Secret New York: An Unusual Guide ('Secret' guides)

This is a gift and I have not given it yet.

I am sure that if you are a real New Yorker, you will have your favourite, off-the-beaten-track recommendations. But this is a good guide for anyone who has been to the city a couple of times and wants to try something a little different. I like the introduction to the Austrian Cultural Forum...the Manhattan grid creates all sorts of design opportunities and challenges... so the ACF is a 24 storey building and just 25 feet wide. I don't know of anyone who has set off to see this building.. yet! I certainly didn't know about the Holocaust Memorial at the Appellate Court. Loads of discoveries to made...Would I add Christie's Auctions to the guide... certainly, you can attend their auctions all around the world, i have been to London.Once again I would love to take an apartment for a couple of weeks and choose one or two unusual sights from the book each day, I think that would be an amazing experience!The Secret Guides - unlike other guides - won't date so easily, so that is a bonus.And in one of the photos we have teamed it up with Final Girls and New York colouring for mindfulness.... just what you need for a trip to the metropolis!!

This is a glorious cock-eyed corrective to all those city guides that want you at the stinking fish-market* by the crack of dawn wherever in the world you are. It’s idiosyncratic, often beautifully written, & if not “secret” then unexpected.Like a slightly less sober WG Sebald, Rives also provides a back-handed history of this wondrous city, and you should try his guide if you have any interest in beavers & seals; a train reef; the skyscraper races; a $13.5 Woolworth cash sale; the US invasion of Canada; Stone, Pearl & Wall St; bird men; the Tong War; wampum; the structure of salt; naked Audrey Munson; “Pegleg” Stuyvesant; Washington’s means & ends; “life underground”; the big apple; a steel-frame church; Guastavino tile; LES catacombs; the setback law; the grid; Birds of America; the birth of baseball; piano marks…I could go on. I happily walked the length of Broadway looking out for the sights he told me about.*there’s also a stinking fish-market for you Rough Guide types.

Bought as Xmas pressie so yet to be tried out for usefulness

Nice, but there's more in New York to discover