Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York

Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York
by L.B. Deyo, David Leibowitz

Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York
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Book Summary Information

Author: David Leibowitz, L.B. Deyo
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-07-22
ISBN: 0609809318
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Three Rivers Press

Book Reviews of Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York

Book Review: Superb
Summary: 5 Stars

How often do you find a book that really inspires you? Since reading Invisible Frontier I haven't been able to look at my city in the same way. Instead of seeing the dull surfaces of the streets and buildings, I see through them into the structures beneath. The steel skeletons of row houses, the intestine sewers, the soaring bridges and skyscrapers all seem vivid and enticing. I want to see more.

What you have to understand about Invisible Frontier is that it's a series of explorations layered on explorations. The phyisical discoveries and adventures are woven into intellectual discoveries and adventures. The reader follows our heroes into the ruins of Riverside Hospital, but also follows them into the past, when Typhoid Mary was quarantined there, and also into the churning chaos of the river that surrounds her island, and into the mathematics that govern that chaos, and into the agony of the shipwrecked souls who died just offshore in that turbulence.

The authors bring a light touch to their narrative. Their criticisms of contemporary life are trenchant and hilarious, but no more acerbic than their self-assessments. They frankly admit their doubts, and the absurdity of their conceits. It would have been easy indeed for them to leave out the failures, such as their inability to penetrate the Trilateral Commission headquartes. By leaving the failures in, they greatly enhance the thrill of their successes, and lend a gravity to their adventures. I enjoyed their misses as much as their hits.

I won't leave off without mentioning that their last chapter is the best bit of writing about 9/11 I have yet read. It is light, subtle, but deeply moving and beautiful. Don't miss this book.

Summary of Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York

In the shadows of the city waits an invisible frontier?a wilderness thriving in the deep places, woven through dead storm drains and live subway tunnels, coursing over third rails. This frontier waits in the walls of abandoned tenements, hides on the rooftops, infiltrates the bridges? steel. It?s a no-man?s-land, fenced off with razor wire, marked by warning signs, persisting in shadow, hidden everywhere as a parallel dimension. Crowds hurry through the bright streets, insulated by pavement, never reflecting that beneath their feet or above their heads lurks a universe.

Led by its two founding agents, L. B. Deyo and David ?Lefty? Leibowitz, Jinx is a stylish urban adventure out?t known for its daring?if sometimes ridiculous?forays into the hidden wonders that lurk above and beneath America?s greatest city, New York. In Invisible Frontier L. B. and Lefty chronicle Jinx?s dramatic?if sometimes absurd?exploration of a Dante-esque New York, from the depths of the city?s underground Hell (abandoned aqueducts and subway tunnels) to the pinnacles of its Paradise (rooftops and bridges) and everything in between, capturing the genius of the city?s engineering, the vibrancy of its found art, and the elegiac beauty of its ruins. Here is a true series of wittily narrated adventures into the hidden world beneath a great civilization.

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