Unknown New York: An Artist Uncovers the City’s Hidden Treasures

With this delightful and brightly illustrated debut, artist Jesse Richards ventures “off the beaten path” to spotlight 100 “hidden gems” in and around New York City. Featuring sites he sketched with an artists’ group he founded in 2007, Richards makes stops at the 23rd Street & Fifth Avenue subway station, where mosaic tiles depict famous New Yorkers’ hats blown off by the wind tunnel created by the Flatiron building; the basement of the main branch of the New York Public Library, which houses A.A. Milne’s son’s Winnie the Pooh dolls; the Pier 62 Carousel, which features hand-carved animals native to the Hudson River Valley; and the fortune telling machine made famous by Tom Hanks in 1988’s Big, which was relocated to Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 2019. While not all of the sites are as “hidden” as the author claims—Domino Park, Stone Street, and the Morgan Library and Museum are all standard New York tourist fare—readers will be charmed by the cheery, conversational entries packed with intriguing arcana (from 1897 to 1953, a “pneumatic tube mail system” stretched across Manhattan and into Brooklyn, using compressed air to push mail through subterranean tubes to the post office). Visitors and recent transplants to the Big Apple will be charmed. (Oct.)