Katharine Greider

The premise for Katharine Greider's book on an apartment building on Manhattan's Lower East Side is fantastic: understanding a place at a specific point in time (the forced eviction due to structural problems with the building) by tracing its history. She starts before the Dutch settled the island, and in that regard I was reminded of James Michener books. This starting point held my interest greatly, as did the more subjective asides about the meaning of home and our connection to a place (making me think of Gaston Bachelard), but her writing could not do the same when she presented the minutiae of early residents, for example. Perhaps some editing was required, or maybe a different style in those sections, to make the voluminous amounts of research tell a better story. I agree with another reviewer that illustrations would have helped to make this urban history stronger...and more enjoyable.… (mais)

I was looking forward to reading this book. I love personally grounded histories based on one location, I'm a native New Yorker, and I'm a city planner by profession. This book looked as though it would speak to me on many levels.

I couldn't get through it. The writing is lovely, but so calm that it fails to communicate emotion. The story suffers from being a bit too chronological - we learn information as the author does, but it this often-effective style results in a choppiness in the text that makes the story difficult to follow. Not recommended.… (mais)

The Archaeology of Home is a fascinating look at the life of a single building on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Greider digs all the way back to the Native Americans who inhabited Manhattan before Westerners arrived, then follows the land up to her own occupancy at the turn of the millennium. While the narrative is primarily chronological, Greider frequently intersperses her own tales of renovation woe among the historical tidbits.

This book is full of information, much of it unique to me despite being fairly conversant in the history of New York. Her historical information is well sourced, and though teeming with detail, the book never seems dry. However, this detail is both a blessing and a curse to the overall book. By trying to be so comprehensive about the building's occupants, Greider ends up actually blurring the picture somewhat. A multi-household dwelling holds so many people over the course of a couple hundred years that it impossible to remember much about any one family. The little details do much to add flavor to the overall narrative, but after a while they begin to become a bit wearying.

Greider really shines in the more memoir-like portions of her book. Her descriptions of her own tenants and her struggles with contractors, city officials, and bankers are vivid and engaging. Perhaps this book would have benefited from a reversal -- if it was mostly about her present day experience with bits of historical details here and there, I'd give it 5 stars easily.… (mais)