Magazine

In Lewis Mumford’s New York, rapacious developers overbuilt without sufficient regard for their public surroundings. Corporate titans constructed inefficient, gigantic skyscrapers as monuments to themselves. Virtually any big plan for development met with a public backlash. Does any of this sound familiar?

The 20th century has come and gone, but New York has remained the same. Or so you might conclude from reading Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York, a recently re-released collection of essays by the New Yorker’s great architecture critic, who wrote the magazine’s “Sky Line” column in the ’30s. Edited by Robert Wojtowicz, the literary editor of Mumford’s estate, the collection is an excellent primer on Mumford’s acerbic, incisive writings. Architecture and urban-planning aficionados of a certain age hold Mumford in the same esteem as, say, literature fanatics do Ernest Hemingway. Today, his opinions can seem both prophetic and naïve, but the most striking thing about reading Mumford’s work is that it shows how little New York’s buildings, the experience of living in them and the fights surrounding them have evolved.