights movement.
It was really interesting to be in a household where it wasn’t just that people were coming and going. So when I was very young, I didn’t know who Gus Hall was, but I realized he came over for free dinners all the time. Then I came to understand he was the head of the Communist Party. I didn’t know who Angela Davis was, but then I realized that she too was an important and interesting figure.
I think what was interesting about it for me growing up was that I saw the way my parents consumed news and information. There were a lot of journals. My father read The New York Times as if he was trying to decode it all the time, because he felt that it was probably owned by the CIA and that if he could figure out what it was really saying, he would know what was going on behind the scenes. But there was this sense that writing mattered, that there was a public conversation taking place, and it was meaningful and that it would help shape the world.
So I think that was one of the things that came out of it. I also reacted against my father’s romantic sense of black and white politics. I think that also helped shape my career and my desire to unpack things in a more granular way, which is part of what journalism is supposed to do, that the world was grayer.
I think my mother appreciated that more. She was a much more cynical New Yorker, a wonderful, loving, funny woman. But it was my father’s encompassing view of things that was the dominant voice in the house. It’s been the backdrop to the way I think about so many things and so many things that I need to do in my work.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how you grew up in a comically cliched version of a Greenwich Village family in a squat, unremarkable, red brick, pre-war apartment building. You lived on the corner of a then seedy two-block lane called Downing Street. How is it comically cliched?
Michael Kimmelman:
Woody Allen made hay with the comical Ben Shahn posters and the knee-jerk politics. But growing up in the village, it was much more of a community. It was much more middle class. It had still a large Italian population, mostly working class.
It felt like a welcoming place to people who wanted to feel that they were a little bit out of the mainstream. I think back then, we’re talking now about the ’60s and ’70s, there was a much more creative strain to that notion of contrarianism. Now it’s been so consumed, and so it’s so quickly converted into something on TikTok or Instagram that it’s hard to even recognize as something out of the mainstream.
But I think then there was this sense of not closed community, but a somewhat cosseted community. I think that was a very nurturing environment to be in, too. I mean the village now … My family still is down there, some of it. But it’s an incredibly wealthy neighborhood. I think it doesn’t feel welcoming in the same way. It’s certainly not a place where a lot of young people could come and start their careers and try to find each other in the arts. That’s what it still was when I was growing up. It was also, as I said, filthy and a little dangerous, kind of seedy.
Debbie Millman:
It was, yeah, absolutely. You and I are nearly the same age. My dad and mom divorced when I was about eight or nine years old, and my dad moved to Manhattan. And so, I spent quite a lot of time there in the early ’70s. That’s really when I fell in love with Manhattan. I’m a native New Yorker. I’ve lived in Manhattan now since 1983, since the year I graduated college. So it’s almost 40 years of never living anywhere else.
I look back on the time in the early ’70s, yes, it was dangerous and the subways were full of graffiti and had those terrible metal clunky doors, but there was something incredibly welcoming about it, and a very, very special time, especially as the LGBTQ community was beginning to rise up and make a difference as well.
Michael Kimmelman:
Yeah, 100%. The problem is, I think, some younger people will say, “Oh, well, this is just nostalgia for an older generation.” But I do think there were some fundamental differences. It’s not that New York cannot repeat much of this, but … You mentioned the LGBT community.
So the village was not just a welcoming place, but because there was the decline of the waterfront on the west side, there were piers that were just vacant, essentially abandoned buildings. And so, there were places where people could meet that became clubs and became just gathering places. There were interstices of the city that …
That’s an interesting dynamic. When the city actually is in supposed decline, it often becomes a place where it’s possible for artists and other people to find space and to do really interesting things. That’s why I think the ’70s, it had something to push against and it also had an economy to work with. So it was a very creative moment.
But, nonetheless, there was really something still, I think, magnetic about the village. A lot of that did have to do with the LGBT community that was there for a long time, but obviously became a much more prominent part of the identity of the village after Stonewall.
Debbie Millman:
You talked about your dad being an avid reader of The New York Times and was convinced that it was run by the CIA. He cut out articles, he underlined things. You said that this gave you a sense that writing was a social and ethical undertaking, that it was about trying to speak to the ills of society to stimulate a conversation around what is possible. Was this when you first took an interest in writing?
Michael Kimmelman:
I think it actually was before that. I didn’t really imagine myself a writer until after college. But I did admire my family’s belief that there was a responsibility to participate in a conversation about a larger world and around issues of equity and race. Then the question was how does one most usefully do that? I think I came to understand that writing was a very powerful instrument.
