Katharine GreiderBesprekingen

The premise for Katharine Greider's book on an apartment building on Manhattan's Lower East Side is fantastic: understanding a place at a specific point in time (the forced eviction due to structural problems with the building) by tracing its history. She starts before the Dutch settled the island, and in that regard I was reminded of James Michener books. This starting point held my interest greatly, as did the more subjective asides about the meaning of home and our connection to a place (making me think of Gaston Bachelard), but her writing could not do the same when she presented the minutiae of early residents, for example. Perhaps some editing was required, or maybe a different style in those sections, to make the voluminous amounts of research tell a better story. I agree with another reviewer that illustrations would have helped to make this urban history stronger...and more enjoyable.

I was looking forward to reading this book. I love personally grounded histories based on one location, I'm a native New Yorker, and I'm a city planner by profession. This book looked as though it would speak to me on many levels.

I couldn't get through it. The writing is lovely, but so calm that it fails to communicate emotion. The story suffers from being a bit too chronological - we learn information as the author does, but it this often-effective style results in a choppiness in the text that makes the story difficult to follow. Not recommended.

More than the story of one house, this book explores the living history of the building back through its roots to the land, and even the very foundation of the city. A fascinating look at a very personal piece of history, but also an in-depth look at the neighborhood in which the house is situated.

The Archaeology of Home is a fascinating look at the life of a single building on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Greider digs all the way back to the Native Americans who inhabited Manhattan before Westerners arrived, then follows the land up to her own occupancy at the turn of the millennium. While the narrative is primarily chronological, Greider frequently intersperses her own tales of renovation woe among the historical tidbits.

This book is full of information, much of it unique to me despite being fairly conversant in the history of New York. Her historical information is well sourced, and though teeming with detail, the book never seems dry. However, this detail is both a blessing and a curse to the overall book. By trying to be so comprehensive about the building's occupants, Greider ends up actually blurring the picture somewhat. A multi-household dwelling holds so many people over the course of a couple hundred years that it impossible to remember much about any one family. The little details do much to add flavor to the overall narrative, but after a while they begin to become a bit wearying.

Greider really shines in the more memoir-like portions of her book. Her descriptions of her own tenants and her struggles with contractors, city officials, and bankers are vivid and engaging. Perhaps this book would have benefited from a reversal -- if it was mostly about her present day experience with bits of historical details here and there, I'd give it 5 stars easily.

What an unusual book! Following the story of a home, a house, a place that has led a remarkable "life." Greider's home in the Lower East Side of Manhattan was falling down. Literally. This is the story of her journey of discovery about our American concept of owning your own home, about what "occupied" the space where your home is before you, and the building arrived, and why we are so obsessed with both home ownership and land. A good read, although very offbeat.

The Archaeology of Home was incredible and really something new and awesome to read. I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads! I really want to thank it for the giveaway, also the publishers.

I found this book interesting as it provided a unique historical story of New York. Eventhough I am not from there and only visited a couple of times the writting is descriptive enough to mentally construct the story. I do think images or drawings would have been a huge help, especially for the house descriptions.

The Archeology of Home is an absolutely fabulous book. Greider does an amazing job of interweaving the story of her own property into that of greater New York. What she accomplishes is an urban history that will be equally enjoyable to the preservationist, urban historian, or general reader.

This book serves a great general introduction to New York History, while encouraging the reader to investigate the subject even further. In telling the story of her family’s trials involved with this old home, she masterfully peels back layer upon layer of history that exist upon this site.

I hope to see this work featured in New York bookshops, notably the Tenement Museum Shop upon my next visit.

The author's co-op building was in the throes of rehabbing when she received a call in the middle of the night saying that everyone had to leave, that the house, which dated from the early 1800's, was likely to collapse at any moment. In trying to discover what went wrong, structurally, Greider delved into the history of the house, and, making lemonade from the lemon life handed her, wrote a book about the house, the history of the place where it stood, and the people who had preceded her there. Unfortunately, she intersperses this history with often incoherent philosophical musings on the nature of "home", and with descriptions of her aggravating co-owners and the trauma of not being a millionaire anymore (although still having a very large family home in a high-toned Virginia suburb to which to escape). Had she left the latter portions in a private journal, where they belong, this would have been a much better book.]

When Greider was told to leave her house or risk it falling down on top of her and her family, it spurred an investigation that began with contractors' diagnoses and lawsuits, then veered into archaeology and urban history.

