Names of New York
Discovering the City's Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names
"A casually wondrous experience; it made me feel like the city was unfolding beneath my feet.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
In place-names lie stories. That’s the truth that animates this fascinating journey through the names of New York City’s streets and parks, boroughs and bridges, playgrounds and neighborhoods.
Exploring the power of naming to shape experience and our sense of place, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on the city’s map. He excavates the roots of many names, from Brooklyn to Harlem, that have gained iconic meaning worldwide. He interviews the last living speakers of Lenape, visits the harbor’s forgotten islands, lingers on street corners named for…
$32.00
April 13, 2021
JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO is a geographer and writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and Harper’s Magazine, among many other publications. He is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World, the cocreator (with Rebecca Solnit) of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, and a scholar in residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, where he also teaches.
Names of New York
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Cuba Then, Cuba Now
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro