Hello New York by Julia Rothman

Julia Rothman is a wonderful and entertaining graphic storyteller. She starts out with an ode to her hometown of City Island and proceeds to the icons of the five boroughs of New York City. In the Grand Central Library, a librarian recounts a bartender who would go through the rare books, looking for antique cocktail recipes. He wanted to bring back 1920’s drinks, perhaps to recreate something from the F. Scott Fitzgerald era.

   Rothman uses illustrations to describe the buildings, and uses words to tell us about the characters in them. She draws the Puck Building, Grand Central Station, the 23^rd Street public baths, and the Spa Castle in Queens. We get the Astor Place Cube (gone and deeply missed), Union Square South, which she describes as the “most unloved” (I agree, I hated the installation since it opened in 2000) and many others. Thankfully, she goes through a lot of overlooked sites, like the Cloisters, the Transit Museum, and the Museum of the Moving Image. Staten Island, not a tourist hub, gets included too, thanks to the tattoo museum, a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and the tugboat graveyard.

    My favorite part is where she draws the different kinds of apartments-the studio, the railroad, the two-bedrooms-along with the rats, bedbugs, and roaches. However, I think these parts should be extended, maybe they could be an article in the Sunday Times? The apartments could even be a children’s book, or if she has enough drawings, a coffee table book? It would be a great NYC souvenir.