The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Intimate City: Walking New York by Michael Kimmelman

Episode Date: December 4, 2022

The Intimate City: Walking New York by Michael Kimmelman As New York came to a halt with COVID, Michael Kimmelman composed an email to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk. Wherever they liked, he wrote—preferably someplace meaningful to them, someplace that illuminated the city and what they loved about it. At first, the goal was distraction. At a scary moment when everything seemed uncertain, walking around New York served as a reminder of all the ways the city was still a rock, joy, and inspiration. What began with a lighthearted trip to explore Broadway’s shuttered theater district and a stroll along Museum Mile when the museums were closed soon took on a much larger meaning and ambition. These intimate, funny, richly detailed conversations between Kimmelman and his companions became anchors for millions of Times readers during the pandemic. The walks unpacked the essence of urban life and its social fabric—the history, plans, laws, feats of structural engineering, architectural highlights, and everyday realities that make up a place Kimmelman calls “humanity’s greatest achievement.” Filled with stunning photographs documenting the city during the era of COVID, The Intimate City is the ultimate insider’s guide. The book includes new walks through LGBTQ Greenwich Village, through Forest Hills, Queens, and Mott Haven, in the Bronx. All the walks can be walked, or just be read for pleasure, by know-it-all New Yorkers or anyone else. They take readers back to an age when Times Square was still a beaver pond and Yankee Stadium a salt marsh; across the Brooklyn Bridge, for green tea ice cream in Chinatown, for momos and samosas in Jackson Heights, to explore historic Black churches in Harlem and midcentury Mad Men skyscrapers on Park Avenue. A kaleidoscopic portrait of an enduring metropolis, The Intimate City reveals why New York, despite COVID and a long history of other calamities, continues to inspire and to mean so much to those who call it home and to countless others.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

I should make a challenge there every day to hit a different pitch and just see what happens. I don't know. Clearly, my wanting to end up in opera is not going to work out. We all know that after 13 years, right? Welcome to the show, my friends. We certainly appreciate you being part of the big show. Thanks for all the calls and emails we've been getting lately. It's been quite exciting, especially the calls. We're actually going to put a number out. I'm going to make a number for the show people can call into because people have been tracking my number down lately and calling in and i'm just like well that's pretty cool but it's not my personal line damn it which i don't mind so much but we'll make a business line for it so stay

tuned for that uh there'll be some giveaways we'll be giving away too that we've got coming up so we'll watch for that as well refer the show to your family family, friends, and relatives. Remember, it's the holiday season. One thing we should make an announcement with, we're doing our big CEO interviews at CES show that we've been doing for 13 years or so. And those are coming up. So stay tuned for that. There'll be a bunch of products

we'll be reviewing, of course, as we always do from CES show. And it's going to be exciting. That's going to be the first week of January. So you'll see a flood of our interviews there. We sit down with CEOs of major corporations and talk to them about what the hell is this? No, I'm just kidding. You know, basically whatever the phone is or whatever the thing is. Anyway, youtube.com, fortune house, Chris Foss, goodreads.com, fortune house, Chris Foss, the big LinkedIn groups, the LinkedIn newsletter, all this stuff we do on LinkedIn. And we're trying to get stuff working over there on the, uh, what is it? The Tik TOK, but we just can't be cool. So we're

working on, we're trying to get our mojo on whatever that means. Anyway, we have an amazing author on the show. He's the, uh, architecture critic of the New York times. You may have heard of it. It's been around for a couple hundred years. I think at least a couple, one or 200 years. I'm just making stuff up as I go along people he's on the show with us today he's gonna be talking about his newest book that comes out it's uh yesterday november 29th 2022 i can't believe it's almost christmas uh the intimate city walking new york michael kimmelman is on the show with us today as i mentioned he's the architectural critic architecture critic he can be mentioned, he's the architectural critic, architecture critic, he can be architectural if he wants,

I mean, it's a free country, of the New York Times. He was the paper's chief art critic and from Berlin created the Abroad column covering politics and culture across Europe and the Middle East. He has reported from more than 40 countries and founded Headway, a non-profit journalistic

initiative focused on global challenges and paths to progress. A native New Yorker, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Congratulations. Kimmelman is the author of The Accidental Masterpiece on the Art of Life and Vice Vers, and portraits, talking with artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and elsewhere. I'm not sure where elsewhere is that. Is that a place or is that just everywhere? Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you? Fine, Chris. Thanks. Happy to be here. Congratulations on the new book. We're glad to have you. Give us your dot coms where we want people to find you on the interwebs and get to know you better.

