Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Tenements, Towers, and Trash
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 12/29/1982
WEBSITE: http://www.juliawertz.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 29, 1982.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Cartoonist. Monthly comic and illustration contributor to New Yorker. Former MacDowell Colony fellow.
AVOCATIONS:Photography, exploring urban areas, learning about history.
AWARDS:Eisner Award nominee for Drinking at the Movies and The Infinite Wait and Other Stories.
WRITINGS
Comic and illustration contributor to numerous periodicals, including New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Believer, Medium, New York Post, Daily Mail, and New Yorker.
SIDELIGHTS
Julia Wertz is a writer, illustrator, and cartoonist. Wertz is from the San Francisco area, but has spent much of her life in New York City. Her comics are notoriously full of swear words and inside jokes, and document her love life, family life, and struggles to make it as an artist while working low-wage jobs. Wertz also explores darker themes in her comics, such as her struggles with anxiety, addiction, and chronic illness. She explains that in her childhood and adolescence, she wanted to be a writer as well as an artist, but she was not disciplined enough to be a writer and too independent to be an artist. Creating cartoons was an ideal middle ground.
In addition to writing comics, Wertz enjoys learning about history and taking photographs in abandoned places. Her comic work has been published in New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Believer, and Medium. She contributes monthly illustrations and comics to New Yorker and her photography work has been printed in New York Post and Daily Mail. Her graphic novels Drinking at the Movies and The Infinite Wait and Other Stories were both nominated for Eisner Awards. Meg Lemke in Paris Review noted Wertz’s “innocent visual style,” characterized by wide-eyed characters with jaunty, lively quirks. Wertz splits her time between the Bay area and New York.
Wertz’s Tenements, Towers, & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City is a testament to Wertz’s love of New York City and history. Parul Sehgal in New York Times described the book as “a passionate anatomy of the city, a book of dramatic streetscapes and hidden histories.”
Wertz reveals the dirty underbelly of the city, defining the New York of old by the abundance of strip clubs and prostitutes walking the streets. She suggests that this side of New York still exists, you just need to know where to find it. Much of the history that Wertz covers is that of the cultural aspects of New York. She details the infamy of 19th-century celebrity abortionist Madame Restell, who built a mansion on Fifth Avenue just a block away from a Catholic church, and the old cigar shops on Broadway, now Jamba Juice and Apple stores.
The book is illustrated in Wertz’s traditional style; large-eyed characters with expressive, round faces. The landscape is made of neat, clear lines and the book is drawn in black and white. Wertz is a character in the graphic novel, as she often is, and is depicted as anxious, frazzled, and a bit awkward. Much of the book is presented in a ‘then-and-now’ format. Wertz will draw an illustration of the New York City of past, and contrast it with a sketch of the modern day city.
Wertz’s fascination with New York developed when she moved there to live and work, and fell in love with the city. She dove into the history of New York, developing the outline for the book. She explains in the book that she was eventually priced out of New York. As Brooklyn became the popular place to live, Wertz was evicted from her apartment and was unable to find an affordable place in the city to live. She eventually returned to California, which is where she wrote and illustrated the book.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews wrote, “in busy cartoons and archly entertaining prose, New Yorker artist Wertz serves up a grandly alternative history of Gotham.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that Wertz illustrates with “a vivid eclecticism that makes this an indispensable guidebook to places lost and found,” while Sonnet Ireland in Xpress Reviews wrote that Wertz’s drawings “seem to capture the spirit of each place.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City, p. 42.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2017, review of Tenements, Towers & Trash.
New York Times, October 18, 2017, Parul Sehgal, “Sentimental Depictions Of New York,” p. C1(L).
Publishers Weekly, June 19, 2017, review of Tenements, Towers & Trash, p. 99.
Xpress Reviews, September 1, 2017, Sonnet Ireland, review of Tenements, Towers & Trash.