I did grow up reading The Times. That was my little errand. I’d be sent out by my parents to get The New York Times from the local store run by this very grumpy Italian woman on Bleecker Street and I would bring home the paper. And so, I read the paper.
I also became enamored of the critics at the paper. In those days, the arts and leisure section of The New York Times would columns by these figures. Because I was a pianist, I would follow the musical coverage.
I also would read the other things because my mother was an artist and I was interested in art. I was very interested in this woman Ada Louise Huxtable, who was such an extraordinary and important, wonderful person and character and writer.
So somewhere in there was gestating this idea of a public role for writing. But I became more interested in academics for a little while and thought that maybe that was where I belonged. It didn’t take me that long, but I eventually found my way back to the idea that the CIA run New York Times was probably my best bet.
Debbie Millman:
If only. You attended Yale University for your undergraduate education and studied history. What did you think you wanted to do professionally at that point? Did you want to do something academically with history?
Michael Kimmelman:
So I was a pianist, as I said, and I went to Yale because it had a great music school. I also wanted a broader education. I gravitated to history really because I thought, okay, listen, if I’m going to be interested in how the world works, I better know what happened.
Debbie Millman:
Right. That helps. Yes.
Michael Kimmelman:
Yeah, it does. I really had this incredibly bizarre pedestrian idea that I should start at the beginning. The beginning for me at that point was still a very western-focused idea, Greece and Rome, and then making my way progressively forward.
But it was a very important grounding. I felt that if you had some basic understanding of history, that you could then understand things that grew out of that history, not just cultural things but social-economic forces, many other things, scientific progress and so forth. So it was really just like me doing training 101 for adulthood.
Debbie Millman:
You graduated from Yale and said you fell into a job as an editor at I.D. magazine. I wasn’t sure if that was the international I.D. magazine or the domestic I.D. magazine.
Michael Kimmelman:
It was the domestic I.D. magazine.
Debbie Millman:
So the one that was owned by F&W that also owned Print magazine.
Michael Kimmelman:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I’m the editorial director of Print.
Michael Kimmelman:
There you go.
Debbie Millman:
So I just found that to be so interesting.
Michael Kimmelman:
Yeah, it was at that time. It was such an interesting publication. It was a trade publication really focused on design, industrial designers, graphic designers, and so forth. I just completely lucked into that job. It was by chance. It changed my whole life and it taught me how to edit and write. I did my first writing for it. I had to commission things. I had to layout pages.
It was a very intense and remarkable opportunity, but it also threw me into a field which I think I just felt a kinship with from the beginning. It’s like the first week, I was sent out to go to the opening of some store in New York. I don’t remember why. I had a press package. It was a glossy folder with some sheets in it and photographs of this store by the designers.
It’s something that, of course, as a journalist, you’ll get a thousand of those things in a week. But at that time it was all new. I was like, “Wow, this is really so slick and cool and I’ve been invited to this place.” It was new and gleaming and there was an architect there. There was something about it that made me feel I was in the world.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Oh, I remember those early feelings.
Michael Kimmelman:
There was also something about I.D. at that point. It was still very much an old-school, but high-modernist publication. There was a graphic designer for it named David Sterling, I remember, who founded something called double space. Very creative.
It was a grounding for me as well and a particular idea about the role of design. I’m so glad I’ll say that I didn’t luck into a job purely about architecture, because there was something about being on the industrial design side of things that was much more in the world and practical, and not downtrodden but a little less fancy, and, therefore, willing to have conversations around very practical issues about the role of design.
I think that also embedded in my head, too. Design wasn’t just about things that Korb passed on to Norman Foster. It was also about the way people sit, the Museum of Modern Arts design objects for $5 or less, a cork screw, this kind of stuff, and how modernism had an ambition to shape the world, to reshape society.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. In many ways, I think the time that you were there, now that I know that that was you there as opposed to the international I.D., and then what Chee Pearlman was trying to do after, it was really the heyday of the magazine. How long did you work there?
Michael Kimmelman:
Oh, it was just about a year, because then I went on back to graduate school. But I continued to do a little writing. I also started to do freelance work outside that, too.
Debbie Millman:
After I.D. magazine, you went back to school. You went to Harvard University for your master’s degree and studied art history. Though I read that you didn’t do it because you were deeply devoted to art history. What motivated you to choose that specific topic?
