Adventures in New York City

Travel Books: Ian Frazier's "Gone to New York: Adventures in the City" spans 30 years of travels in the city that never sleeps. Frank Bures writes that it captures the rhythm of the place -- and its people.

02.01.06 | 9:54 PM ET

Gone to New York coverIn 1974, Ian Frazier showed up in New York City, fresh off the farm in Ohio (with a slight detour to Harvard). He had applied for a job at The New Yorker before getting there, and when the editors offered him a spot in their fact checking department, he declined. Not long after that, they offered him a job as a Talk of the Town writer. This he accepted, and has been writing—and writing about the city—ever since.

In the intervening 30 years, Frazier has gone on to pen some great books—“Great Plains,” “On the Rez,” and he also edited the 2003 “Best American Travel Writing” anthology. His own work has always been a kind of hybrid of travel and essay: strolling, musing, and observing.

His new book, Gone to New York: Adventures in the City, is also billed as “travel.” I didn’t know what to make of this at first, because I was under the impression it was made up if his Talk of the Town pieces. This sounded like a dubious prospect for two reasons: First, because Talk of the Town pieces can blather on and on about nothing. And second, because collections of people’s work done over the years rarely cohere into solid books.

But as I got to reading Frazier’s pieces, starting when he first moved to the city and ending just last year (and actually culled from various magazines), I was surprised to find a rhythm and logic that hold the stories together. “Gone to New York” is like walking across Manhattan with a friend who has an outsider’s eye, an insider’s knowledge, and the excitement of someone who has never fallen out of love with the city or its people. 

Frazier takes us down Canal Street, and deep into the history of the Holland Tunnel. From his window, he watches kids shout at each other. He joins a crowd of strangers standing around a cop and a citizen trying to keep an old woman resuscitated. He takes us along on his quixotic campaign to rid New York’s trees of the bags that blow into their branches. He introduces us to his landlord and building owner, Gary, a jaded Israeli immigrant who tells him, “You an American, so you straight. But the world is not straight, it’s crooked.”

My favorite character of Frazier’s, though, is Martin Tytell, a typewriter repairman who has been repairing typewriters since early in the 20th century, and can repair a typewriter in any language in the world—Thai, Hindi, Sanskrit, Hausa, Amharic, Coptic. You name it, he can do it. Frazier digresses into the long and fascinating history of the typewriter—the role it played in wars, the Tytells’ testimony in high-profile fraud cases, Mr. Tytell’s unwitting influence on the Burmese alphabet, and we are somehow willingly taken along for the ride.

This is the kind of detail that makes “Gone to New York” so enjoyable. As Frazier seems to amble along, we follow him, noticing things here and there that no one has bothered to notice, but that later, when we are looking back on them, become the most meaningful parts of our trip through the city.

Tags: Travel Books, Travel Writing, North America, United States, New York, New York City


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