THE NEW YORK NOBODY KNOWS: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City

THE NEW YORK NOBODY KNOWS: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City. By William B. Helmreich. xxi and 449 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2013. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780691144054. The New York Nobody Knows is an ethnographic tour of New York City based on sociologist William Helmreich's four-year project of walking most of the city's streets and sharing moments with the folks he met on his journey. The title is, of course, hyperbolic--the people chronicled in this book know themselves very well. The nobodies who don't know them are the rest of us whose responsibilities and interests do not lead us to experience the broader city outside popular representation and/or our own regular life paths. Helmreich boldly asserts early in his introduction that, "New York City has never been scientifically studied as a whole by sociologists," (p. 2) with an implicit objective to fill that absence. But then Helmreich states a scalar paradox in a belief that his ethnographic methodology of immersively walking the city while interacting with residents and participating in activities provides the only way to "know the city up close" (p. 3). This is one of numerous contradictions in the book that mirror the multitude of contradictions in New York City itself. The result is a pointillist image that is expected to only become visible when the individual dots are viewed as a whole. These dots are a diverse collection of anecdotes, observations, interviews, and historical asides gathered not only from Helmreich's journeys through the city's streets, but also from his personal experiences as a native New Yorker and as a teacher of sociology. While statistics are used throughout the text, Helmreich provides them primarily as context, under the belief that, "Quantitative data may not be close enough to the ground to tell us what's going on" (p. 259). New York City is a unity only in administrative and imaginative senses, and Helmreich's effort is to both unpack that unity and give some analytical structure to the dissimilar parts. The organizing paradigm is to group these elements thematically, with distinct chapters on newcomers, communities, recreation, spaces, gentrification, and ethnic identity. Helmreich opens, appropriately, with a chapter on "The Newcomers." In contrast to the anecdote-heavy nature of the rest of the book, this chapter presents a significant amount of broad statistical information on immigration (documented and undocumented) and demographic change. But these broad statistics are given a human face from interviews with a range of characters, such as sidewalk vendors, deli owners, street artists, security guards, former mayors, and city administrators. The story of Kennedy Fried Chicken (p. 49) may be especially amusing to those who have never heard it before. Helmreich's choice of a thematic organizational structure presents a challenge for readers who wish to get a deeper geospatial understanding of the city, resulting in a book that is spatially disorienting. For example, the chapter "New York's Communities" intentionally focuses less on specific geographies than a collection of ideas, both broad and specific, that transcend physical boundaries: crime/safety, shared values/interests, education, entertainment, community gardens. In making thematic connections and contrasts between physically disparate spaces, the text also makes it difficult to envision the explicit physical relationships between those locations. The printed maps in the book provide only decontextualized neighborhood names that offer little help in mentally mapping the spatial relationships that are key to navigating the polyglot city portrayed in the text. A handful of thematic maps might have been helpful here, although that runs counter to Helmreich's effort to paint the city as a unity. For readers with anything less than Helmreich's rich working knowledge of city neighborhood locations, the utility of this book as a neighborhood guide during an apartment search would be limited. …