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    Gone to New York: Adventures in the City
    Gone to New York: Adventures in the City
    Gone to New York: Adventures in the City
    Ebook193 pages4 hours

    Gone to New York: Adventures in the City

    By Ian Frazier and Jamaica Kincaid

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Welcome to Ian Frazier's New York, a city more downtown than up, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who climbed the World Trade Center, and an eighty-three-year-old typewriter repairman whose shop on Fulton Street has drawers full of umlauts. Learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey.

    Like his literary forbears Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, Frazier, in his bewitching, inimitable voice, makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again, the way he did, arriving as a young man from Hudson, Ohio. In classic evocations of the F train, Canal Street, and Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in his iconic "Bags in Trees" essay, Frazier gives us New York again, in all its vital and human multiplicity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 22, 2006
    ISBN9781466800458
    Gone to New York: Adventures in the City
    Author

    Ian Frazier

    Ian Frazier is the author of Travels in Siberia, Great Plains, On the Rez, Lamentations of the Father and Coyote V. Acme, among other works, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He graduated from Harvard University. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

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    • 5/5
      This is a collection of essays that Frazier wrote over the period 1975 to 2005, a number of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. As the title suggests, they’re mostly about New York City.As with most collections, I liked some of the essays better than others and I struggled a bit with my rating. They started off captivating me, especially the one about Canal Street (“The traffic on Canal Street never stops. It is a high-energy current jumping constantly between the poles of Brooklyn and New Jersey”). In the 1970s, Frazier lived in a loft above an Army Navy store on Canal and he describes the whole length of the street ending with a history of the Holland Tunnel.There are three essays on his efforts over the years to remove plastic bags from trees. He creates a Bag Snagger and has it patented and spends his free time plucking bags out of trees (“The snagger worked great--a twist of the crooked metal fingers would inveigle the bag, then the sharpened hook would cut it free. . . . The sensation was like having your arm suddenly extended sixteen feet, and the satisfaction like getting something out of your eye”). Eventually, he also creates a device to retrieve the helium balloons that people let go in the main concourse of Grand Central Station where they mar the beauty of the constellations on the ceiling.I could go on about my favorites (the stories about the manual typewriter repairman, Frazier’s 12 mile walk along Route 3 in New Jersey to the Lincoln Tunnel, the quiet oasis of Butler Library at Columbia University, Frazier’s childhood growing up in Hudson, Ohio) but I’ll stop. As I mentioned, I struggled with my rating because there were occasional essays that didn’t engage me and I put the book down for a month but the last 100 pages were so good that I’m going to give the book 4 ½ stars.Highly recommended for anyone with some knowledge or affection for New York City.
    • 3/5
      Essays chronicling a not-very-deep young man's time in New York and its suburbs. Well written, but awesomely shallow.

    Book preview

    Gone to New York - Ian Frazier

    ANTIPODES

    If you drilled a hole straight through the earth, starting at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, you would pass through ten inches of pavement, four feet of pipes, thirty-five feet of Seventh Avenue subway, about twenty-two hundred miles of rock, about thirty-six hundred miles of nickel-iron core, and then another twenty-two hundred miles of rock. You would come out in the Indian Ocean, 106°3’ east longitude and 40°45’ south latitude, about three hundred miles off the southwest coast of Australia. You would have reached Manhattan’s antipodes, or diametrically opposite point on the globe. You would be about two and a half miles under water.

    Due north of Manhattan’s antipodes, it is 2,040 miles to Malingping, Java. Due south, it is 1,500 miles to the Knox Coast of Antarctica, 2,260 miles to the Russian research station at Vostok, Antarctica, and 2,955 miles to the South Pole. Due west, it is 7,700 miles to Punta Rasa (Flat Point), Argentina. Due east, it is 1,760 miles to Cape Grim, Tasmania. The town nearest to Manhattan’s antipodes is Augusta, Australia, 590 miles to the northeast, where Australians go for fishing vacations and where it rains about half the

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