A review by audaciaray
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell

4.0

While I was in college and for a few years after, I was deeply obsessed with reading books about NYC's social and cultural history. I'm not sure how I missed this one. I'm glad I finally read it. Mitchell's writing is super descriptive and he develops character studies well enough that many of them feel timeless - well, timeless if you know NYC and its characters. But there is also fascinating stuff about a New York that is truly lost. I was especially taken with the writing about food - not restaurants, but the guys who were clammers, the guys who collected oysters, the family that ran a terrapin farm on Long Island. NYC's ecosystem has changed so, so much in the last 80 years.