"The Archaeology of Home" deftly sews together the history of early Colonial America, domestic architecture, geography, immigration and autobiography into one highly-readable account of the author's former home at 239 East 7th Street on the Lower East Side of New York City. To travel through time and document the lives of those who lived in the house - and on the site - for over two centuries before the author herself did is a massive endeavour, but one she does successfully thanks to meticulous research and and attention to detail. In doing so, she brings the house's long-dead former residents to life. It's an impressive achievement, and made for yet another great read for me from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers.

With much anticipation, I received this book as an advanced reading copy through the Library Thing Early Reviewers program. Greider and her family lived on two floors of a refurbished tenement house on East 7th Street in Manhattan until a home inspector discovered that the building was unstable and on the verge of collapse. She researched the house's history to deal with contractors and lawyers and from that grew this fascinating microhistory. Starting with pre-colonial native tribes through Dutch and English settlement, the construction of the tenement in 1845 and all it's residents through the troubled era of the 70's & 80's, Greider details the lives and times of the people who have lived on this spot and their neighbors. It's a detailed look at the use of one plot of land that touches on history, archaeology, ethnography and sociology. Amidst the history is Greider's own story of renovation, lawsuits, and displacement which I did not like so much, in fact it uncomfortably reminded me of Under the Tuscan Sun (one of my least favorite books). This should be a book that I love in that it covers many things I'm obsessed with - history, New York, immigration, social life, urbanism - but alas I just like this book. I had to put this book down several times while reading it because I just couldn't get into it Greider's writing style. Nevertheless I salute her brilliant premise and extensive research in creating this book.

Favorite Passages:

"The typical Manhattan abode simply lacks the square footage necessary to organize interior space according to expectations. What you get instead is a commingling of functions that are normally segregated and an intimacy some find inappropriate or uncomfortable. Children share a bedroom, or even sleep in their parent's room. Often there's only one bathroom. In a few of the oldest tenements, the bathtub is still in the kitchen. People often eat in their living rooms. Entertaining in these circumstances is almost unavoidably casual. If a couple who lives in a tiny walk-up invite you to dinner, you will witness the ferocious labor required to prepare a hot meal in a galley kitchen, to drag out a folding table while kicking toys out of the way, and then to tidy up the blitzkrieg that results. It is all very unlovely and close; acquire the taste and nothing could be nicer." - p. 80

½

Katharine Greider received a life changing phone call in January of 2002 and this book is the ultimate result. She was told that her home, the first home she and her husband owned, the home where her first child was born, was unsafe and could collapse at any moment. The Archaeology of Home: An Epic set in 1000 Square Feet in the Lower East Side is her memoir / history, a memoir, not of her time living there, but of the time after that phone call and the problems that came with the news. The history is the history of 239 East 7th Street and the people who it sheltered and the people that affected 239 East 7th Street. Greider weaves the memoir and history together, shifting in time between the building’s history and her story.

The transitions are not as seamless as they are in fiction; life is not conducive to easy segues. I am glad she wrote it so it could not be easily untangled. Otherwise, I would have only read the history and I would have missed the recent history, the building’s fate after being declared unfit for habitation. After learning how it was built and meeting a century and a halves worth of residents, their families, the neighborhood characters and elites, not learning the building’s fate would have been a loss.

The history is well told and well researched. As she points out in the acknowledgments she was in the best place to research New York urban history, the city itself. With the exception of a few, necessary, digressions into ancient history she follows the land 239 East 7th would occupy chronologically from before the first European settlers arrive. Even thought her focus is not one family Greider has produced a fleshed out genealogy using sources that typically only give up cold, dry facts. She does it, not by creative license but with diligent work, and some luck, in the archives.

The illustrations add to the story, partly by giving a face to the building but it was the map that was most helpful to me. By locating the house and the other locations mentioned for me it allowed me to picture Manhattan changing from a place to graze cattle to the city we know today.

This is an interesting and readable urban history. I would recommend it to anyone, especially someone who is not a fan of scholarly works. There is no statistical analysis or theoretical discussion here, Greider simply tells the story of 239 East 7th Street and through that story we learn New York City’s story. She has produced an interesting and unconventional work.

The Archeology of Home by Katherine Greider is really two stories, linked by a common subject: a now-vanished 19th century building at 239 East 7th Street in New York City. The story of Grieder and her family's residence there, their troubles with structural issues and the loss of their home there is one story. The history of 239 and its former residents forms the other story, which Greider intertwines with her own memoir. Overall I enjoyed the history of 239 more and thought it was by far the stronger part of the book. Greider is strongest, I think, when writing about the Victorian residents of 239 and of East 7th Street. Her research is thorough and impressive. I would have liked to have seen illustrations, though - I think that visuals make any urban history book much stronger.

