I had done this a while ago and mailed it to Ms. Cooper, but it came back 'Addressee Unknown." My guess is since the book was published in 2012 Ms. Cooper is no longer collecting submitted maps by readers.
Ms. Cooper also doesn't seem to respond to Tweets, even ones that tell her I'm a 1966 graduate of the same Stuyvesant High School she went to and that I enjoyed 'We Keep the Dead Close' and listened to a few podcasts of her being interviewed on her latest book. She probably won't respond when I link this posting to her either. Oh well.
The Manhattan mapping book is a great book, and of course Ms. Cooper has moved on to her true-crime investigation of a long ago unsolved murder case of an graduate archaeology student, Jane Britton, in an off-campus apartment at Harvard, 'We Keep the Dead Close.' The map book was fun, but her bones are made with 'We Keep the Dead Close.' It will be more than interesting to see what Ms. Cooper produces next.
Filling out the Manhattan map was of course a trip along Memory Lane. Until 2011 when I retired, I'd been coming in and out of Manhattan since I was 11 in 1960. I lived there briefly at my grandmother's and went to high school there. Outside of working at the family shop which never yielded a reliable salary but rather handouts and tips, I worked in Manhattan from 1967 to 2011.
It's fairly impossible for anyone to be able to read the map I've completed in a scanned copy. I finally got a scanner for Christmas and it works great. I've used it to send family photos to a cousin in Wisconsin. The scanner is a great device. Of course I'm quite late to the party to use one. But who cares?
Manhattan is 13 miles long and about 2½ miles wide at its widest point. As far as square miles go, there aren't many. Disney World is probably larger. But my God, what's come out of it.
The long ago crime TV crime series 'Naked City' said there '8 million stories in the Naked City.' Then they'd go on to introduce their episode, "And this is one of them."
Of course 8 million, or 8½ million do not live in the city, (what anyone who is from NYC refers to Manhattan as) but that's generally the population of New York City within its 5 Boroughs (counties). And it would be exceedingly rare for someone to grow up in any of those boroughs and not somehow, sometime, come into Manhattan. Bridge and Tunnel.
So filling out the map for myself gives anyone who looks at it the visual that not much in my life has been above 59th Street, where Central Park begins. Well, it hasn't. That's the one thing about Manhattan, you can spend a lifetime in one part, and rarely touch on other parts. It's an island of small towns.
But's it's all there, from the beginning. Arriving at Penn Station to visit grandma and grandpa and the family flower shop, to my places of living, education, work, recreation and the near misses at the World Trade Center in 2001 and the workplace murders and suicide on September 16, 2002 at 1440 Broadway.
There's so much that despite a small handwriting, I couldn't squeeze in Penn Station, the pool parlor at Broadway Billiards on 51st Street and other emporiums I shot a stick at; all the bars I got to know the bartenders, owners and other people at, some of whom became lifelong friends. But all these places are below 59th Street.
My oldest daughter, who grew up in Flushing and Nassau County, now lives in Westchester County, north of I-287, Cross Westchester Expressway. Weather forecasters will tell you of colder weather and more snow "north of 287." My daughter refers to where she lives as being in "Upstate New York." It hardly is, but mentally it can be seen that way..
I saw a re-Tweet the other day from a comedian Max Marcus (@MaxMarcusComedy) who shares a similar sentiment: "When you live in NYC and see Upstate NY trending and you assume it's something about Westchester."
Maybe I'll do another map exercise using Queens. A lot of people come from Queens who contribute to the "8 million stories."
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