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About
Following Adam Gopnik's best-selling Paris to the Moon, the adventure continues against the panorama of another storied city.
Autumn, 2000: the Gopnik family moves back to a New York that seems, at first, safer and shinier than ever. Here are the triumphs and travails of father, mother, son and daughter; and of the teachers, coaches, therapists, adversaries and friends who round out the extended urban family. From Bluie, a goldfish fated to meet a Hitchcockian end, to Charlie Ravioli, an imaginary playmate who, being a New Yorker, is too busy to play, Gopnik's New York is charmed by the civilization of childhood. It is a fabric of living, which, though rent by the events of 9/11, will reweave itself, reviving a world where Jewish jokes mingle with debates about the problem of consciousness, the price of real estate and the meaning of modern art. By turns elegant and exultant, written with a signature mix of mind and heart, Through the Children's Gate is at once a celebration of a newly fragile city and a poignant study of a family trying to find its way, and joy, within it.
In the fall of 2000, just back from Paris, with the sounds of its streets still singing in my ears and the codes to its courtyards still lining my pockets, I went downtown and met a man who was making a perfect map of New York. He worked for the city, and from a set of aerial photographs and underground schematics he had turned every block, every highway, and every awning-every one in all five boroughs!-into neatly marked and brightly colored geometric spaces laid out on countless squares. Buildings red, streets blue, open spaces white, the underground tunnels sketched in dotted lines ... everything in New York was on the map: every ramp to the Major Deegan Expressway and every abandoned brownstone in the Bronx.
The kicker was that the maniacally perfect map was unfinished and even unfinishable, because the city it described was too "dynamic," changing every day in ways that superceded each morning's finished drawing. Each time everything had been put in place-the subway tunnels aligned with the streets, the Con Ed crawl spaces with the subway tunnels, all else with the buildings above-someone or other would come back with the discouraging news that something had altered, invariably a lot. So every time he was nearly done, he had to start all over.
Autumn, 2000: the Gopnik family moves back to a New York that seems, at first, safer and shinier than ever. Here are the triumphs and travails of father, mother, son and daughter; and of the teachers, coaches, therapists, adversaries and friends who round out the extended urban family. From Bluie, a goldfish fated to meet a Hitchcockian end, to Charlie Ravioli, an imaginary playmate who, being a New Yorker, is too busy to play, Gopnik's New York is charmed by the civilization of childhood. It is a fabric of living, which, though rent by the events of 9/11, will reweave itself, reviving a world where Jewish jokes mingle with debates about the problem of consciousness, the price of real estate and the meaning of modern art. By turns elegant and exultant, written with a signature mix of mind and heart, Through the Children's Gate is at once a celebration of a newly fragile city and a poignant study of a family trying to find its way, and joy, within it.
In the fall of 2000, just back from Paris, with the sounds of its streets still singing in my ears and the codes to its courtyards still lining my pockets, I went downtown and met a man who was making a perfect map of New York. He worked for the city, and from a set of aerial photographs and underground schematics he had turned every block, every highway, and every awning-every one in all five boroughs!-into neatly marked and brightly colored geometric spaces laid out on countless squares. Buildings red, streets blue, open spaces white, the underground tunnels sketched in dotted lines ... everything in New York was on the map: every ramp to the Major Deegan Expressway and every abandoned brownstone in the Bronx.
The kicker was that the maniacally perfect map was unfinished and even unfinishable, because the city it described was too "dynamic," changing every day in ways that superceded each morning's finished drawing. Each time everything had been put in place-the subway tunnels aligned with the streets, the Con Ed crawl spaces with the subway tunnels, all else with the buildings above-someone or other would come back with the discouraging news that something had altered, invariably a lot. So every time he was nearly done, he had to start all over.