"The Archaeology of Home" is essentially a series of interlinked essays circling the relationship between people and place. It was a denser read than I'd imagined (alternating between historical detail and reflection) but consistently well written. The author is a writer first and a subject expert second -- a strength here, as she readily admits to her unfamiliarities and uses language effectively to draw the reader along on her journey.

Subjects that Greider covers include brief histories of Lower East Side residents during a variety of historical periods, her own experiences (and sense of loss) with having to abandon a structurally unsafe home, the concept of a cemetery as a home. Each chapter is generally centred on a particular topic, and the entire thing is connected by a single street address. It's conceptually quite elegant, though I imagine that some readers would find some sections more personally interesting than others. Likewise, some might perceive the strong personal voice as a strength, and others as a weakness -- there is a lot of space given to Greider's own frustrations and fears.

This book could be considerably strengthened by the inclusion of more images -- there are perhaps a handful of images included in the text, and a map in the front, but often the text includes descriptions of photographs or images that are not included. The reliance on text only is a missed opportunity.

Also, it should be noted that I read a fair chunk of this while in a hospital waiting room, and still managed to enjoy it. Point in favour.

Katharine Greider presents a portrait of her home over the history of its spot on the planet. This was an intriguing idea to me, as I have often found myself woolgathering about what might have been at the spot where my home sits now. For some time I worked on charting the histories of mundane properties in order to determine if there ever might have been a source of pollution on that property. There are so many surprises in the simple histories of the boring little places around us, so I thought this would be an engaging story in line with my experience.

It turned out to be that and more. The book is a bit of a survivor's story. The author was unceremoniously chased from her home when its failed foundation was discovered, and the City revoked its occupancy permit. This led to an extended period in which she had to live elsewhere, eventually witnessing its reconstruction. The story jumps back and forth from rich descriptions of the property, its inhabitants, and their environs at various stages in its history (after it emerged from the swamp atop cartloads of fill). As an engineer, I was fascinated by the depictions of this history, but even more by the author's descriptions of interactions with engineers and architects, and the impacts of these interactions on her life. I think engineers would really enjoy this book, which serves as a stark reminder of the very real implications of our work.½

The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set in 1000 Square Feet of the Lower East Side by Katherine Greider.

Reviewed from Advance Reader received through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.

In late January, 2002, Katherine Greider got a phone call from the architect hired to investigate and recommend repairs to their home on 7th Avenue in New York. The foundation was failing, he said. The house is not safe. You have to get out, now. Thus began Katherine and husband David's nightmare, featuring a cast of contractors, engineers, architects, the other owners from their co-op building, and a voyage through history from the time before New York was anything but swampland through the genesis and evolution of the neighbourhood, the waves of immigration and the people who inhabited No. 239 before they did. Greider jumps back and forth in time between past and present, and her meticulous research and accessible writing bring alive the various characters who lived in the house and the neighbourhood from the 1600s to the 2000s. Highly recommended.½

This book is a fascinating history of a house, of a neighborhood. The author has done an amazing amount of research revealing an intriguing cast of characters which she has brought to life within the shifting backdrop of the neighborhood. The picture of each era is well drawn and fleshed out. My problem with the book is that it tried to do too many things, diminishing the impact of each. Besides being a history of the house, it is also a memoir about the author's dealings with the house and, particularly in the beginning, includes way too much filler; the story of man's relationship to property and home from the dawn of history.

I really enjoyed this book. This is a book that defied expectations. I expected a book about something going horribly wrong with a house, and the history of the house, period. What I didn't expect was that it would also include the history of what "home" has meant over time, all the way back to the first peoples who settled down.

I began to expect/worry that I would get irritated with the author, that the book would become too self-centered, or that I would have little patience for a family that made and spent lots of money in the tech boom, and lost it in the bust. But that just didn't happen. The author kept a good balance and, in the end, she and her family were just another on the list of people who lived in that house, making good or bad decisions, trying to do the best they could, and trying to find home.

The amount of research that went into this book is amazing, and I imagine that the descendants of the myriad of people mentioned in these pages would be thrilled to find their relatives listed here. For the reader, it is good to know that you do not have to keep careful track. If they are important, you'll start to recognize them, but otherwise, the author uses people and the details about them to paint a picture of the neighborhood. When reading these sections, let the names and occupations and mini-stories of these people-pixels flow over you and generate a portrait of a single neighborhood, on a single street, in the city of New York.

This review is based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.½

Like many Americans, I'm interested in the genealogy of kinship and I want to learn more about my ancestors whose life stories have helped to shape my own. Katharine Greider's book has a genealogical focus, but it's the genealogy of place rather than lineage. Through her research of her home's history, Greider establishes a connection with those who inhabited the same living space in Manhattan's East Village.

