Book “Through Manhattan”
Through Manhattan like clockwork: Why New York is still the city of cities
– One skyline, 1000 stories: Two tourists in New York looking at Lower Manhattan © Gregor Fischer/dpa-Zentralbild/DPA
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Are there stories about New York that haven’t been told yet? Yes, innumerable. Niklas Maak and Leanne Shapton collect some of them in their book “Through Manhattan” and provide the proof: Anyone who seriously thinks they know the city hasn’t gotten it.
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Everyone knows New York, even if they haven’t been there yet. He knows the city as a backdrop for famous films and video clips, as the setting for novels, as a blueprint for just about every trend in the world. But the familiarity of the city is deceptive, because it’s like this: Even residents or regular visitors to this metropolis will never fully discover it, too many facets and microcosms are constantly changing here. Nevertheless, all friends of the city are united by the famous state of mind: that very special New York feeling.
The New York feeling is a moment that everyone who has been there knows. That moment when you think you’ve never experienced anything like it. The moment you fall in love with the city. For example, the moment when the naked transvestite suddenly sits next to you on the subway, or the moment when a dozen kindergarten children at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge breakdance like the big ones to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” (both examples the author of this text was allowed to experience for himself, both are just two moments of many).
“Through Manhattan”: Monument to the New York feeling
The journalist Niklas Maak and the artist Leanne Shapton have now presented a book that lovingly memorializes the New York feeling: “Through Manhattan” is full of said moments. Maak and Shapton use a trick that is as simple as it is ingenious: They meet at the southern tip of Manhattan, at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, and draw the line on a map all the way to the north. They follow this line for two days, through the street canyons of the noisy island like clockwork.
This approach alone distinguishes the project from the usual tourist guide. Firstly, the trail automatically keeps going off the beaten path, secondly, it leads much further up than usual – as describes Maak in conversation with “Deutschlandfunk Kultur” the moment he realized it: “Man, there are still 120 streets above Central Park.”
And on this route from south to north – which has always been the direction of the immigrants who arrive in New York by ship – Maak finds the people and moments of this city. Here the halal seller looks like Will Smith and the homeless person is more well-groomed than anywhere else. In the middle of the night, the lights are still on in Apple’s emergency store so that desperate cell phone owners can have their broken cell phones “treated” like in a hospital emergency room. And in the Museum of Natural History, a lady has been standing in front of the gorillas for 50 years, explaining the special features of the primate to visitors.
New York: color and shape, feeling and sound
Parallel to Maak’s little anecdotes, Shapton tells her own stories of the city in sketches and packs color and shape, the feel and sounds of New York into pictures. Together, text and illustration create a portrait of the morals of our time. Of course, that only works because New York is still the city that sets the pace, politically, economically and culturally. From here things take their course. The beating heart of the western world, for better or for worse.
However, “Through Manhattan” tells us that the city of cities is still primarily a feeling that can only be defined in moments. And the fact that you actually get the indescribable feeling when leafing through the book is something Maak and Shapton can look back on as a great success of their project.