Yeah, well, I'm at Kimmelman on Twitter, so long as Twitter is still around. And I don't have my own website, but I'm reachable through the New York Times. And you can click on my byline, and you can get to me directly. It's not exactly like your direct phone, but it's pretty close. There you go. The New York Times, I've heard of that. We've had a number of reporters and journalists from the... Reporters and journalists? Reporters, journalists? Whatever. Whatever. Yeah. From the New York Times. Great publication. Wonderful

journalists who write amazing books we have out on the show. So you've been writing for some time. What motivated you to want to write this book? Well, Chris, it actually grew in the very first days of COVID. It grew out of a kind of despair and desperation. So New York had actually just gone into lockdown. I mean, I think Governor, then Governor Cuomo, had basically told people everybody had to stay in. And so,

you know, like everybody else, I felt panicked and confused and so forth. But I also knew that I wouldn't be able to, like, do my job in a normal way. And I wanted to sort of think of what I could do, partly to get my own mind off the pandemic. It was about to become a pandemic. But also to see what I could do which was useful. So I sent out an email to a whole bunch of people I knew, architects and designers and writers and others. And I suggested that we take a walk around the city. Take me, I said, someplace

meaningful to you. We could just take a short walk. That was still possible. And I thought, you know, back then there was a lot of pressure on people like me and journalists and people in the media and everyone was supposed to predict what was supposed to happen. And, you know, I didn't know what was going to happen, you know, in an hour. And I was completely paralyzed and unable to predict anything and also knew that we were doing a lot of leaning on into disaster scenarios. You know, like there was a lot of prognosticating about the end of days. Yeah. Especially if you were, as I was, living in New York City,

the news was just everyone was abandoning New York City. And it was just like some one of these disaster movies of the 1970s, people fleeing and the city was going to end and what were we going to do and so forth. I just, A, I had no idea. But B, I didn't think that was true i mean the city has been through lots of ups and downs a century ago we went through a another epidemic and uh came out of that much stronger you know so what i did know was that the city itself was a kind of

rock you know it was something we all shared. It was something we could see outside our windows. It was something that gave us a sense of community when we were suddenly locked inside. So I thought walking around would be kind of a distraction and a joy. And it would give me something to do besides worry and worry about my family. Yeah. So that's how it started. And then it just grew over time because I think people were glad to get something that wasn't just another, you know, gloom and doom story about the pandemic.

But then also I think it was something that bound us together because that's what cities at their best do. You know, you speak to that well because we went through something where, you know, something that we took for granted every day, you know, was taken kind of from us a little bit. And we, you know, like, you know, I had always gone out, you know, like you to eat with friends and coffee and, you know, you go out and do stuff. You don't really think about it. Like, you're not like, you're not like, well, what if I didn't have Starbucks today?

Which you probably should think about. Get some real coffee, people. But, you know, you, you, you, you, you, you suddenly couldn't go out to eat with people. And you lost your society, your community. And you're just like, well, you got to go spend time, you know,

with the wife and kids. And I mean, you see my kids. No, I'm just kidding. I don't have any kids. That's the way that joke works. Um,

but I've seen other people's kids and they should really, anyway, I'm just kidding. Being funny. Um, just offend everyone's kids, Chris, on the show.

That'll make for great, that'll make for great audience. So pleasure. Uh, uh, we lost everybody who doesn't have a kid's kids, Chris, on the show. That'll make for great audience pleasure. We lost everybody who doesn't have a kid's Chris. Three people are in the podcast. Anyway, before I segue again. And so it was really hard. And you realize how important those things were.

And yeah, I mean, the dire situation that was coming out of New York and, of course, big cities where people were like, ah, we're out of here, we're moving. You saw these moving trucks that were leaving big cities. And, you know, people were doing the death knell of like, they'll never be big cities anymore. Everyone's moving to the middle of the country. And then, of course, everyone moved to Kansas and went, holy shit, we're moving back to New York City. I just lost the Kansas crowd, all five of them.

