This is the first episode in Public Seminar’s podcast, Exiles on 12th Street. If you like it, go to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe.
What does New York look like, feel like, sound like, smell like? In celebration of the city that Exiles on 12th Street calls home, the first episode of the podcast is dedicated to the stories of those who live here. Join us as we hit the streets to explore the glamour, grit, and grunge of graphic New York with biographer Chris Bonanos, radical counter-cartographer Lize Mogel, dedicated walker Matt Green, and writer and critic Luc Sante. Presented by historian Claire Potter, executive editor of Public Seminar.
Here are some links and references mentioned in this podcast:
- As a biographer, Chris Bonanos is the author of Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous. He is also the senior editor of New York Magazine. The episode image was taken by Weegee at an opening night at the Metropolitan Opera in 1943. It is one of the most famous images of the twentieth century and the one that cemented Weegee’s reputation. Forty-odd years later and Weegee’s assistant came clean: he admitted that he and Weegee had gotten the disheveled woman drunk beforehand, then planted her at the scene.
- Claire Potter notes the brownstone where James Baldwin wrote his first articles for The Nation. That former residence is located in Greenwich Village on 81 Horatio Street, and those writings can be read here.
- Radical counter-cartographer Lize Mogel is the co-editor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography and has exhibited interdisciplinary work about political and social issues in South Korea, Pittsburgh, the U.A.E., and New York, among other international locations.
- Matt Green, a former civil engineer, has spent the past seven years walking every block of New York’s five boroughs. He is the subject of the recent documentary “The World Before Your Feet.”
- Claire mentions Nonstop Metropolis, a book by Rebecca Solnit and and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro that maps New York’s many histories from many points of view, including that of writer and critic Luc Sante.
- Sante is a writer and critic who authored Low Life, a nonfiction account of Lower Manhattan; Evidence, a documentation of crime in New York From the early and eerie 1900s; and The Factory of Facts, a memoir, among many additional books and interviews.
- Sante gives Exiles producer Sarah Montague a guided tour of Tompkins Square Park. The park is located in Alphabet City, from Avenue A To Avenue B, East 7th Street To East 10th Street.
