Habitats - Constance Rosenblum

There
may be eight million stories in the Naked City, but there are also
nearly three million dwelling places, ranging from Park Avenue palaces
to Dickensian garrets and encompassing much in between. The doorways to
these residences are tantalizing portals opening onto largely invisible
lives. Habitats offers 40 vivid and intimate stories about how
New Yorkers really live in their brownstones, their apartments, their
mansions, their lofts, and as a whole presents a rich, multi-textured
portrait of what it means to make a home in the world's most varied and
powerful city.

These essays, expanded versions of
a selection of the Habitats column published in the Real Estate section
of The New York Times, take readers to both familiar and remote
sections of the city-to history-rich townhouses,to low-income housing
projects, to out-of-the-way places far from the beaten track, to every
corner of the five boroughs-and introduce them to a wide variety of
families and individuals who call New York home. These pieces reveal a
great deal about the city's past and its rich store of historic
dwellings. Along with exploring the deep and even mystical connections
people feel to the place where they live, these pieces, taken as a
whole, offer a mosaic of domestic life in one of the world's most
fascinating cities and a vivid portrait of the true meaning of home in
the 21st-century metropolis.