At the time of their original publication, the walks must have felt reassuring, with Kimmelman and his guest hosts - architects, professors, urban designers, historians, authors, community activists - spending much of their time on not only the concrete past and present of the neighborhoods, but also speculating about their futures - and there would be a future, everyone was confident of that. He wrote to colleagues and friends, “With everything shuttering and people increasingly likely to feel stir crazy at home, I am thinking of doing a modest series for The Times: architectural walks around the city, in which I am taken on these tours by different people.” Kimmelman sought “distraction, joy, consolation.” However, the “abiding thought in this book” would be “the glory of the city, not … COVID-19.”Įncountering the essays now, as the book The Intimate City: Walking New York, published after the worst of the pandemic has apparently passed, does take away some of the urgency Times readers must have felt encountering the pieces in the spring, summer, and fall of 2020, when a cure for COVID was still an uncertain promise, and the future of civilization sometimes felt as though it might be in the balance. Michael Kimmelman, the architect critic for the New York Times, had a particularly ambitious idea. At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, it was not uncommon for people to pause and imagine a project they might carry out that would be difficult to do otherwise.

The intimate city michael kimmelman