Michael Kimmelman:
First of all, I had done a fair amount of art history. I’d studied in Italy for a summer and I was doing art history at Yale, too. I grew up with some interest in art history. But it was also at a time when there were interesting people doing art history, including Tim Clark at Harvard and Oleg Grabar, who was the great Islamist.
And so, I was attracted to the idea of doing art history, not because I wanted to become a gallerist or work at a museum but because I thought it was a vehicle to talk about the world at large. But I did, while I was there, keep my foot in the door journalistically. In fact, I wrote my first articles for The New York Times.
But I was frustrated because I realized that I didn’t really want to go into academics. Again, pretty much out of the blue, I mean actually entirely out of the blue, I was approached by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about being their music critic, because I had been doing music, classical music, reviews for The Boston Globe.
Now I actually had another thing going on, which was that I signed a book contract with Random House, which I still haven’t done and hope still to do, on prodigies.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Michael Kimmelman:
Yeah. So I thought when the Atlanta gig came up, having never worked as a daily critic, I didn’t know what it entailed, I could work on my prodigies book and do some music criticism in Atlanta and take a leave from Harvard. So that was in 1984, I think. That’s when I left Harvard without ever quite quitting. I may even now technically still be …
Debbie Millman:
Matriculated.
Michael Kimmelman:
… matriculated at Harvard. And so, I went to Atlanta thinking, okay, I’ll work on this book. Then I discovered what it was like to work as a daily critic. I was doing music at that time.
I lasted in Atlanta a few months. They were ready to run me out of town. I was a little critical of the orchestra in ways that I think the orchestra leaders did not appreciate.
I got a call from The Philadelphia Inquirer, which, I guess, had seen my work. And so, I ended up in the Inquirer, which was a spectacularly fortunate place to land. It was at that time the most exciting and dynamic newspaper in America. They were incredibly generous and kind to me. If I sound like I’m always saying I was lucky and everyone was wonderful, I mean it. I do feel very fortunate.
Debbie Millman:
You do say it a lot. Although I do feel, and this is a whole separate conversation, that the notion of luck is really about timing and opportunity and hard work. But in any case …
Michael Kimmelman:
And to some extent, of course, trying to seize on the opportunities you do have. The Inquirer was a place where I had the opportunity to really try to stretch out as a journalist and was given really good guidance by editors. I was there not very long either when I … A couple of years. I moved to The New York Times in, I think, ’87.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, your first article came out on April 29th, 1987.
Michael Kimmelman:
There you go.
Debbie Millman:
It was a review of an all-finished concert, where you started the article in this way. I love this lead. “Time has generally been a good editor. In this age of historical reexamination, the process of unearthing lost works by long gone composers has become a flourishing business. Private archives, neglected library shelves, and an attic or two have yielded to inquiring musicologists a good number of finds that have then found their way into the concert stage, and in many cases, onto recordings.” Do you still agree with that sentence, “Time has generally been a good editor”?
Michael Kimmelman:
Oh God, yes, of course. And a cruel one too sometimes. But yes, absolutely.
Debbie Millman:
You actually started at The Times as a music critic, working alongside people like John Russell. I understand that when he learned that you’d been trained as an art historian, he asked you if you would also be interested in writing about art. You’ve said that he must have been desperate to invite you to do that.
Michael Kimmelman:
Well, I think … I mean I-
Debbie Millman:
I can’t imagine John Russell being desperate about anything-
Michael Kimmelman:
I know. He was the coolest customer.
Debbie Millman:
… but why would you think that?
Michael Kimmelman:
So I should also say John became the godfather to my older child. I loved John and his wife Rosamond, and I miss them both very much. He was a remarkable figure who emerged in post-war London and had had an incredible career during the Second World War working with Ian Fleming and the naval intelligence for Churchill. Then after the war, wrote about theater and music and became the art critic of The Sunday Times, and wrote many, many books.
So he was more than a role model. He was a mythic figure to me. But he, therefore, also was appreciative of people who were, I think, able to write about and were interested in different kinds of things.
I suppose if I said he was desperate, it was also because I really had not done any kind of journalistic art writing at that point, and this was the deepest end of the deepest pool. I was hesitant too, not just because I didn’t want to make a complete idiot of myself in public, but also I just wasn’t … It’s a very odd thing.
