Tenements, Towers & Trash

Starred review from June 19, 2017
New York City is a land of architectural ghosts, and Wertz (Drinking at the Movies) is a skilled and perceptive documentarian who here combines two of her talents—cartooning and urban exploration—to create a dense, informative package filled with her audacious personality. Wertz’s method for uncovering these ghosts involves a lot of wandering, sharp eyes, and tons of research that she translates into meticulous drawings of structures throughout the city, often in a “then-and-now” format to document changes not only to the structure itself, but to the culture of the city. Wertz tackles the pneumatic tube system with the same gusto as she does the life of serial arsonist Lizzie Halliday. In presenting the life of the city, Wertz captures change as the most important constant trait of New York City, with a vivid eclecticism that makes this an indispensable guidebook to places lost and found.

Starred review from August 15, 2017
In busy cartoons and archly entertaining prose, New Yorker artist Wertz (Museum of Mistakes, 2014, etc.) serves up a grandly alternative history of Gotham.There was a time, not so long ago, when Times Square was a locus of hookers and nude dance shows rather than Disney-fied tourist traps. More pointedly, writes the author, it was "a garbage covered shithole full of strip clubs, porn theaters and seedy characters"--which, naturally, she characterizes as representing "the good old days." As Wertz cautions, the sordidness hasn't entirely disappeared; you just have to know what to look for, and then look. This graphic book, rendered in a style that seems a distant cousin to that of Roz Chast, is all about looking. Wertz is a transplant from the Bay Area who came to New York, found her nirvana, and began exploring the history and actuality of the place. It's a tragic note that, evicted from her studio in an up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood, she couldn't find affordable digs anywhere in the city and returned to California, where she discovered that "it was an absolute fucking torture drawing and writing about a city I no longer lived in but desperately loved." It's easy to gauge that affection from her pages, which recount long walks through the city fueled by a steady diet of histories and trivia ("Pinball was banned in NYC until 1978! It was a 'pinball prohibition, ' and officials would smash the machines with sledgehammers, and dump them in the river") that she recounts in ever salty prose. Wertz, for instance, revisits the history of the many instances of Ray's Pizza, a synecdoche of a kind: founded by mobsters as a money-laundering site, the operation became legit in the hands of immigrants who worked there, quit, and opened their own versions of the place, name and all, so that there are now somewhere between 20 and 40 unrelated Ray's outlets in the city. A delight for New York aficionados. Every city needs a version of this artist and her book.

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September 15, 2017
Wertz closed her graphic memoir, Drinking at the Movies (2015), with a section of jaw-dropping, full-page drawings of her personal New York City landmarks. This illustrated history is full of such wonders, and that's just the start. After leaving her adopted city of over a decade on unhappy terms in 2016, Wertz knows she'll never love another city the way I loved New York. Depicting that city in its every offbeat aspect, Wertz's style soars. Side-by-side then-and-now ink drawings of specific blocks and apartment interiors fascinate with their realism; pages of the author's favorite doors or bookstores will have eyes glued, with lots to read, too. Interspersed throughout the decidedly unconventional and utterly delightful collection are several-page histories (some of which have appeared in the New Yorker or elsewhere) of people (Nellie Bly, Typhoid Mary); places (Brooklyn's Dead Horse Bay and Bottle Beach, Staten Island's Boat Graveyard); and events (the city's prohibition of pinball, the use of pneumatic tubes to transport mail). A unique and personal history and an oddity-celebrating labor of love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)