A People's Guide to New York City - by Carolina Bank Muñoz & Penny Lewis & Emily Tumpson Molina (Paperback)

About the Book

"A People's Guide to New York City is the fourth in a series of People's Guide books that seek to create a 'deliberate political disruption"'of the ways we know and experience the urban environment. As told by most guidebooks, the story of New York City lingers on the stories of celebrities and artists who made their fortunes here and shared their fame with the city itself. The everyday citizens of New York are not necessarily forgotten in these guidebooks. Indeed their diversity and hardiness, their capacity for invention and overcoming adversity, their toughness, tolerance, and fast-talking hustles are often celebrated. New York is a global city, an immigrant city, a rags-to-riches city, a mecca for money and artistry. New York has created or refined dozens of cultural motifs that leap beyond its boundaries, and fortunes that span the world as well. A People's Guide to New York City makes a straightforward proposition that the life and landscape of New York are a product of social power and its attendant struggles. The streets, the buildings, the institutions, the people, tell a story of movement and countermovement. It is often a story of the prerogatives of great wealth; a story of government invention, intervention and repression; a story that is also of people's demands, creativity, and self-organization. It is a story of stand-off and a story of compromise; battles won, lost, avoided, celebrated, forgotten. To see this, you have to see the whole of the city. As such, A People's Guide brings you to the five boroughs. We present them from north to south, and also organize our sites from north to south and by neighborhoods, moving from Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx to the Lenape Burial Ridge in Staten Island. We selected sites that tell different parts of the stories of New York City's peoples over time and today; not just who they were and are, but how they've made and re-made the city around them. Our sites should change how you view the city itself--its physical landscape, and the places that are most significant in the city's history and ongoing development. By making visible the invisible social dynamics that undergird the city, we hope to shift how the city's students and visitors determine what and who is important to the Big Apple"--

Book Synopsis

This alternative guidebook for one of the world's most popular tourist destinations explores all five boroughs to reveal a people's New York City.

The sites and stories of A People's Guide to New York City shift our perception of what defines New York, placing the passion, determination, defeats, and victories of its people at the core. Delving into the histories of New York's five boroughs, you will encounter enslaved Africans in revolt, women marching for equality, workers on strike, musicians and performers claiming streets for their art, and neighbors organizing against landfills and industrial toxins and in support of affordable housing and public schools. The streetscapes that emerge from these groups' struggles bear the traces, and this book shows you where to look to find them.

New York City is a preeminent global city, serving as the headquarters for hundreds of multinational firms and a world-renowned cultural hub for fashion, art, and music. It is among the most multicultural cities in the world and also one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The people that make this global city function--immigrants, people of color, and the working classes--reside largely in the so-called outer boroughs, outside the corporations, neon, and skyscrapers of Manhattan. A People's Guide to New York City expands the scope and scale of traditional guidebooks, providing an equitable exploration of the diverse communities throughout the city. Through the stories of over 150 sites across the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as thematic tours and contemporary and archival photographs, a people's New York emerges, one in which collective struggles for justice and freedom have shaped the very landscape of the city.

From the Back Cover

"As bright as the city of lights shines, the everyday stories and landscapes that are the basis of its grandeur are often missed by pomp and lore. This volume takes you to New York City in its most multiple and mundane glory. To know all of New York City is to venture to learn the stories of every building, every corner, every street, every brick--and this volume takes us there."--Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University

"One can't understand New York City without understanding how protest and contention have made this city. This is more than just a fine guidebook. If you love the city as I do, reading the book will fill you with the warm pleasure and nostalgia that comes from attachment to place, to history, and to kin. So read it!"--Frances Fox Piven, author of Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements

"The multiracial and multiethnic community struggles foregrounded by A People's Guide to New York City provide organizers and activists with context and perspectives to lift and support grassroots organizing for decades to come."--Javier Valdés, former Codirector of Make the Road New York

"Excellent! This guidebook acquaints walkers in the city with the historical struggles that over centuries have shaped and reshaped Gotham. Recounting key stories of political, economic, and cultural conflict, it brings its narrative down to current social justice campaigns. Well-researched, well-written, and well-organized, it is, in my opinion, the best tour guide of New York."--Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, City University of New York, and founder of the Gotham Center for New York City History

About the Author

Carolina Bank Muñoz is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Penny Lewis is Professor of Labor Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

Emily Tumpson Molina is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Brooklyn at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.