The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Hello, New York: Julia Rothman’s Illustrated Love Letter to Gotham’s Five Boroughs

On the heels of Wendy MacNaughton’s magnificent Meanwhile in San Francisco (which is less about San Francisco than about the human soul) comes Hello, New York: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Five Boroughs (public library) from Brooklyn-based illustrator Julia Rothman, who has previously given us such charming treats as The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science, Drawn In, and Farm Anatomy.

Rothman takes us on a tour of New York’s hidden treasures and traces the little-known, fascinating stories and personalities behind the city’s most iconic landmarks and places, from the rare books curator at The New York Public Library to the Hasidic Jewish couple that runs New York’s go-to store for bras, from standbys like the ubiquitous bodega and the yellow taxi cab to curiosities like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, an extraordinary time-capsule of working-class immigrant life in the 19th century, to cultural icons like the ghostly beams illuminating the skies where the Twin Towers used to be.

Just like San Francisco’s Dolphin Club Swimmers, New York has its own brave souls who plunge into the East River — here they are, mere minutes from my own abode in Brooklyn:

Then there are the buildings, reminiscent in spirit of James Gulliver Hancock’s illustrated architectural tour of Gotham, but bent through the lens of Rothman’s distinctive style:

But my favorite section, perhaps predictably, is an homage to one of the city’s greatest cultural institutions, the New York Public Library, guarded by its famous lions, Patience and Fortitude:

Complement Hello, New York with two very different love letters to Gotham: a photographic one, honoring its humans and a literary one, celebrating Central Park.

Images courtesy of Julia Rothman / Chronicle Books


Published March 20, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/03/20/hello-new-york-julia-rothman/

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