So you really speak to that. And it was hard to come back to that. One of the most interesting things was seeing Times Square like a ghost town, like just empty. What was that like for you to see that? Yeah, I mean, the very first walk I did in the book was with a guy named David Rockwell, who's done a million. He's an architect, and he's done a lot of shows on broadway one tony's and stuff like this and we

met in time square and walked around and there was like nobody there i mean the new york times is called it's called time square for a reason uh so it's where my office is. And I was used to being there, you know, every day and seeing mobs. And now it was nobody. There were there was a couple of people when, you know, Elmo and Mickey Mouse costumes hoping to find some easy marks, but there were no tourists. It was nothing on the other hand, and that was very eerie, but it was also a kind of wonderful moment in retrospect to sort of see. It was like time stopped to see the buildings, to see the streets, to sort of breathe and look around. You know, one of the things about the way we move and operate in cities is often that we're just, you know, not really taking that moment to look. And we're trying to get quickly from one place to another. So on a certain level, I think the pandemic also had the value of letting us stop

and look around, reminding us how we wanted each other in those, in those streets as well. Except for my kids. Um, yeah, the, uh, have you seen him lately? Uh,

that's going to be the callback joke of the show, I guess. Um, you're right. It was eerie. Like I would see pictures in New York and I'd just be like, holy crap. And it would,

you know, look like, what was that legend movie with that one actor who punched the other actor? Well, Will Smith, you know, it was like, it's kind of like ap what was that legend movie with that one actor who punched the other actor, Will Smith? It's kind of like apocalyptic sort of stuff that was eerie. So you guys, let me ask you this because I wanted to ask you this first. Why did you name the book The Intimate City? Is this a love letter to New York, basically?

It really did end up being one because, first of all, I'm a native New Yorker. I grew up here. I've lived elsewhere. I lived in Europe. I came lived elsewhere. I lived in Europe. I came back. And I love other places. I'm not – I know what people – some people think of New York. It's not for everybody. But I think it's an equal opportunity elitist city, meaning anybody can come here and the next morning just say they're a New Yorker, and that's totally fine by me. I think it's a very welcoming place, in fact, for whatever its reputation might be.

So I love this city, and it began with a desire that people also share in that affection for this thing, which was binding us together. But I also took people around and asked them to take me to places that were, you know, meaningful to them. So a lot of what I got was not, you know, it's not like an architecture tour or just a guidebook, which you, you know, I mean, there's great guidebooks out there. It was really a way in which people talked about themselves and their lives and what was meaningful to them.

And in some cases about their childhoods and neighborhoods where they grew up. And, you know, because cities are lived places. They're not accumulations of buildings or landmarks. And everybody has a different experience. When I moved through Greenwich Village, where I grew up, you know, I have a million feelings. I'm not checking off the box of the name of an architect who did a building on a particular street. And I mean, that's a good case where I was walking around with somebody and he was just pointing out how the neighborhood had changed and a street that I had basically grown up on, I'd never really looked at. I never stopped in that way to think about how

the city got the street and the city in general got to take the forms that it did. Why one side of the street looked different from another. So, you know, it was intimate in a lot of ways. It was intimate for me. It was intimate, I think, for the people who I walked around with. And I do also believe that New York has this reputation, too, of being such a big city that it's kind of anonymous. But in fact, it's made up of millions of people who are neighbors and know each other and have their streets and communities where they're, there's very tightly bound together. And there's a lot of intimacy in the city in the best sense of the word. Yeah. I mean, people are connected to their community. And I think that's what we found during COVID. We were alienated from our community or, you know, we couldn't enjoy our

community. And that's when we realized how important it was. You know, I realized a lot of things. I think everyone sat down and said, what are my values in life? What's, what's important? What's not important? What's, what's meaningful? What's not meaningful? You know, my family can disappear in a heartbeat and, uh, you know, this virus can take them and, and I don't know, you know, I, it can just happen like that. And you don't know, it was like so random. Um, it's a beautiful book because not only do you have a lot of interesting pictures that you don't normally see in like, you know,

the mainstream, like here's the Eiffel tower or not the Eiffel tower, the, uh, such a Liberty. Here's the, you know, here,

here's all the things everyone wants to see. And you really go around and, and throughout it, you're, you're having these conversations with people that go on these tours with you. And it really kind of adds to the intimacy of it. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.