I’d been a musician, so I had a totally natural understanding of what music critics did. But because I’d gone into art history, my relationship to art writing was really rather academic. I thought, “Art criticism, what is that?” It just seems somehow tawdry. I don’t know. I just didn’t quite get it.
Debbie Millman:
It’s an interesting word for it.
Michael Kimmelman:
But he was in his way very lovely and persuasive and said why don’t I try doing something? And so, I did. As they say, the rest was history. Art writing, immediately … I don’t remember exactly, but I think the first show I wrote about was … At Pace Gallery, was about Rothko and Miro or something. So here were these two large figures. There was a lot to talk about. It just felt that the canvas was bigger and the language was richer.
Debbie Millman:
Well, even just the conceptual nature of both artists makes it as much art-based as idea-based, I think.
Michael Kimmelman:
Yes, that’s right. So I mean I just found it much more natural, to be honest with you. I quit my music gig and moved over to the arts place.
Debbie Millman:
Once you took that job, though, I read that you felt like you were conducting your education as an art critic in a very public and conspicuous way, and have said you spent your first few years on the job just trying not to make a complete idiot of yourself in public.
Michael Kimmelman:
Yeah. Well, for sure.
Debbie Millman:
Your words, not mine.
Michael Kimmelman:
Yeah. No, I think that’s exactly right. I will say there are two ways one can do that kind of a job in that kind of a position. One is to try to make your mark by actually saying extremely bold things and being very decisive and staking out a territory.
I would say that when I became the architecture critic, I was in much better position to do something like that than when I became the art critic when I succeeded John, which was rather quickly after this, because I was very young and there was a lot to learn, but I also felt that the art world was a rather mandarin place. It’s a bubble. It’s a community. There’s an inside and an outside to it.
Debbie Millman:
Very much.
Michael Kimmelman:
And so, I felt like an outsider, which was an odd thing for the now new chief art critic of The New York Times to be, but it was a useful thing in some ways. It gave me a certain kind of distance from this. But it also meant that I felt like I could put my foot wrong very easily, as one does in a place where you really feel a little foreign.
Debbie Millman:
What do you view as the role of the critic now?
Michael Kimmelman:
Oh, geez.
Debbie Millman:
Big fat question there for you. Just snuck that one in.
Michael Kimmelman:
Yeah. Look, I think it depends on so many things. Which critic, what field, for what publication. It’s a very … I don’t want to just fall back on some general template, but I do think that there is a conversation around these fields which critics operate, that the critic is responsible for stimulating.
I think the thumbs up, thumbs down aspect, the police traffic cop on the corner handing out tickets, or the teacher giving gold stars and stuff like this, that actually does have some function in consumer-specific fields. So I think for restaurants and food, for instance, you do want to know whether the restaurant is worth it. You want to know that probably with movies and TV, there’s a lot more service journalism now focused on that. Which series on Netflix or Apple+ should I watch, because I’m going to devote so much time? I think there is a responsibility a critic has to telling you whether it’s worth your time.
I certainly think in my field, in architecture, it’s a completely different role and it’s why I think I feel most comfortable doing this. In the art field, it’s not about a consumer really, because very few people are in the market. Your writing does play a role, I think an increasingly minor one, in the operations of the market.
But there is this sense that you are adding an opinion and the opinion is based on, I think, the strength of your voice. That’s interesting, but it’s also a very weak foundation. Therefore, you yourself … It’s not ad hominem exactly, but there’s a lot of ambiguity about the value of remarks and comments and opinions in this world.
That’s not, as I say, a bad thing. But in, for instance, what I write about now, first of all, there are a lot of facts. So a building, let’s say, costs a certain amount. Let’s say it’s a housing project. It has certain kinds of units in it. It may involve a certain level of affordability. It exists on a certain block and a certain place, which has a certain effect on the other buildings in that neighborhood.
There are a lot of ways in which you’re dealing with not just a vastly more complex set of issues, but you’re also operating with some very tangible and specific problems. So it’s not only about whether you think a building looks good or not, but about those other issues. What are the stakes? That’s what you’re trying to wrestle with here around, I think, the built world. What kind of world are we building?
So to me, that requires a different kind of repertorial responsibility and skill. I would have to say that the arc of my writing as a critic has continually broadened, and that’s what kept me doing it, my ability to do it in an expanding and different way over time.
