Carol von Pressentin Wright’s classic Blue Guide to New York City, relied on by tour guides, residents and visitors alike since its first edition in 1983, is available in a special reprint edition from Amazon in the UK and US. You might not guess it, Amazon make the correct edition almost impossible to find despite our frequent requests to them, but, just to be sure, here it is:

Amazon US: Blue Guide New York » 
Amazon UK:  Blue Guide New York »

Check the ISBN of the edition Amazon take you to.  If it is not 9781916568051 then put in the search box exactly this ISBN (not the title).  Ignore the one star review, the 86 reviews averaging 4.6 stars for precisely the same book have been buried by Amazon.  And if you have the right book the price will be $40 / £30, with the above cover.

This is a special reprint addition of Carol Wright’s 2017 fifth edition. Printed in black and white, for copyright reasons it may not include all the original photographs, but the quality Blue Guides text and the mapping are all there in full.

After 40 years and five editions selling tens of thousands of copies Carol Wright is stepping back.  A new edition is in the works, being lovingly researched and written as we speak by the architectural historian, lecturer and journalist Francis Morrone.  More details will follow in due course.

…at the Museum of the City of New York, from September 13th. “From Farm to City”, focusing on the “forgotten borough” of Staten Island. Staten Island is the subject of a forthcoming Blue Guide Travel Monograph, due out next year.

As I write this, it is the anniversary of the birth of one of early America’s great engineers, John A. Roebling (born on June 12th 1806), designer of the Brooklyn Bridge.

When it was opened, in May 1883, Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world and an engineering wonder. It is still one of the most majestic sights of New York City.

Roebling had arrived in America in 1831 with a small band of German pilgrims, intending to set up an agricultural community. His talent for engineering soon emerged, however, and he became the country’s most successful producer of wire rope. His design for the bridge that would be built over the East River contained many elements that were new or untested on such a huge scale. His vision became reality, but at the cost of many human lives, including his own. While surveying the building works in 1869 his toes were crushed in an accident and had to be amputated. He contracted tetanus and died. Supervision of the construction passed to his son, Washington Roebling, and his able wife Emily. The foundations of the bridge are sunk deep in the riverbed. In order for men to work them, they had to have air to breathe, and this was solved with a system of caissons, huge diving bells filled with air and submerged in the water. The problems of compression and decompression were not understood in those days and many men suffered from the ‘bends’, including Washington Roebling himself, who was plagued by symptoms of caisson disease for the rest of his life.

Brooklyn Bridge was superseded as the longest suspension bridge in 1903, by the Williamsburg Bridge, also in New York. Today the world’s five longest suspension bridges are in Japan, China (two), Denmark and England. Brooklyn Bridge occupies 78^th place. But it is still one of the greatest and most beautiful.

For more on the bridge, and on those who designed and built it, see Carol von Pressentin Wright’s Blue Guide New York.