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Purchase The Intimate City: Walking New York

In celebration of MOCA FEST 2023, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) presents its next featured MOCA TALKS speaker, Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of The New York Times and author of The Intimate City: Walking New York.

As New York came to a halt with COVID, Michael Kimmelman composed an email to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk. (Nancy Yao, MOCA President, was invited to walk Manhattan’s Chinatown with Mr. Kimmelman in the fall of 2020. Read the New York Times article here.) Wherever they liked, he wrote—preferably someplace meaningful to them, someplace that illuminated the city and what they loved about it. At first, the goal was distraction. At a scary moment when everything seemed uncertain, walking around New York served as a reminder of all the ways the city was still a rock, joy, and inspiration. What began with a lighthearted trip to explore Broadway’s shuttered theater district and a stroll along Museum Mile when the museums were closed soon took on a much larger meaning and ambition. These intimate, funny, richly detailed conversations between Kimmelman and his companions became anchors for millions of Times readers during the pandemic. The walks unpacked the essence of urban life and its social fabric—the history, plans, laws, feats of structural engineering, architectural highlights, and everyday realities that make up a place Kimmelman calls “humanity’s greatest achievement.”

Filled with stunning photographs documenting the city during the era of COVID, The Intimate City is the ultimate insider’s guide. The book includes new walks through LGBTQ Greenwich Village, through Forest Hills, Queens, and Mott Haven, in the Bronx. All the walks can be walked, or just be read for pleasure, by know-it-all New Yorkers or anyone else. They take readers back to an age when Times Square was still a beaver pond and Yankee Stadium a salt marsh; across the Brooklyn Bridge, for green tea ice cream in Chinatown, for momos and samosas in Jackson Heights, to explore historic Black churches in Harlem and midcentury Mad Men skyscrapers on Park Avenue. A kaleidoscopic portrait of an enduring metropolis, The Intimate City reveals why New York, despite COVID and a long history of other calamities, continues to inspire and to mean so much to those who call it home and to countless others.

“‘The Intimate City’ is a joyful miscellany of people seeing things in the urban landscape, the streets alive with remembrances and ideas even when those streets are relatively empty of people.”—Robert Sullivan, New York Times Book Review

This program is moderated by Nancy Yao, MOCA President. We look forward to your participation, and to sharing this and many more exemplary stories of the Chinese in America.

Autographed copies will be available for in-person pickup at the event.

About Michael Kimmelman

Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic of The New York Times. He was the paper’s chief art critic and, from Berlin, created the Abroad column, covering politics and culture across Europe and the Middle East. He has reported from more than forty countries and founded Headway, a nonprofit journalistic initiative focused on global challenges and paths to progress. A native New Yorker, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, he is the author of The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa and Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere.

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