Broadway: From the Battery to the Bronx
Carin Drechsler-Marx, Richard F. Shepard
Harry N. Abrams, 1988

Spiral-bound paperback | 5-3/4 x 10 inches | 160 pages | 200+ illustrations | English | ISBN: 0810907453 | $19.95

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
An entertaining guide to the people, culture, and history of 293 New York City blocks.
Photography by Carin Drechsler-Marx; text by Richard F. Shepard.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
A few days ago, I featured Walking Broadway, a guidebook to "Thirteen Miles of Architecture and History" by William J. Hennessey. In my review I mentioned that the new book is not alone in focusing on Manhattan's most famous street; many books came before. One of them is Broadway: From the Battery to the Bronx, which features photography by Carin Drechsler-Marx and text by Richard F. Shepard. Although it has a map at the back and the chapters move in the preferred south-to-north route of books about Broadway, this 32-year-old book is less a guidebook and more a history of New York City told through the thoroughfare, plus a snapshot of the Big Apple in the late 1980s. Shepard, who died in 1998, was a writer and cultural news editor at the New York Times for decades. The Times obituary linked above points out how he asked to step down from his editorial post "because he liked writing and talking to people and getting around town." These dual qualities ? a Times position and a desire to get around town ? come across in his...