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All You Need to Know About All You Need to Know


Published: January 21, 1996
(Page 2 of 4)

There were no tours of ethnic enclaves, no lists of the best nightspots, coffeehouses, beauty services, places to find peace and quiet, public artworks, things to do on a Sunday or adult education courses. There was no published advice on how to get your child into private school, how to get a divorce, how to find a public toilet or how to live and die (a guide to negotiating the maze of New York probate court). Certainly there was no need for a book called "How to Beat a Parking Ticket" (J. F. Caroll Publishing, 1994). As diverse as they are, what all guidebooks have in common is that they are books; they are for reading, and to treat them as reading material is a way of choosing the ones that will best serve you.

Take the example of restaurant guides, of which there are dozens, many of them by well-known critics, like John F. Mariani and Peter D. Meltzer ("Passport to New York Restaurants 1995," Passport Press, Ltd., 1994) or Sylvia Carter and the Newsday staff ("Eats NYC," Andrews & McMeel, 1995) , to name a couple of the more prominent. Each has its own opinions, rating system, writerly style. How to choose? Isn't it a question of whom you trust?

But this is true even for the books that are mostly charts and ratings and straightforward information, like the Zagat's restaurant guide, the city's biggest seller.

An annual survey of diners, it uses the Zagat formula, which is to collect opinions, collate them and give them back to us as ratings and capsule commentaries. Now the publisher of more than 30 guides to restaurants, retailers and hotels, Zagat is among the leaders in the guide expansion derby, and the success of the line is largely formulated on the voice that emanates from its pages. Without actual words, we know whom we're listening to: us. That's both comforting and trustworthy. It is no wonder that the formula has spawned many imitators.

The restaurant guide is, of course, the prime example of the guidebook as before-the-fact reference: you consult it for a pragmatic purpose, to choose a place to eat, and consult it before you go.

There are, however, whole other categories that raise the question of what a guidebook is for. Do you read it at home or take it with you?

For example, consider guides to the city's architecture and social topography. The most comprehensive remains the AIA Guide to New York City, (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988) by Elliot Willensky and Norval White. A neighborhood-by-neighborhood, block-by-block, building-by-building assessment of the city's notable structures, it is written, not without attitude and opinion, but almost in notes form, so that it isn't so much a reading experience or a prescription for how to see the city, but an on-the-spot reference.

On the other hand, Gerard R. Wolfe's "New York: A Guide to the Metropolis" (McGraw-Hill, 1993) is a text-heavy tome organized in 20 well-informed walking tours, and thus falls between the practical extremes. It's reasonably well-written but not a particularly good read; from an armchair you can appreciate the ample history it includes, but not the visual sense of what's being described, and there is a distinct disadvantage in not having the physical orientation the text carefully provides. On the other hand, this is a pretty dense piece of work to be grappling with as you walk.

"Seeing New York," (Temple University Press, 1995) by Hope Cooke, has some of the same problems, acknowledged in the subtitle: "History Walks for Armchair and Footloose Travelers." The book is essentially a collection of essays, organized in the form of walks through neighborhoods, and all written according to personal theory and consistent theme: that one gets rooted in a place by tracing its history. It is, I think, a reader's book first. If Ms. Cooke's voice is to your liking (the writing is authoritative but occasionally precious), you'll want to follow her out the door.

Next month, Citadel Press will publish "Infamous Manhattan," a book-length walking tour of the sites of the borough's most famous, grisly or interesting crimes, by Andrew Roth. Better researched and more elegantly written than a previous volume on the same theme, "New York Notorious," (Crown Publishers, Inc., 1992) by Paul Schwartzman and Rob Polner, which was nonetheless notable for its wisenheimer, tabloidlike prose, "Infamous Manhattan" is a perfect example of a guidebook that is better reading than it is service. It is full of wonderful historic tidbits -- it says New York's first murder victim, one Gerrit Slomp, was stabbed in a brawl outside a tavern near Broadway and Beaver Street on July 22, 1648.

It is written with wry, deliberate mischief."The great quantity of bad behavior in New York has given this city not only a fearful reputation," Mr. Roth writes, "but also a deep and fascinating criminal heritage."

There's much for a reader's pleasure, but what would you see at the corner of Broadway and Beaver? A bloodstain?

The comprehensive guides, those big monsters ostensibly full of everything, can be divided into two types: those that are group written and researched, and those, like Dr. Mitchill's original, that are the product of a single, monumentally obsessed individual.
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