Description
Book SynopsisA fantastical field guide to the hidden history of New York's magical pastManhattan has a pervasive quality of glamoura heightened sense of personality generated by a place whose cinematic, literary, and commercial celebrity lends an aura of the fantastic to even its most commonplace locales. Enchanted New York chronicles an alternate history of this magical isle. It offers a tour along Broadway, focusing on times and places that illuminate a forgotten and sometimes hidden history of New York through site-specific stories of wizards, illuminati, fortune tellers, magicians, and more. Progressing up New York's central thoroughfare, this guidebook to magical Manhattan offers a history you won't find in your Lonely Planet or Fodor's guide, tracing the arc of American technological alchemiesfrom Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton to the Manhattan Projectto Mesmeric physicians, to wonderworking Madame Blavatsky, and seers Helena Roerich and Alice Bailey. Harry Houdini appears and disappears, as
Trade ReviewThere are no ancient monuments to mark New York City’s magical history; in their place, Dann’s historical guide chronicles the city’s lesser-known magical past. * Foreword Reviews *
Enchanted New York is full of wonderful anecdotes, and I enjoyed seeing how many of these addresses were still extant. It’s a nice mental ramble in these claustrophobic times. * Religion Dispatches *
It’s a place where poetry grows of chance encounters among strangers below the piers conjuring an alchemy of ideas, where we imagine other worlds; rituals invoke spirits, the dead dance with the living, and the faeries lead us into a blurry world in between. Here pieces of green find inspiration in the cracks in the sidewalk, crawling up from unknown worlds, eternal returns of the repressed. Cycling through these streets, one occasionally stumbles upon urbanist flaneur Kevin Dann, disappearing and reappearing on chance occasions; his
Enchanted New York rightfully reminds us “New York City since the American Revolution has been a place where, at each step of its prodigious biography, both witting and unwitting actors have engaged in magic, often with enormous historical consequences rippling out far beyond Manhattan’s shores.” An important and abundant journey through a secret history of a distinct urban space informed by witches and dreams, faerie magic and a creative clash between a new colossus and Moloch. At a time of plague, when the poor are sleeping in the streets, and a cavalcade of bodies are marching for something better, read
Enchanted New York and reimagine the city. -- Benjamin Heim Shepard, author of Illuminations on Market Street
Packed with fascinating details and arresting insights,
Enchanted New York is a page-turner that illuminates forgotten corners of our cultural past. -- Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
For over a decade Kevin Dann has been cycling friends, family, and clients over the streets of Manhattan to reveal delicious and tragic histories of the tension between the humane desire to understand the supra-sensible universe and the soul-crushing materialism that inundates Gotham. A more talented, erudite, and soulful guide does not exist.
Enchanted New York renders those voyages into a book like a butterfly unfurling its wings as it emerges from the chrysalis shaped island. -- Gary Kroll, State University of New York, Plattsburgh
