The Archaeology of Home

November 1, 2010

A narrative of one piece of residential property in New York City's East Village, combined with an idiosyncratic account of the city's growth and a meditation about what makes a house a home.

In January 2002, freelance writer Greider (The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers, 2003) received an unsettling call. Her Manhattan home on 7th St. between Avenues C and D that she inhabited with her husband and two young children was in danger of collapsing because of structural problems. They had purchased the property about a decade earlier, unaware of its rotting infrastructure. The family moved out quickly into temporary quarters, uncertain whether to rebuild at the same location after the demolition, to move somewhere else in NYC or to leave the city altogether. As Greider fretted, she also decided to learn about the piece of land, the house built upon it, the builders, the generations of inhabitants, the rest of the block, the larger neighborhood, the borough of Manhattan and NYC as a whole. Eventually, the author deepened her inquiries, researching the evolution of private property and home-building. The resulting narrative is a mixed bag. The author incorporates elements of investigative journalism, genealogy, archaeology, sociology, philosophy, geography and engineering (the list of disciplines could continue), and the mix of writing styles is nearly as numerous. The poetic mixes with the didactic, and Greider writes alternately in a highly evolved third-person narrative and first-person accounts that occasionally turn maudlin. The author and her husband overcame depression as their temporary rootlessness stretched out over the years, and they had to counter litigation alleging their failure to maintain the house adequately. Greider countered the depression by examining the worlds of the previous residents over a couple of centuries, documenting their day-to-day lives when the research material allowed, speculating about them when the research failed to provide concrete answers.

The author tries to do too much with one plot of urban land, but she succeeds at much of what she covers.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2010

Losing one's home is at the heart of Greider's book, but in this case, it's not about a foreclosure. The home in question here was a historic building on Manhattan's Lower East Side that faced physical collapse, thus forcing the author's family and other residents to flee. Using her impressive skills as a freelance journalist, Greider has created an extraordinary narrative that brings together a chronology of events, a provenance of the once-tenement building, and even a personal memoir. In addition, she has compiled a fascinating chronicle of the previous residents, mostly newly arrived immigrants looking for a "better life in America." Her sleuthing of public records shows how the building had evolved over the 150 years of its existence, even determining what caused its ultimate doom. VERDICT Well written and thoroughly researched, this sobering tale should resonate with many readers of our time who have also lost their homes, leaving them asking, "How could this happen to me?" While the book will certainly interest urban historians, it will appeal even more to home owners wanting clues about how to research the past of their own homes. Recommended.--Richard Drezen, Brooklyn, NY

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2011
Most of us own old homes yet rarely ponder their past. Over 11 chapters and 44 pages of endnotes, Greider constructs the improbable memoir and epic history of one New York address, 239 East Seventh Street, describing its series of inhabitants, all craving the security, boundary, and history that is home. With control and confidence, Greider tells her personal narrative while excavating an enormous cast of characters and their connections to and journey through one building in the Lower East Side that comes to represent Manhattans evolution. She begins with the violating phone call that alerts her family to their buildings failing condition and forces them to leave the rotting house. She supports each ensuing chapter with city records, psychologists and philosophers quotes, and inhabitants memories to create an astonishing, complex, yet easy-to-digest tale. Greider succeeds brilliantly in magnifying 239its tenants, structure, and surroundingsso thoroughly that we feel its grit, then zooming out to reveal multitudes dancing on the head of a pin, the macrocosm that is home, city, humanity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)