The Man with the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a New York City Block

Wakin, a reporter and editor at the New York Times, delivers his shallow history of New York City from the perspective of residents of the same Riverside Drive block during the first half of the 20th century. Upon returning to his childhood neighborhood in 2000, Wakin’s fascination with “the notion that buildings have life stories drawn from the flesh and blood beings who pass through them” prompts him to revive obscure stories of those who had lived in the buildings on his block. Wakin’s “juiciest tale,” about a 1934 armored-car heist in Brooklyn, occupies a disproportionate amount of the book and has only a minimal connection with its ostensible focus: one of the thieves accidentally shot himself and was taken to a boardinghouse at 334 Riverside Drive, where he succumbed to his injuries. Other sections recount the construction of buildings and the stories of their occupants, including Japanese scientist Jokichi Takamine, a scion of the pencil-manufacturing Faber family, and William Randolph Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies. In the absence of more substance, Wakin resorts to imagining what interactions between some of the residents would have been like. The result is superficial and a lost opportunity. (Jan.)