Jerold S. Kayden

Often guidebooks work on the premise of highlighting the good things about a place, enticing people to visit a city or a country by illustrating and discussing the unique and the beautiful. This guide works in a different way, as it strives to change something about the city by commenting on what needs improvement; call it an activist guidebook. Kayden, with NYC's planning department and the Municipal Art Society (MAS), discusses every one of the city's privately owned public spaces (POPS) known at the end of the millennium. The hundreds of plazas, arcades, concourses, lobbies and other indoor and outdoor spaces that allowed developers to add square footage to their buildings are documented through photos, plans and descriptions, with key facts highlighting what should be legally in the space. The problem is, as Kayden discovers and explains, the spaces often omit some of these features, or close early, or have been dramatically transformed since first created. So the book becomes a call for quality over quantity, a call for improving the public realm even as the distinction between it and private interests has become extremely fuzzy.

The book is a classic and is indispensable for New Yorkers, though it should be noted that Kayden and MAS have launched an online version: https://apops.mas.org/… (plus d'informations)