Holiday Guide
With festive hues adorning the Empire State Building, travelers bustling through Grand Central Station, shoppers crowding the sidewalks and model trains running through the Botanical Gardens, New York City becomes even more magical during the holiday season. But if the reality of holiday sojourns—not to mention potentially bad weather and labor disputes between theater management and musicians—turns you into an armchair traveler, head to your favorite bookstore instead of the airport. Each of these five books conveys the sensation of being in New York, during the holidays or at any time.
New York unleashed
Proving that even locals get excited about holidays in New York, Steven Kroll’s Pooch on the Loose (Marshall Cavendish, $14.95, 32 pp.) chronicles the sightseeing adventures of Bart, a terrier who lives in Greenwich Village with his human, Max. Bart seems to have it pretty good—doorman building, parquet floors, fireplace—but he’s not happy. He longs “to do the town, see the sights, especially at Christmas.” So he does. He takes the Staten Island ferry to see the Statue of Liberty, then heads to Radio City Music Hall and even dances with the Rockettes, which turns out just as you might imagine: “People in uniforms try to grab me. One of them is a cop!”
After viewing the windows at Saks and Lord & Taylor and skating in Central Park, the pooped pooch heads back to Max and the apartment—now complete with decorated tree. Michael Garland’s Photoshop illustrations (he also illustrated James Patterson’s Santa Kid, on which Saks based its 2004 holiday windows) are perfect for the young urbanite.
Christmas pops up
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Chuck Fischer’s latest pop-up masterpiece, Christmas in New York (Bulfinch, $35) takes readers young and old on a three-dimensional tour of the city’s holiday sights, from a stage full of high-kicking Rockettes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s elaborately decorated Angel Tree. Fischer’s Rockefeller Center is spectacular, complete with the beloved angels, skating rink, Christmas tree and even Art Deco elements. Three of the book’s nine mini-booklets unfold (literally) to tell the history of the complex and the tradition of the Christmas tree. Christmas in New York also includes views of department store Christmas windows from 1934 to 1997 and a delightful pop-up view of Fifth Avenue. Fischer’s interpretation of Times Square on New Year’s Eve is a burst of color and energy. There’s even a surprise gift tucked into the back inside cover.
Art of the matter
If the pop-up Rockefeller Center whets your appetite for even more information about the landmark, reach for Christine Roussel’s The Art of Rockefeller Center (Norton, $59.95, 320 pp.), a detailed account of how the buildings and accompanying art were commissioned, created and installed. Roussel also notes the complex’s starring role in our collective holiday experience. Of particular interest to holiday readers are the chapters on the flagship building at 30 Rockefeller Center; the Channel Gardens and Promenade; and, of course, Radio City Music Hall. Readers learn all sorts of tidbits, including the fact that the famous skating rink was not part of the site plan until a temporary rink opened on Christmas Day, 1936, and proved so successful that a permanent rink was installed three years later.
Over the river, through the years
Re-released this season, Pete Hamill’s 1973 novel The Gift (Little, Brown, $16.95, 160 pp.) is a nice-looking little holiday volume. But it doesn’t portray a “greeting-card Christmas,” as Pete Hamill the narrator points out. It is Brooklyn, 1952, and Pete arrives home to a scene miles away from Norman Rockwell’s oeuvre: “Several older women cried as other young men boarded buses that would take them off to the other bases, where they would be changed into soldiers and sailors and sent to Korea; a few cops, some scattered night people chewing doughnuts in the blue glare of the fluorescent lights—all of it played against the mechanical roar of engines and city noise and that jukebox playing somewhere about Christmas and absence and young men going away.” At 17, Pete is a vulnerable kid reeling from unrequited love and trying to understand his old man. But he is mature enough to scrap together money for a tree and a few presents for his younger siblings. He’s also aware of his mother’s despair: “Christmas became the most difficult time of the year for her; she simply didn’t have the money to buy anything fancy, no electric trains, fielder’s mitts. She usually made do with stockings filled with tangerines and walnuts, bought on credit at Jack’s grocery store.” Pete, meanwhile, is searching for a greater gift, which—this being a Christmas story, after all—he finds.
Should you go?
If you’re still trying to resist a trip to NYC, don’t pick up StyleCity New York (Thames & Hudson, $24.95, 192 pp.), a photo-filled and well-written (author Alice Twemlow uses phrases like “this tiny, ribbon-tied box of a shop”) travel guide. The book is arranged by neighborhood and describes great finds, such as a Mercedes-Benz showroom that accommodates only five cars on a curving ramp much like the one its famous architect later designed for the Guggenheim. One-of-a-kind lodging options fill the “sleep” chapter, ranging from the sleek Hotel on Rivington, with nearly 360-degree views, to the Hotel Chelsea, about which one is advised “seedy cool is apt to teeter dangerously on the edge of downright dingy.” Most of the places featured in StyleCity New York—chocolatiers, tea shops, museums, design emporia—are decidedly not dingy, and are sure to be even more fabulous during the holiday season.