Seeking New York

"If you're looking for yet another photography-led coffee table showpiece of New York's skyline, look away. NYPD police inspector Tom Miller's book has " like most of the buildings it explores " much more substantial foundations." National Geographic Traveller Based on the popular blog Daytonian in Manhattan, Seeking New York investigates the back stories of Manhattan's architecture and monuments. Alongside the expected account of architects, dates and styles, it reveals the human history of the buildings and statues: the scandals, the tribulations, the joys and achievements, the humanity, indeed, of the New Yorkers who lived within these walls. Meet Dorothy Parker, S.J.Perelman, Talullah Bankhead and Irving Berlin at the Algonquin Round Table; Maisie Plant, who persuaded her husband to sell his Fifth Avenue palazzo to Cartier for $100 and a pearl necklace; James and Abby Gibbons, whose Chelsea home was one of the stations on the Underground Railroad by which fugitive slaves found their way from the South to Canada. Perhaps you would rather not meet Jack the Rat, who for a dime would bite the head off a live mouse (for a quarter he'd do the same to a rat); or Ivan Poderjay, who left his bride's apartment for their honeymoon - with her body in a steamer trunk. Here the ever-changing face of Manhattan is captured through the structures and their stories.