The thirty-eight urban gems covered here range from newly created linear spaces along the water's edge, such as Brooklyn Bridge Park and the East River Waterfront Esplanade, to revitalized squares and circles, such as those at Gansevoort Plaza in the Meatpacking District and Columbus Circle, to repurposed open spaces like the freight tracks, now the High Line, and Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx. Readers can discover midtown atriums, mingle with the crowds in Union Square, travel offshore to nearby Governors Island, and enjoy the vistas of historic Green-Wood Cemetery. Pete Hamill writes in his foreword, "I've . . . made a list of new places I must visit while there is time. With any luck at all, I'll see all of them. I hope you, the reader, can find the time too." Concise descriptions, helpful maps, and vivid photographs capture the New York urban scene.

The New York Public Library, one of the nation's architectural wonders, is possibly our finest classical building. Designed by John Merven Carrere and Thomas Hastings, and inspired by the great classical buildings in Paris and Rome, it was completed in 1911. The library boasts a magnificent exterior, but that is only the beginning. In the interior, one splendid hall follows another, an awesome gallery leads to richly decorated rooms, and stairways are vaulted in marble. From the terrace to the breathtaking Main Reading Room is a triumphal way. All the devices of the classical tradition, the main artistic current of Western civilization, are brought into play. Maidens, cherubs, and satyr masks look down from ceilings. Lions' heads, paws, rams' heads, and griffins are on every side. In this beautiful volume, featuring new color photography by Anne Day, every facet of the building is described, including its inception and construction."

The Municipal Art Society of New York recently celebrated its fiftieth year of offering walking tours to the public; in 2007 more than 10,000 people participated. This illustrated guidebook to highlights of architecture, preservation, urban planning, and public art described by two experienced guides, with pictures, route maps, and travel information, covers Manhattan from downtown skyscrapers to Harlem by way of Madison Square, Art Deco Midtown, Grand Central Terminal, Columbus Circle, Central Park, and more.

During the rise of New York from the capital of an upstart nation to a global metropolis, the visual language of Greek and Roman antiquity played a formative role in the development of the city's art and architecture. This compilation of essays offers a survey of diverse reinterpretations of classical forms in some of New York's most iconic buildings, public monuments, and civic spaces. Classical New York examines the influence of Greco-Roman thought and design from the Greek Revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the late-nineteenth-century American Renaissance and Beaux Arts period and into the twentieth century's Art Deco. At every juncture, New Yorkers looked to the classical past for knowledge and inspiration in seeking out new ways to cultivate a civic identity, to design their buildings and monuments, and to structure their public and private spaces. Specialists from a range of disciplines-archaeology, architectural history, art history, classics, and history- focus on how classical art and architecture are repurposed to help shape many of New York City's most evocative buildings and works of art. Federal Hall evoked the Parthenon as an architectural and democratic model; the Pantheon served as a model for the creation of Libraries at New York University and Columbia University; Pennsylvania Station derived its form from the Baths of Caracalla; and Atlas and Prometheus of Rockefeller Center recast ancient myths in a new light during the Great Depression. Designed to add breadth and depth to the exchange of ideas about the place and meaning of ancient Greece and Rome in our experience of New York City today, this examination of post-Revolutionary art, politics, and philosophy enriches the conversation about how we shape space-be it civic, religious, academic, theatrical, or domestic-and how we make use of that space and the objects in it.