Books like Underneath New York — picked by fans

This book was pivotal in sparking my fascination for the secretive and mysterious worlds beneath cities. 

It is the definitive guide to the vast assemblage of underground spaces, infrastructures, and nooks and crannies beneath the streets of London.

The coverage of the book is remarkable and will really help readers that are new to the theme to appreciate the huge range of spaces and infrastructures that lurk hidden far beneath London’s streets.

The book opened my eyes to culverted and hidden rivers; to sewers, water, and hydraulic pipes and tunnels under the Thames; and to underground transport systems, hidden power and communications grids, and labyrinths of bunkers.

Most important for me were the book’s amazing array of maps, lithographs, and photographs. 

Because the ground itself obscures virtually all of the subterranean worlds of cities, the best way to actually represent and visualise them is through drawings and diagrams.

This book opened my eyes – as it has done for many – to the complexity, density, and depth of the foundations, pipes, tunnels, conduits, and infrastructures below cities.

In it, David Macaulay uses his unequalled drawing skills to illustrate everything from sewer valves; skyscraper foundations; the worlds beneath manholes to an amazing cross-section of New York showing shipping lanes, deep transport tunnels, and huge skyscrapers whose hidden, deep pile foundations can be almost as deep as their above-surface structures. 

The subterranean worlds of cities have long been represented as a literal ‘underworld’ – a hidden and shadowy realm inhabited by all sorts of marginalised and spectral figures and communities.

Very often, such communities – real, imagined, and mythical – have been deemed by elites to be morally, socially, and biologically threatening the above-surface city. As someone who does not generally read a huge amount of fiction, Heise’s wonderful book was a huge inspiration for me.

It explores and reveals like no other book how American urban underworlds have been represented across a range of American literature.

From New York through Chicago and Los Angeles, what emerges is a rich a vibrant history through which the lived and imagined world below cities have been pivotal in key novels.

Anyone who has ventured down into Paris’s many catacombs, tunnels, and quarries will quickly realise that no city has a more storied, evocative, and influential subterranean culture.

With stunning colour photography, amazing maps, and an unrivalled discussion of the remarkable histories, cultures, and physical realms beneath Paris, this book was a revelation to me. 

What I found particularly fascinating is the way the book shows that, in sharp contrast to above-surface Paris, which is constantly ‘regenerated’, repaired, and cleared of the detritus of the past – beyond immaculately repaired historic buildings – the ‘stuff’ of Paris subterranean world largely just continues to accumulate!

The photos in this remarkable book take readers on tours of underground signs from the days of Victor Hugo; sketches of the guillotine from the time of the Revolution; Nazi military signs, and a vast array of art, graffiti, and remnants from Paris’ remarkable present-day ‘catophile’ culture.

Tough Jews is a short history of Jewish-American gangsters and their Italian colleagues with whom they made common cause. It is here for the first time that we understand why Arnold Rothstein was the most important gangster in America. Having introduced "organized" into organized crime, he promised underworld figures the help of the famous attorney William Fallon if they landed in trouble and agreed to look after their families if they got sent up the Hudson (to Sing Sing). I am struck by the fact that Cohen makes his history personal, by means of his own contacts with the people who know the inside story of how the Jewish gangsters thrived—or didn't. He sits down with them; he eats with them; and he gets them to remember how it once was in the days of Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, and Arnold Rothstein.

My favorite gay autobiography. Humorous, explicit, and thought-provoking. Like my story, his is far from a neatly packaged “coming out” story of self-acceptance. He describes some way-out-of-bounds-for-most-people sexual adventures in detail but with no intention to shock or titillate. He is just telling stories he finds interesting, and he is a great storyteller. Not surprising, since he is a celebrated science fiction author.

Always surprising in a quirky way. Example: in the 1950s, he is at an outdoor gay cruising area at night when there is a police raid. It is only as the men flee that he grasps how many were there: hundreds. It is his first sense of being in a large gay male community, and it is empowering.

Understanding New York Jews is key to understanding American Jews. There is no city like New York City and there are no Jews like New York Jews. In the middle of the 20th century, they made up around 30% of the total city population. This three-volume award-winning set uncovers aspects of the city’s history that even aficionados don’t know. Each volume can be purchased separately but together they paint an absorbing panorama across four centuries. I like to teach the volumes. They are fresh each time I read them, with lively prose and compelling vignettes. Reading them is like walking the streets of Gotham with a great guide.

If you read one biography/memoir of a Gilded Age criminal, make it this one. It tells the story (often in his own words) of the celebrated pickpocket George Appo, an odd little half-Chinese, half-Irish, one-eyed fellow who could make $800 in a few days when most working men made less than that in a year. Appo would rivet New Yorkers when he testified about his second career as a “green goods” con man, working to swindle gullible out-of-towners who came to buy purported counterfeit money at a discount, only to discover that there was nothing but sawdust inside the packages they carried away. Appo refused to name names, though, as he was a self-described “good fellow.”  

I read The Women’s House of Detention earlier this year and was introduced in its pages to a world of pre-Stonewall policing of queerness and transness. In our current moment, when state laws increasingly seek to restrict the lives of gender-expansive people, this book offers a window into both the origin of these laws and also, importantly, into the lives of queer and trans people who, in their resistance, created space for me to exist, and to name my own existence, today.

Anyone who is curious about other cities and cultures will love the complete series of the This Is… books by Miroslav Sasek. They are filled with exciting facts and the colorful illustrations are truly delightful. From New York, to London, to Hong Kong, and many more, these books will inspire you to travel the world!