Debbie Millman:
You brought this up very briefly before. You said one of the reasons you returned to playing the piano and to performing was because you thought that if you were going to write as a critic, it was going to be very useful to put yourself in a situation where you are also the subject to other people’s judgments. Especially if you’re wielding a giant stick like you are by the virtue of the publication you’re writing for, you’ve stated it’s useful to remember what it’s like to make yourself vulnerable by putting your heart and soul on the line. Has that softened your writing as a critic, or has it given you more courage because you’ve also put yourself out there?
Michael Kimmelman:
I don’t know whether the people from the Atlanta Symphony were right that I was an obnoxious northerner coming down there as a kid to tell them off about the orchestra, by the way, which had amazing players in it.
So I don’t know if it’s softened exactly. I’d like to think anyway that my writing has sharpened because I feel much more naturally and deeply the issues that I’m writing about, because they have come back full circle to that world I described in the beginning of how people live and how we treat each other and what we are building. We’re not building for each other.
So I think the stakes are very high. But, yes, I do think that as you get older too, it’s not just about putting myself out there. I think you have an appreciation for how difficult things are to get really meaningful things done, to do meaningful work.
And so, I’d like to think that my writing is more measured. It’s very easy to score points and get a reputation as somebody who’s a flashy writer or somebody who’s fun to read by just saying nasty things.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. I mean it’s like candy for people. Those are the reviews that go viral about how you come out of a restaurant hungry, or, oh my God, that Eleven Madison Review when they went vegetarian. Those things just break my heart because of how much somebody works to make something.
Michael, your latest book is titled Intimate City: Walking New York, which began with an email you sent at 1:32 PM on March 13th, 2020, an infamous day in our history. New York had confirmed its first cases of what would be the worst public health crisis in a century.
You wrote to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk with you. You suggested walking through a place that was meaningful to them, illuminated the city, and what they loved about it. Initially, your goal was distraction from a scary and frightening time when everything seemed uncertain. Aside from a book, what did the walks evolve into?
Michael Kimmelman:
For me, what evolved was an opportunity to remind people that the city was a rock and an inspiration. It was something people could see out their windows in the beginning. It was something we could walk around when nothing else seemed safe.
Then it also became something that I think united us. It was a way of talking about how we share this thing with this responsibility, but also this enterprise, which represents a notion of society, togetherness, and progress.
So I wanted to turn the book into something that was a celebration of the complexity and diversity of the city and the people who made it and make it every day. That was the joy of it.
I also think it was just, frankly, distracting, distracting for me, distracting for the people who went on the walks with me, but also for readers. At a time when every story seemed terrifying, there was something joyous and happy about some of these stories.
Debbie Millman:
The book covers four of the five boroughs and some 540 million years of history as you walk through LGBTQ Greenwich Village, Chinatown, Harlem, and more, and you take readers back to an age when Times Square was still a beaver pond and Yankees Stadium was a salt marsh. In the chapter about the East River, you state, “Odd though it may sound, New York’s heart is its perimeter.” I’m wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that.
Michael Kimmelman:
So I’m a native New Yorker. I moved back from Berlin the end of 2011. One of the big changes after being gone for a few years was to see how the waterfront had changed, how areas that had been still warehouses and the margins of the city had become greened and opened up.
It was a reminder of the incredible role that the waterfront has played in the city. I thought people … I grew up too in the village. I wasn’t that far from the Hudson River. I would be there, but I didn’t really have a relationship with it daily.
But also Deborah Berke, who was one of the people I wrote to in the beginning and said, “Any place you want to talk about that’s personal and meaningful to you?” she lives on the Upper East Side and she walks along the riverfront. That’s her solace and joy every day. She does that with her husband. Sometimes she’ll take the ferry to her office.
And so, out of that grew this idea about … I think each of these chapter is really intended to say something larger about the city, not just to be personal to the person who’s walking with, but to tell the readers about some larger thing about what created the city and what the meaning of the city is, how it operates.
Debbie Millman:
As a native New Yorker, I sometimes get really cocky about what I know about the city. Many, many, many years ago, I took my then very little brother on one of those red bus tours because he was so excited about the bus, not so much about what he was going to learn but being on this double-decker bus.
I ended up learning so much that I couldn’t believe how arrogant I’d been about what I thought I knew about the city, and came to this book really excited about how much more I could learn. It does not disappoint.
You walk through Brooklyn with Thomas J. Campanella, who teaches city planning and directs the urban and regional studies program at Cornell. He’s also the historian in residence for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. He’s a fourth generation Brooklynite and the author of Brooklyn: The Once and Future City.
