Mapping 26 Kaleidoscopic New York Cities

Good maps shed light, but all maps reduce. They take some infinitely varied piece of terrain, shaped by constant encounters with natural history and human hands, and narrow it to a few features, limited further by space and time. For all their dimensions, maps can never wholly represent a place—especially not when they purport to.

Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s new anthology of maps and essays, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, is defiantly subjective cartography. Its thesis—that a city’s geography can never be wholly accounted for, confined, or normalized—is supported by 26 maps of enthralling variety. Here there be ball courts and brownstones, radical feminists and authoritarian planners, 19th-century banks and 21st-century kids’ parties, archipelagos of immigrant homelands, Jewish and Jerseyan influencers, churning commutes, and the entire city’s waste. With dozens of contributors, this kaleidoscopic tour of America’s largest urban palimpsest pans a multitude of perspectives. “Each of us is an atlas of sorts, already knowing how to navigate some portion of the world, containing innumerable versions of place as experience and desire and fear, as route and landmark and memory,” writes Solnit in her introduction. “So a city and its citizens constitute a living library.”