In the City: Random Acts of Awareness by Colette Brooks

Near the start of In the City, Colette Brooks wonders: “What kind of a person is a city person?” and then offers her own answer: “One possibility: the kind of person who doesn’t feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, pieces of stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the street” (2). Well. I’m not so sure about the first part of that, but the end, yes. I think she offers another answer near the end of the book, when she says this: “I suspect that I could collect these strands forever, link one discrete element to another, and still it would seem incomplete. There would always be something else to remark upon, something else to say” (106). I mean: maybe anyone feels that way about the landscape they love best, but a city person is someone who feels that about the built urban environment and its history and all the many lives and stories and secrets it contains. Another answer, maybe: you know you’re a city person when you think about the city where you live and, as Brooks puts it, “you simply cannot conceive of your life having worked out in any other way” (9).

I really like the associative way this book proceeds from topic to topic, and the way it mixes the personal and the historical. It’s a little about cities in general and a lot about New York in particular and a little bit about other specific cities, too (there’s a trip to Brazil that figures in the narrative); not surprisingly, I especially like the bits of NYC history and descriptions of NYC moments and scenery. Early in the book Brooks talks about seeing the Statue of Liberty from what I’m pretty sure is the F train—not that she names either the statue or the train line, but I remember how much I loved that stretch of my commute for the ten years I lived off that train line, the moments between when the train comes aboveground after Carroll Street and when it goes back underground after 4th Avenue. Other NYC things in this book I love: a discussion of what people are reading on the subway, a section about lost & found posters, bits of overheard conversations, a description of the Panorama of the City of New York in the Queens Museum, a bit about the The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 that laid out the street grid. And, though this is from one of the sections in the book about Brazil, I love this: the idea that any city is many individual cities, all “constructed from scraps of memory and invention” (64).