The Archaeology of Home is, in a sense, a disaster survival story. However, its victims are limited to the residents of one building. When the architect hired to recommend repairs to the aging building discovered major structural damage, the building's residents were advised to immediately evacuate. The building was owned by a coop, so the decision to invest in repairs or to cut their losses and sell involved, not just the author and her husband, but all of the building's shareholders. In order to discover how the building had degraded to its current state, the author researched the history of both its land ownership and occupancy. Greider interweaves the history of the property and its former residents with an account of the two years of uncertainty she endured as city officials, architects, her family, and the other residents made decisions that would determine whether they would return to their home or move on. Greider often uses the language of therapy, and the book seems to be an attempt to reach peace with the past and put it behind her.

I have an interest in New York's Dutch history, so I particularly benefited from reading about the Dutch connection to Greider's East 7th Street property. I also enjoyed reading about the families who lived at that address in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It appears that some of these families left no descendants, and I was touched by Greider's active remembrance of these otherwise ordinary individuals.

This well-researched and well-written book will appeal to readers with interests in urban sociology, genealogy, architecture, psychology, anthropology, biography/memoirs, and New York history. Recommended.

This review is based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.½

I enjoyed reading this book, although I liked it more for its history of New York City than for the litany of troubles connected with owning an old house. As an adult I have owned several older houses, the earliest structure was a small place originally built in 1773. I, too, have experienced both emotional and financial frustration; it tends to go with the territory. Although I could empathize with Katharine Greider’s situation, it was through her well-researched history of the city (not her trials & tribulations) that hooked me on her book.

For me, the exciting part of old-house-love is the never-ending desire to learn as much as possible about the history of the place. I have always wondered about who had lived in the locations before me. This curiosity stretched beyond who had lived in the brick ‘n’ mortar house, and I ruminated about what human activity may or may not have transpired in the location before the house appeared. Sure, I have done some research on each of my older houses and enjoyed finding old maps of the property and information about its residents, but nothing I ever did was up to the level of that done by Greider. Hers was impressive. As an aside, I appreciated her gratitude and compliments to the fine staff at the New York Public Library and the excellent service provided to all researchers.

Until recently, I lived in and around NYC most of my life. When I drive down the Harlem River Drive, I imagine what Manhattan may have looked like before there were any buildings, long before any Europeans arrived. When I was a teenager and I had a summer job at Fort Totten in Queens, I was curious about soldiers had walked on that ground hundreds of years earlier … and those who may have walked on that ground thousands of years earlier, before Fort Totten existed. I have always had this natural thirst for information, which was nicely quenched by Greider's book. I found it fascinating to read that the island of Manhattan looked like a “real” island at one time complete with marshes and river grasses. I loved reading about the history of New York City, and hearing some background regarding the actual people behind some familiar names of streets and places. Many of us know the names of such places as Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens, MacDougal Street and Delancey Street and Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan. How fun to read a bit about the people behind the place names!

"The Archaeology of Home" is a complex of layers upon layers. It is difficult for me to categorize this book: It is memoir. It is genealogy. It is an absorbing history of New York City's lower East Side. It is philosophy. We readers have the privilege to step into the luminous, intelligent (an inadequate word) mind of its author. Living in northern Appalachia, I hadn't realized how hungry I was for such an experience. The depth and breadth of Ms. Greider's research is astounding--approaching, I believe, obsession. It is as if she is compelled to tell us each and every tidbit she has uncovered from countless documents. At times the book loses momentum because of this quirk and the reader may lose a sense of the intended organization of the book. Where is she leading us? In my own life, I have been obsessed with two houses--the 105-year-old "Victorian" farmhouse where I have lived for 30 years and the 20-room Victorian home of my liquor merchant great-grandfather. I have questioned my obsessions with these houses, but no longer after reading this book.

The Archaeology of Home is at once both fascinating and frustrating. Greider evokes the best and worst of New York in her study and musings of the growth and death of a building.

Many people become attached to the rooms in which they live, the brick and mortar that shelters them, and the roof that observes their personal rituals. Greider is no different; the problem is that although she started out approaching the issue of her dwelling from both historical and spiritual fronts, there are too many moments when she lapses into times of mourning for the money being spent in her real-estate adventure. At times she sounds a bit like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. Her adventures - unfortunately - don't quite equal Alice's.

