Codex New York

Codex New York: Typologies of the City
Stanley Greenberg
The Monacelli Press, May 2019



Hardcover | 11-1/4 x 8 inches | 280 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1580935227 | $50.00

Publisher Description:

As a native New Yorker with a lifelong curiosity about urban infrastructure, photographer Stanley Greenberg—author of the bestselling Invisible New York—observes characteristics of the city that most people miss. And the more he explores the city, the more he understands it as a huge catalog of features that repeat, vary, morph, and multiply—block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. He embarked on an extraordinary journey, walking every block of Manhattan from the Battery (where there is today much more land than when the Dutch first arrived) to Inwood (which retains more of its original topography than any part of the city) to photograph striking and subtle urban typologies along the way. Alleys, skybridges, parking sheds, architectural relics, tiny streets, water infrastructure—these and more were captured to create an incomparable visual chronicle of the city.

What are the objects that a city needs to be a city? Codex New York organizes them into an idiosyncratic field guide that prompts new paths of inquiry. When were they built? Codex New York also serves as a temporal marker; many of the empty spaces Greenberg photographed have already been built on, obscuring the views of the city that now exist only in images. Joining the ranks of great photographic documents of the city, Codex New York is a critical look at and investigation of what New York is made of.

dDAB Commentary:

New York is the city that just keeps on giving. With its speed of development and demolition, density of people, layering of infrastructure, and convergence of cultures, there are nearly unending ways of exploring and documenting the city. I've created a couple NYC books myself, both fairly traditional guidebooks, though I've read many city guides that hone in on particular aspects of its physical infrastructure or offer alternative "readings" to its streets and buildings. Surprisingly, I never owned or read a book by Stanley Greenberg, the well-known Brooklyn photographer, until now, with Codex New York. With the subtitle Typologies of the City and a cover of an unglamorous photo of a street intersection where Belgian blocks, asphalt, and a manhole cover overlap, it's clear that Greenberg is more interested in the inner-workings of the city and the convergence of historical and physical layers in unexpected ways than he is in its capital-A architecture or historic landmarks. I can't imagine anyone seeing the cover, buying Greenberg's new book, and expecting glamour shots of its newest buildings or landscapes.

The 19 "typologies" are presented in alphabetical order, with such names as "Bridge/Tunnel/Track," "Parking Lots," and "Sanitation" — yep, nothing glamorous here. Greenberg starts, ironically, with "Alleys," that one piece of urban infrastructure missing from most of Manhattan, the NYC borough that Greenberg limits himself to with this book (he actually trekked all of the island's streets for the book). Although he extends alleys "to also include mews, maintenance spaces, and parking entrances," these definitely are not the spaces familiar to tourists or documented in guidebooks catered to them. The same could be said about most of the 18 chapters that follow, especially when Greenberg ventures into the industrial areas that the city's residents and visitors rely upon but don't think about until their power goes out or the trucks stop picking up the trash. One aspect tying together the photos is how sparsely populated they are. People are present here and there, but for the most part Greenberg presents a nearly ghost-town Manhattan. I'm guessing this human scarcity stems mainly from the parts of the city he focuses his camera on, rather than any in-camera effects, such as long exposures. Whatever the case, the overall result is a clear expression of the "typologies" that Greenberg focuses on: The attention in his visual "codex" is so strong it should color how people move about and see the city after digesting it.

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Author Bio:

Stanley Greenberg is a Brooklyn-based photographer and author of numerous books, including Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City (1998), Waterworks: A Photographic Journey Through New York’s Hidden Water System (2003), Architecture Under Construction (2010), and Time Machines (2011).

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