I was born in Brooklyn, and I loved learning so much about the borough. One of my favorites is this. “Brooklyn was officially incorporated in 1834 by the start of the Civil War. Not three decades later, Brooklyn had already become the third largest city in America.” Michael, I believe that it still is. Is that correct?
Michael Kimmelman:
I’m not sure of the exact population of Brooklyn. It could be the third largest. Now it must be Chicago. I’d have to look up the population. But I mean one of the other interesting things about that is that we take for granted New York has five boroughs. This is New York City.
That was a relatively new thing. It happened at the turn of the last century that all five boroughs came together. That’s when we built that giant building next to the Brooklyn Bridge, on the Manhattan side, and when we declared ourselves this greater metropolis.
But they were very independent places, these boroughs, with very different identities. We also have to remember that the subways weren’t always there. So getting from Brooklyn to Manhattan, it was a trip. Brooklyn fed Manhattan with resources, but Manhattan was an island.
It’s easy to say, but once you start to unpack this history and understand how neighborhoods develop as a result, and industries develop, I find it infinitely fascinating. It tells you so much about things that you … It’s not just what you think you know that you pass through unconsciously every day. Why are the streets of Chinatown or the village shaped this way? How did that happen? All these kind of things which as a New Yorker like you, I didn’t necessarily think I knew, but I realized how little I knew.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, or you took for granted. I didn’t know that Brooklyn Heights was America’s first commuter suburb. But it makes perfect sense.
Michael Kimmelman:
Right. There you go. Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
I also learned that Anaïs Nin named her home, which was also in the area of Brooklyn Heights, February House, because some of the occupants had February birthdays. It was home to, listen to this, listeners, Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Kurt Weill, Gypsy Rose Lee, Lotte Lenya. The building’s gone now. It was demolished … It just kills me. It was demolished to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Do you know by any chance, Michael, why it wasn’t declared a landmark?
Michael Kimmelman:
The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was also what gave us the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which is, of course, the great movie shot of Manhattan from Brooklyn, is essentially the roof of the Brooklyn-Queens’s Expressway, which clings to the cliff of the heights over what’s now Brooklyn Bridge Park.
So, yes, we did lose that building. In those days, there weren’t landmark laws and there wasn’t the same attitude, really, towards preservation. But that’s a really interesting example. Now you walk around Brooklyn Heights and you see the promenade and you think, “Oh, well, it seems eternal.” In fact, it’s a very mixed bag creation, a kind of jury-rigged attempt to drive highways through New York and not completely destroy all of Brooklyn Heights.
So we get the promenade, we also get the highway, we lose some buildings. It’s a complicated organic organism, New York City, and I find that part of it also is deeply interesting.
Debbie Millman:
You walked the East Village with the writer Lucy Sante and you write this in the book. “By the 1960s, what used to be called simply the northern quadrant of Manhattan’s Lower East Side took on a bohemian title, the East Village. It became home to beats, hippies, and new wave bands to Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, Abbie Hoffman, Fillmore East, the Poetry Project, and, during more recent decades, to graffiti artists and gentrifying droves of New York University students. To repurpose a phrase by another former resident, William S. Burroughs, ‘In the East Village, the layers of history wrap around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.'”
Michael, how do you feel about the massive gentrification of the East Village? As somebody who in the early ’80s spent a lot of time in the East Village, it feels heartbreaking. The first time I ever saw the gap there, I knew it was over.
Michael Kimmelman:
Yeah, it’s such a complex subject, gentrification, I think. I do obviously feel, as so many people do, that the way we live, the system we operate under, it’s a very capitalistic system, of course, empowers real estate interests in New York City to an often extremely unhealthy degree. We’re beholden to real estate interests, for instance, to create affordable housing, which used to be a public responsibility. A lot of gentrification … Gentrification is not the word I really prefer.
Debbie Millman:
Okay.
Michael Kimmelman:
I think the word that’s crucial is displacement. I think that that’s really what people feel, and especially people in poor neighborhoods, people in vulnerable neighborhoods there. What they’re concerned is not necessarily that there isn’t an investment or improvements to the neighborhood, which is often what comes with money, but they don’t want to lose their homes. They don’t want to be able to no longer afford to shop and exist in a neighborhood. That’s really about displacement.
Gentrification, in some cases, can be a good thing. I mean I mentioned earlier about Greenwich … Next door, the village where I lived. It was a dingy and shabby place in some ways, and we can romanticize that, but it’s nicer that the streets are cleaner and some of the parks are better maintained.
