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The mass timber revolution has been a slow and quiet one in New York City. While CLT towers and wooden tech headquarters pop up in other parts of the country and around the world, the most visible timber structure in Manhattan is a pedestrian bridge over Tenth Avenue. With reality lagging behind ambition, New York magazine and its urbanism website Curbed asked four firms to produce timber-based conceptual designs for public-facing projects: a Major League Soccer stadium in Long Island City (SOM), an airport terminal at JFK (SHoP), a public school in Red Hook (Modus Studio), and a community health clinic in Harlem (ZGF). The brief was to show readers what a timber-loving city might look like—to introduce designs that must be built out of wood rather than just what can be.

New York City experienced explosive growth between the 1880s and the 1930s, when nearly a million buildings, dozens of bridges and tunnels, hundreds of miles of subway lines, and thousands of miles of streets were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling population. The new book Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880–1935 (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by historian Alexander Wood offers a revelatory look at this era of urban development by asking, “Who built New York, and how?”

In her new book, Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, Nicole Gelinas presents a gripping account of how the automobile has failed New York City and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to the city’s post-pandemic recovery. In a history that spans a century, Gelinas outlines how New Yorkers spent the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to adapt its urban density to fit the private automobile, then, in the past fifty years, how advocates have been resisting and reversing those mistakes. Moving beyond the now-standard characterization of “Saint Jane” Jacobs versus the villain Robert Moses, Gelinas looks closely at the planners and protestors that both preceded and followed their actions and advocacy.