Photography is beautiful. I had some amazing photographers who did that work. And since I didn't do this myself, I can just say the people at Penguin Press who produced the book produced this incredibly beautiful object. It's just it's a beautiful thing and heavy. Yeah, it's a heavy book. It's a heavy book. Way to it. But the tone of it, I think, is very light and upbeat and accessible and human, which was, which was the goal. I wanted people to, um, you know,

it's not a book about COVID, but you're right that, that it's, it grows out of that sense that there is this thing that we share each other in this place, um, in these different communities. Uh, and so there's a, you know, there's a sense in which I think the preciousness of the book, in a way, is a little like the preciousness that we felt about our lives together that seemed so vulnerable at that time. Yeah, you're like, are we ever going to be able to go out and eat again? Are we all just going to be locked in our homes? Well, you know, Chris, one of the interesting things that happened early on in New York, and I think it happened in a bunch of other cities, too, but here it was on a big scale, of course, was that the hospitality industry sort of collapsed. I mean, nobody was going out to restaurants. And, you know, that's a big part of the New York City economy. Overnight, the decision was made to allow restaurants to take over essentially parking spots and sidewalks and to have places to eat outside. They came to be called streeteries, like these little stalls and stands and covered stands outside.

And thousands of them around the city suddenly sprang up overnight. And there were a bunch of interesting things that happened as a result of that. One was that, you know, in New York, if you try to, like, eliminate a single parking space, it's like the Battle of the Somme in terms of community resistance. You know, people are, like in arms and usually and you can't take my parking space. It's just crazy. So, you know, that doesn't usually happen overnight, like 10,000 of them, which was partly because there was a larger need and probably because we just exercised the will to do it. It was like, okay, well, we're just going to say we'll do it.

We didn't have to go through that process. But, of course, the other thing that happened was that suddenly all these streets all over the city became activated again. People could go out, sit outside where it was safer, they felt, we felt. And streets came back to life and you know we can take for granted i think especially people who don't live in a city um may take for granted just how meaningful are these shared public spaces um how important they are it doesn't you don't have to live in a tiny apartment to need to have those spaces it's, there's something about the very nature of a city, a democracy, a cosmopolis that is based on these spaces, these places where we negotiate

each other, figure stuff out, figure our shared existence together. I mean, I don't mean to make it too highfalutin, but that's sort of the beauty of a city. And when these streeteries opened, you saw people just like, it was like a collective breath of fresh air, you know, just like everyone exhaled and the streets came alive again. And this was still before, you know, we had vaccines, before people felt even entirely comfortable, if anybody does now, you know, going city like New York can seem to be this monolithic, gigantic thing built of stone and steel and glass. But it's actually an organism. It changes, neighborhoods change, the buildings change. You know, you come from Vegas where things are changing all the time. The cities are, that's part of what makes them alive. They're dynamic.

And so we saw that overnight the streets could change. And I think that was also an important lesson because we were stuck in this pandemic and it was a reminder that things can and that they will change. And indeed they have. I love it. They, you know, we, we really found out how important community was. Like we, We really took it for granted. And like you say, New York is such a hustle and bustle, big city. I've been there. You've got to keep moving. You can't just stand on the sidewalk and block everybody or you're going to get punched or yelled at. You know, it's a busy city.

And, you know, you took time with this book and had the opportunity there with COVID to, you know, spend time in places where, you know, the bustle is gone and you can look around and go, what is this about and what is it? I grew up in SoCal, so I kind of lived in the big city. And then in my teens, my parents moved us to American Fork, Utah, which was basically like Kevin Bacon in that one movie going from, I think we moved from New Jersey to American Fork, Utah. It was the same city. And it was shock. It was just shock and awe.

And I remember growing up in my teens and reaching that point of wanting to go to what was the big city, Salt Lake City for the time for us, which is nothing compared to New York. But still the vibrancy of going there. for the time for us, which is nothing compared to New York. But still, the vibrancy of going there, and this was back in the age when cruising was what you did as teenagers. I don't know if you remember that. Of course. But you cruise to go meet girls in your teens,

and you drive up and down State Street and just do that over and over all night long. It seems kind of silly now, but it actually was probably better than dating on dating apps. But there was a vibrancy you go to the city and there was a liveness there there was a feeling of energy the the big buildings you know just implied that there was something going on one of my favorite um one of my favorite uh uh lyrics and songs about manhattan in new york was written by rush, Neil Peart, the camera. I don't know if you've ever read the lyrics from that or been a fan, but he wrote some beautiful lyrics about just the excitement of the city, the feel of Manhattan,

