Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City [Hardcover]

There are many surprises among the 53 black-and-white photographs in Stanley Greenberg's hymn to the hum of the city that never sleeps. There is a revealing shot of the roof structure above the curved vault of Grand Central Station's night-sky ceiling that shows where those light bulbs are screwed in to form the delicate constellations commuters see every day. The anchorages of several city bridges--the chambers where the powerful cables that hold up the roadways are fastened down--are exposed to view, peeling paint, trash, and all. There is a gleaming shot of a working Con Edison turbine and a cluttered view of a derelict power station at Floyd Bennett Field, the city's first municipally owned commercial airport.

The pictures possess a certain sameness after the first 20 or so, but New York has been immortalized by many of history's very best photographers, so Greenberg has a tough act to follow. He has good company as he searches for a new angle, however, including Laura Rosen, whose Manhattan Shores is an equally quirky but richly satisfying and illuminating trek around the edges of the island, and Horst Hamann, whose New York Vertical has become an instant classic. Anyone who likes the idea of exploring the city's underpinnings instead of the subways, piers, or buildings themselves will love Invisible New York, which also contains an index in which Greenberg imparts fascinating information about each site. --Peggy Moorman

This stately and haunting collection of large-format black-and-white photographs reveals the city's hidden-and, in many places, crumbling or decrepit-infrastructure: a vault beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, once rented to a wine merchant for champagne storage; weed-encrusted Nike missile silos adjoining Potter's Field, on Hart Island; the massive remains of the West Side piers, rotting into the Hudson. Alongside these images, even the newly functional attic space above the ceiling in Grand Central Terminal (where the bulbs inside the constellations get changed) and the nuclear-blast-resistant water tunnel still under construction beneath the Bronx take on an Ozymandian melancholy. New Yorker An old missile silo serves as a graveyard; dams and disused waterworks maintain a stolid silence; corroded railyard shelters sag dangerously; powerful cables anchor the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Verazzano Narrows bridges; and the unglamorous roof of Grand Central Terminal juts resentfully up at the brick buildings in this airspace in some of the 53 elegantly composed b&w photos in Invisible New York. Publishers Weekly Through haunting black-and-white photos of 53 little-seen spots in and around New York City, many of which are closed off to the public because of security concerns, [Greenberg] offers a moody, sometimes wistful take on the mechanical and natural guts of the city. -- Laurel Touby New York Daily News Artful... Greenberg takes us into the city's infrastructure: a subway station too short for today's trains; a catwalk high in Grand Central Terminal; the massive underground anchorages of the Manhattan and Verrazano-Narrows bridges; collapsing West Side piers; the Lunatic Asylum in ruins on Roosevelt Island. Most images reveal hidden workings, and some of these unseen places are charged with a dire message: You can live on the city's surface only if you take care of its guts. -- Allen Freeman Preservation When most people, including New Yorkers, think about New York, they think only of its outer parts-skyscrapers, bright lights, monuments, parks. Photographer Stanley Greenberg has here shown us what lies at the base of the amazing city, in a stunning series of 53 black-and-white photographs of water tunnels, dams, docks, catwalks, power stations, turbines, gatehouses and the massive anchorage of suspension bridges... His book is a record of both the functioning and the vanishing underpinnings of the city, the flip side of picture postcards-coherent, visually magnificent and awesome in its scale. More than anything, you come away with a sense of how small you are next to the huge cooperative vision that built the metropolis. -- Peter Kurth Salon