I think gentrification, though, is a term that we associate with the loss of something that we valued because it’s meaningful in our lives. Then very often it does mean the dissolution of a neighborhood that found a bond over the physical fabric of that neighborhood, which has changed. So that might be a corner bodega. It might be just the way the benches are arranged in the median, in the middle of Broadway, the unconscious ways that the city evolves that people adapt to and then find a sense of home.
The reason there’s a hesitation in my voice is because I don’t want to constantly romanticize the city as it used to be, certainly as it was when I was a child. I fear that the most destructive forces today actually include nimbies who are against almost any kind of change that threatens what they have and a kind of preservationist movement that presumes anything that’s new has got to be worse.
But the city is a constantly changing thing. It’s like us, it needs to evolve. That doesn’t mean you give free reign to wealthy developers to build whatever they want. The city is a conversation. It’s a place we share. But obstruction to all change is also a very unhealthy thing.
So I miss that East Village. But I also think out of it came things, other neighborhoods that grew as a result of people being pushed out of that neighborhood. For instance, Mott Haven. There was an interesting community of people who started to do music and art in Mott Haven and on the lower East Side, really the lower East side.
So we have to, I think, be focused and alert on all changes, but also open and sensitive to the idea that not everything that’s going to happen is going to be bad.
Debbie Millman:
No, I absolutely agree. I still get very excited when I see new things being built. There’s something really interesting about having lived in New York my whole life, seeing a building and knowing before it was that, it was that, and before it was that, it was that, and before it was that, it was that. So you have this wonderful history that you might not have ever been able to have had you not been a long-term resident of a place and weren’t pushed out.
I still do get a lot of excitement about the new things that are coming and things that I hear about and the way parks have been reorganized, or the way streets have been closed down for people to sit and be able to enjoy what’s around them without worrying about cars.
Michael Kimmelman:
Right. I think that’s a very good example, Debbie, because we created these plazas out of these areas that had been traffic-clogged like Times Square, but also around Madison Square Park, and then all over the city in underserved neighborhoods. Those are improvements.
I’m not saying that necessarily every change is good, but I’m definitely saying that resistance to all change … New Yorkers have, I think, developed a fear and have become very good at slowing down and blocking things, and some things should be blocked but not everything. We have lost progress, for sure.
With threats like climate change and with growing inequities in which we really need more affordable housing, this is an issue of fairness, not just a question of historical preservation.
Debbie Millman:
Michael, I have one last question for you today. You’ve stated that the goal of the Intimate City is attunement. You write, “It’s cicerones. My walking companions are Benjamin’s and Baudelaire’s flaneurs, or Joyce’s characters in Ulysses, offering up their own psychogeographies. Nabokov used to instruct his Cornell students to chart on a map the paths that Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom followed through Dublin if they hoped to understand that novel.”
You go on to state, “To have walked a place is also in some measure to possess it.” Do you feel now that you have done these walks and written this book that you possess New York City in a different way?
Michael Kimmelman:
Yes, absolutely, and I say that fully aware that anybody and everybody can do the same thing. You never really understand a place unless you walk it, unless you’re there. Why are we tourists? Why do we travel? There’s something about that physical presence in a place, understanding at scale, breathing the air, just …
And New York City, I think, the beauty, the miracle of New York City is that it’s always been a place where absolutely everybody can come and immediately call themselves a New Yorker, and that’s just fine. It is both the American idea, but there’s something very cosmopolitan, truly cosmopolitan, about New York, and that has to do with just coming here and feeling you are a part of it and it is a part of you. I wanted that to come across in the book, too.
We each may have our own way of seeing the city and of experiencing it and using it, but we collectively own this same thing and, therefore, we are collectively responsible for it as well. That’s a very beautiful and I think the highest, really, condition of human society.
So I don’t mean to be too highfalutin. I mean mostly I hope that when people read the book, they just have a lot of fun. There’s a lot of funny stories.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean people can find out why Times Square is called Times Square, why the city poisoned its own water supply. I mean there are so many interesting stories and things to experience and learn. Michael, thank you so much for making such a marvelous book that really matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Michael Kimmelman:
Debbie, thank you so much.
Debbie Millman:
Michael Kimmelman’s latest book is titled The Intimate City: Walking New York. You can read 32 years of his columns and writing about art and architecture in The New York Times. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.