the feel of being in those places and finding those. So, uh, I love the stories you tell in the book as you go through them. How did you did you choose like there's a lot of stuff that i never seen in new york and i i've been there a lot but you know it's you don't see it on the on the normal you know here's the uh statue of liberty here's the you know the the big towers um how did you pick things did you pick things you just kind of wander well it grew it was sort of a organic over time as i realized that you know people were um you know liking this and as i felt that there was a uh because because i should say i began by doing it for in the new york times i was publishing these in the times and so i was getting reactions from people and i began to um where many of these not all of the things in the book appeared um

and and i began to think well actually what i can do here is create a portrait of New York by covering not a complete portrait, obviously nothing vaguely like it, but something that suggests the complexity of the city, the variety of neighborhoods and people who've made it, the fact that, you know, it's not just a bunch of architects who design buildings, but you have engineers who design those buildings, lawyers and politicians and others who establish the laws and terms of, you know, by which things can happen in a city, community organizers, you know, the list goes on and on and on.

And that if the book could somehow be a little tiny reflection of that, it would stand in for the city at large. So I was trying to make sure that I covered ground, but also not the ground that you're describing. I do do Times Square and, you know, some other obvious places, like I said, Broadway and Museum Mile. But it's really to give you a sense of just how rich and unending the city is. Like you were saying, Chris, you can't stand on a street corner without getting bumped or punched for too long. But the truth is the city, this is a lesson to me.

I have to say, even as someone who's lived here for most of my life, the city is full of places which are, you know, some of them look like the country. Some of them are very suburban. Some of them are, you know,

sprawling neighborhoods of single family houses. Some of them are some weird mix. The tall buildings, like I was in Forest Hills, Queens. Forest Hills, Queens was a planned community a century ago when Queens was still farmland a little over a century ago, which was built to attract essentially people from Manhattan who wanted to move to the

suburbs, but still on these new fangled subway lines. And it's basically, you know, the countryside with houses in it. It's like an English village. And right next door, right across the street are these big, tall buildings where lots of new immigrants have moved in. Again, a really wonderfully complex, you know, hard to describe thing. It's not a single thing. And you get out of the subway station in Forest Hills, having come from, let's say, Times Square, it's like you've gone to another world entirely. You've gone into the english countryside so i mean i think i wanted to give some sense of that um and i also wanted to talk to a guy named eric sanderson who's just great eric is a um a scientist a an ecologist and has studied the evolving geography and topography and ecology of the city. So he and I looked back. We pretended

that we were in the city back when Henry Hudson first sailed into the harbor in 1609. What would we see? And that conversation took us back like 450 million years. And we did the same thing in the Bronx. It was really cool. I had no idea, you know, that Times Square had been a beaver pond or, you know, that lower been covered with like half a mile of ice, that kind of thing. It's really fascinating. As I said, you learned, one learns, I learned, you know, how things got to be the way they are.

You know, we study history. We have a lot of historians that come on with their books. And, you know, we talk about textually history and tell the stories of them. But I never really thought about it from the angle that architecture tells a story of our history and our city. And it has stories that are built into it. You know, somebody put their heart, soul, and mind into something, their passion. Maybe it tells a story of their family, their family history, a story of the city in and of itself. And so really these things are not only visually appealing to us.

You look at texts in a history book, and I certainly did in high school, and I was like, oh, God, I've got to read stuff. But with architecture, you can look at it and you can go that's really interesting like one of my favorite things in la was to go down to some of the old uh i don't know if it is it called art deco some of the some of the art deco of la that you know that kind of that wonderful feel that you get from you know the old hollywood sort of Downtown LA is full of that. Yeah. We all. I love it. I see it and I'm just like, this is so awesome.

