Two Way Street

New York Between Past and Future
A guide for the perplexed to contemporary New York City in all its bluster and splendor, caught between the past and the future, between Trump and Mamdani.
New York is a web of contradictions, combining into a combustible fount of right-wing revanchism (Trump) and left-wing rebirth (Mamdani). In Two-Way Street, leading urban critic Samuel Stein offers a brilliant portrait of one of the greatest and most complex cities on earth during its surreal trajectory from COVID epicenter in 2020 to socialist vanguard in 2025.

Stein writes with wit, wisdom, love, and pain for his city on the precipice. Surveying the landscapes of architecture, books, film, theater, and-as he is best known-planning and housing policy, Two-Way Street reveals a New York City caught between its own past and future, unsure of its history and grasping toward the unknown.

With characteristically acid and astute prose, Stein leads the reader on a tour of contemporary New York, from the contested legacies of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs to the reign of Eric Adams and the rise of Zohran Mamdani; from the darkened windows of Billionaire's Row condominiums to the ever-bright lights of Times Square; from the partially delivered promise of project architecture to the curious preservation of emptied tenements.

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