Greider is to be praised for her exhaustive research. The reader gets easily wrapped up in the story of a city building from its roots as Indian land through to modern-day times. The author handles the exploration and story of immigrant lives very well. One can picture the various individuals and families she writes about as they cook, sleep, and go in and out the door of this otherwise nondescript Lower East Side dwelling.

Greider would make a very good genealogist. She is tenacious in her research and is able to "bring life to dead people" in a very intelligent and human way. As one reads of the immigrants from previous generations whose building she shares in more present times, one actually feels the interweaving of spirits, stories, and lives. The book gives its readers an interesting course in New York history, told by the threads of the forgotten.

Greider seems, however, as though she can't make up her mind whether she wants to write a memoir about her introduction to the Lower East Side or a book on urban history. At times she wavers and stumbles into philosophical and spiritual territory a la Bachelard, and these moments are memorable and important. But just as quickly she veers away - usually in the direction of herself and her family - and occasionally commits the worst sin of memoir: whining.

Greider doesn't set out to whine. Her emotions are stirred enough to commit to words and share with others the awkward and disappointing experience she and her husband have when purchasing two floors of an old New York tenement for their contemporary lifestyle in current times. Oddly, it is difficult for the reader to empathize with the author's bad luck. There is no doubt that her real-estate adventure turned into a nightmare that no one would want to face. However, her personal disappointments and financial problems related to the building almost seem intrusive in the text. The reader becomes so interested and so enthralled by the history of the New York land, the lives of the various immigrants in and out of the building over the years, that whenever the author interjects again with her own story, it seems disruptive and out of place.

Despite the fact that the book has a bit of whining, it is certainly recommended reading. Even if Greider wrote this epic as therapy to address the turmoil the building that she loved caused in her life, she did manage to do some excellent research along the way. Her research turns into interesting stories about everyday people, and the book is engrossing and meaningful despite the personal sidelines that don't always seem well placed.

There are moments when the reader thinks the author has revealed too much. "Why do I need to know this?" one thinks while reading about details in the relationship between the author and her husband or about their bank account. It might have been better to write more about other's thoughts, disappointments, and joys on the Lower East Side and resist the temptation to reveal the personal.

The kind of reader who will enjoy this book will be anyone who has ever become emotionally attached to a building, those interested in urban history, genealogy, gentrification, immigrant studies, and those who grapple at trying to understand a sense of place. Most New Yorkers will enjoy parts of this book as will anyone who has ever lived in a big city.

We should look forward to more from Greider. She is at a junction in her career where she could lean more toward personal writing or more toward historic genealogical research. She does the latter well, and one can only hope for more house histories and more immigrants' stories. She should keep the more personal thoughts in her diary.½

I received an Early Reviewers copy, courtesy LibraryThing, of The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set in 1000 Square Feet of the Lower East Side, by Katharine Greider, due to be published in March 2011 from PublicAffairs press, a publisher of whom I'd not previously heard. The book bears some similarity to Bill Bryson's mega-seller At Home in the sense that it uses the author's home as a stepping stone to wider discussions of what "home" means, how it came to be and other philosphical inquiries; but in Greider's case, the focus is on a particular building in NYC's Lower East Side, # 239 East 7th Street, in which she and her husband bought a majority share (it was a coop building, wherein tenants own their own flat and form a building association that deals with issues of public space in the building, maintenance and taxes) in the mid-1990s. This particular piece of real estate was built in the 1840s, the first time that particular land had been built upon, and the building basically reached a state of collapse during Greider's tenancy, in 2002. As she tells the story of the building, Greider tells the story of the people who lived there before her - as much information as she could find from public records and other archival sources, which turns out to be a fair amount of information; she also spends a great deal of time describing in detail the difficulties she and her husband encountered there, the aftermath of the building condemnation and How It All Turned Out In the End for their family. Greider has poetic sensibilities (at one point, she mentions that she was enrolled in a graduate poetry program) and these stand her in good stead here; some of her imagery is wonderfully evocative, very poetic indeed. But honestly, I would have preferred more about the earlier tenants and the lives that they lived and the world in which they lived them, rather than to be given so very much information, blow-by-blow, of her own personal and family travails with respect to the house. At another point in the book, she recognizes that she and her husband were wealthy arrivistes, in terms of being stock-market-invested yuppies during the dotcom boom; that cohort is especially known for self-involvement to the point of narcissism, and that definitely shows in this narrative. That said, the historical information is fascinating, and the use of a single dwelling to describe the overall shifts in culture, ethnicity, activism and reality of NYC from its beginnings to the present is a remarkable, and well-drawn, concept. So, if you're interested in US small-h history or NYC or how houses can be homes, or not, I'll still recommend this one.½