I wonder where it came from. Yeah. And, yeah, it's beautiful that you do this. Anything we haven't touched on in the book that we should touch on? Oh, you do cover four of the five barrios in the book. You make chapters on each different areas and stuff. Yeah. No, I mean, we would cover. So New York is made up of five boroughs

and i couldn't get staten island so next time um but i try to cover a lot of ground and you know my hope is that people will read the book who want who live in new york who want to come to new york who just think about new york who think about cities, and will read it entirely for pleasure. I think it's not meant to be a textbook. It's meant to be deeply personal. Because as you say, Chris, buildings are lived in. Communities are lived in. And I think that sense of life and how we express ourselves in the communities we create,

the places we build. That's sort of what New York, like other great cities, is all about. So I hope people get that from the book, and I hope they find it beautiful, because I certainly am so grateful that it's such a nice-looking object, too. I liked it because I could go through it and I didn't feel like I had to read from beginning to end. Right. I was kind of found myself fishing through the pictures and that, you know, and there's, there's pictures on, I think almost every page or every, every couple of pages, uh, about every other page or so. And so I found myself kind of just flipping through

and then I'd see like, Hey, what is that? That's really interesting. And then I get to reading the conversations he had around the pieces. And so I really liked it because it didn't feel like it was a book that was forcing me to like, you must start on page one or you won't know what's going on. And you can just like jump around. You can hop around and you can just fiddle with it when you want and pick it up when you want. Absolutely. Yeah.

That made it really good. Yeah. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Yeah. It made it for a you want. Absolutely. Yeah, that'd be a pleasure. Yeah, thank you for that. I appreciate it. Yeah, it made it for a fun read. Yeah, and you know, it's also, I will say, since you're allowing me to do this, it was also intended when I did the walks

that somebody could take these walks. So you can go with the book or with the audio version of Kindle, whatever, and you can go around to these places and see them yourself. They were designed as walks. So, you know, I do hope people, it'll inspire people who come here. When we walk around a place, I think we come to feel that we on some level own it, that we have come to, it becomes ours. You know, why do we get on an airplane, save money, deal with TSA and all the hassle of an

airplane and fly someplace and deal with jet lag maybe and then walk around? It's because on some level, it's not just a bucket list thing. It's because then we believe that on some level, it becomes a part of us too. It's ours. And I think that's what I hope the book conveys. And it's sort of what I meant about New York, too. It's a place for everyone. I really do believe that. It doesn't mean that everyone has to love it, but I do believe it's an open city. And that's really, to me, a very joyous thing about it. Definitely. And then if you go to probably many of the sites that are in here, you'll avoid the tourist crowds. You really will.

That's what I – anytime I go to downtown Las Vegas, I'm like, effing tourists. Oh, my gosh. You know, they're walking around going, oh, the lights. I've never seen the lights before. And you're like, get out of my way. It's a casino, man. It's been here forever

get over it but uh no that's the beautiful part about new york it was there was there a favorite barrio or area you had that you loved the most architecture wise i mean putting you on the spot no you don't put him on the spot exactly but i can't say there's one look i did a walk around my old neighborhood um and i do love the village it's you know, it's sort of in my bones. The other night I woke up dreaming that I was in my childhood bedroom. I probably everybody does this, but that included the traffic noise outside the window. So it's sort of something I, you know I still have family in that neighborhood.

I live uptown now, but that was fun to go do that because, again, you know, I was able to see things I didn't know. I'd never thought about because I'd just taken it for granted. There's a street called Christopher Street. Why is Christopher Street at a weird angle when all the other streets are at a grid in the city? Well, that's because it was the property line of a British admiral who had his estate there in the colonial era. And this was the border of his property. And all these other crooked streets in that area were where there were other property lines and cow paths and stuff. So these are like, you know, little embedded memories. That's not maybe the best example, but it's just one little thing that was like,

opened my eyes to something I even thought I knew. You know, back in the early days of Instagram, when it was kind of more about photos and not about thirst traps, some of my famous photographer friends would do these photo tours where you go to a city or go to an area and you just walk around as a team of people and photograph stuff. And some people will be there that knew the history and talk about the history. We should bring those back. Yeah. Only from an architecture aspect where we can have someone like you who can talk about how, you know, this is built in 18 whatever and it has, you know, this sort of style and why they maybe did it that way.

