more buildings | NYC

The last few months have had wonder | wander | women out and about in New York City. Adding to our growing collection of interesting buildings.

A constant reminder that urbanites like us live in the deepening shadow of their escalating concrete towers.

Mere minuscule meanderers in the muck and mire of nonstop construction and deconstruction that breaks all bounds and barriers.

In the city that never sleeps, housing and entertaining all this mad mass of mobile traffic has forced development to build upwards.

Blotting out the sky above. Blocking off the light below. Pocket parks shrink as the building boom expands. Ever bigger and flashier.

We so love our adopted city even if we bemoan the overwhelming encroachment that is changing its face and soul.

New York is a city of nicknames - the Big Apple, The City That Never Sleeps, Empire City, The City So Nice They Named It Twice, and our all time favorite - Gotham.

To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes.

Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, Grand Central Station and George Washington Bridge - to name a few of its iconic landmarks.

Millions of people have come from every corner of the nation and the world to visit, work or settle here - loving it, loathing it or leaving it.

Read the monumental work "Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898" by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. It is an epic narrative as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles.

The history of New York is the story of the United States of America.

Another great read is "The Historical Atlas of New York City," which takes us, neighborhood by neighborhood, through four hundred years of Gotham's glorious past.

With full-color maps, charts, photographs, drawings, and mini-essays, this encyclopedic volume also traces the historical development and cultural relevance of the life of a remarkable metropolis and a nation's cultural capital.

A place wonder | wander | women put at the top of our list of adopted homes.