That would be really interesting to me. Yeah, I mean, I think it's always interesting to have like, yes, I obviously agree that architectural stuff can be super interesting. People need to know, I think, also why that matters, like what difference does it make? And there are so many different ways of seeing the same thing. You know, Chris, I don't know where your fictional children are now, but you know, it's a funny thing about kids, because when you have kids, parents know that you take them to a

place and you want to show them something. This is a famous building that was designed. And they're like watching a balloon go up in the air or noticing a bottle cap on the street. They're in the same place. They're occupying the same space, but having a completely different experience about what matters. And I think that's not wrong, that there are a lot of different ways we can unpack the places we move through and live in and what they mean to us. If we just take the time, you know, and that's sort of, as I said, what this project allowed me to do and a few other people, thanks to COVID. COVID was also a lesson, you know, it is a lesson, I suppose,

but crises can be opportunities, you know. They're not only disasters. And for me, it was an opportunity to look around and see things a little more slowly, which is you always get stuff you just didn't get before if you stop and look. I think the reason I appreciate this is I was a photographer for a lot of years, and one of my favorite things was to go jaunting for a day, do day jaunts where I just go. I'd go someplace and shoot. In Southern California, I was living at the time, there were so many different places to go shoot.

And my favorite place to go shoot of all times was Venice Beach. And I could go there, and you could sit along the boardwalk, and I'd have a long 200 lens. So what I'd do is I'd sit there, get a table, and lean out with the 200 lens. And you'd shoot down because people know you're shooting them. Then they – Yeah. And so you'd shoot way down. And, you know, Venice Beach is like – it's like the freak show of personalities and people.

And it's interesting to watch, you know, people do it. And I would sit there for hours shooting people sometimes you pay people to get some shots of them uh because they're really interesting like the uh the guy who roller skates around with the guitar that's been in a lot of movies you may have seen but there's real appreciation just just sometimes sitting down and just looking around you yeah going what the hell is why the hell the who what where where when why you know yeah yeah it's here why i mean the thing about i love la i love all parts of la including uh and including venice um but the one thing about new york is it's it is a walkable city and with the subway i mean you do have the metro in la which is now expanding

people's ability to do that sort of thing but really the thing about new york is you can go down into the subway you can get out this is new yorkers should do this more you can get out of a place you've never been before and like you're in a different world and um i do know a lot of people who who do what you're describing sort of go around with a camera. I have a good friend, Daniel Arnold, who's an amazing photographer. And he does sort of what you're describing. He's just like out there all day looking for these kind of unexpected views, unexpected people. It's something the city like offers up to you because there's just so much happening, so many people passing by, so many different views, so many different places for you to, you know, look out over the water or look down a long street. And I find it inspiring.

And I think Daniel is, like, a good example of a photographer like you describing, you know, just the sort of wonder of being in a place where unexpected stuff is always happening you catch a funny moments too just like funny bits and moments and different things and and uh you know i i've even caught things where the reflection of of someone's sunglasses reflected something that was really cool and and blown that in so i think that's what's beautiful about your book it reminds us to be in the present and and to appreciate things you know because i mean i i get out and play now because i'm like if they have another covet or pandemic i'm getting my time in now man i'm appreciating life and everything else so this has been really interesting you know it'd be kind of interesting sadly it would bring us back to electronic items that

keep us from looking at the beauty around us. That's probably a whole other podcast chat. But it would be cool if they put a QR code or something on buildings, at least really cool buildings with great architecture, and you could go up and it would speak to you. It would be like, this building was built in... That would be really cool. I think that's actually a great idea, Chris.

There you go. Museums do that. If you go into museums now, you're just listening to your headphones. Hey, listening to your headphones. But to be able to walk around a city and have little walk-arounds, maybe that should be like a – people could sell those as a tour. I mean, we used to do that with the photographic thing. You'd pay like $10.

Yeah. And the head photographer would take you around. Anyway, Michael, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming by. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. It's super fun. Brilliant discussion.

You know, be present, love and live the life that you have, because time is short, my friends. Any dot-coms or Twitter, wherever you want people to look you up on the interwebs there? As I said, you're happy to reach out to me at the time, or on Twitter or on Instagram. But, you know, I'm just hoping you guys will go ahead and find the book somewhere and buy it and enjoy it. It's easily found in every bookstore, I hope, and online.

So thank you, Chris. Thank you. And thanks, Manish, for tuning in. Order the book wherever fine books are sold. Stay away from those alleyway bookstores. I had to get a tetanus shot after going in one. The Intimate City, Walking New York by Michael

Kimmelman. Thank you everyone for tuning in the show. We certainly appreciate it. YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, all the LinkedIn groups and all that crap we do on the interwebs. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us

out, my friend.