Staying Out of Trouble: An Interview with Julia Wertz
By Meg Lemke December 5, 2014
AT WORK
I met Julia Wertz at a slightly rundown family diner she’d recommended deep in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We drank coffee and ate waffles (hers, covered in bacon) and whole-wheat pancakes (mine, covered in syrup). We’d talked briefly before, but always amid the clamor of comics conventions, where Wertz hustles hard to sell her books but does not relish being on display. Yet she has been putting her life online for nearly a decade. Her new omnibus collection, Museum of Mistakes, brings together three volumes of her autobiographical Web series called Fart Party, written between 2005 and 2010; miscellanea, such as hate mail and guest sketches; and a handful of previously unpublished stories, including one that delves into her past and how children process grief.
As the cartoonist Tom Hart has noted, Wertz “makes self-destruction charming.” In comics gloriously full of curses and insider jokes, she catalogs love found and lost, family dysfunction, and a risky cross-country move; she suffers low-wage service jobs and the publishing industry’s rush after indie comics darlings. Though Wertz’s frustration is often palpable (she occasionally imagines pulling people who annoy her limb from limb), she employs a kind of innocent visual style—her figures are wide-eyed and jaunty—and she’s adept at developing a sense of intimacy between the reader and her antisocial persona on the page. In other words, she lets you in, then flips you off.
Wertz has published two graphic memoirs since most of the comics in Museum of Mistakes first appeared: Drinking at the Movies (2010) and The Infinite Wait and Other Stories (2012). The latter is partly concerned with her diagnosis with Lupus and the horrors of navigating the health care system as an uninsured artist. She also recently chronicled her journey to sobriety in an essay for Narratively about comedy, depression, and addiction. A few years ago, she began documenting her urban-exploring exploits, posting haunting photographs of modern ruins on her site Adventure Bible School.
This fall, Wertz made a much-anticipated return to publishing new online comics that, as Gary Panter puts it, “look cute and nice, but they aren’t.”
You’re back to making daily diary comics after a two-year break. Why have you started again—and why did you stop?
I stopped because I was sick of myself. I completed the The Infinite Wait in only six months by drawing autobio comics sixteen hours a day. And before that, I had drawn comics every day, nonstop, for six years.
Eleanor Davis took a year after she finished How to Be Happy where she said, I’m only going to draw what I want to draw, when I want to—not what I need to for work, not what I think I should be working on. I used her example as justification, but I would have stopped anyway. I had planned to take a two-week break, and then, two years later, I was just ready to start again. I had remembered why I liked drawing comics.
Wertz2
What was it like rediscovering your older work? You’ve said, “I drank my way through my first three books, and consequently, I think they’re all garbage.”
Wow, I’m so harsh. I’ve been able to take enough time to appreciate these comics again. I realized that although I was an alcoholic when I made them, it doesn’t mean they aren’t good. Well, I don’t know if I would say good, but they’re funny. I also tried at one point to ditch the name Fart Party. I ended up reembracing it. Who fucking cares?
The early stories were drawn when alcohol worked for me. I write about it in a celebratory way, but if you look back knowing what happened to me later, you see that it’s excessive. I was also making an active choice during those years not to talk about the serious issues in my life, which were later covered in The Infinite Wait. My brother’s drug and alcohol addiction was slowly taking over my life, and I was sick. But in Fart Party, only every once in a while is there a panel that says, Oh, my brother fell off the wagon and got the shit kicked out of him but here I am, eating a cookie.
There is a striking scene in the saga in Fart Party of your now ex-boyfriend Oliver. You come in to bed at night drunk and he pushes you off him—he doesn’t find it sexy. With hindsight, it’s clear how your drinking was interrupting relationships.
It’s such a cute comic, and I thought that was funny when it first happened. Then it definitely happened more than just that one time. I put that poor guy through some ridiculous nonsense. You can’t conduct adult relationships like that, being out at four-thirty in the morning and not returning phone calls. Who does that? Alcoholics do that.
I love the comic your brother made, which is in Museum of Mistakes, about your obsession with Guns N’ Roses. It deals with a form of addiction, a subject you cycle back to throughout your work.
You see me going into a K-hole of Guns N’ Roses videos, not going to school, not wanting to participate in my own life. My brother swooped in, took the videos away, and then he started watching them. The pattern repeats itself later, when he had his addiction years and I swooped in to save him. That’s been a constant narrative in our relationship. The comic is a funny piece about me liking hair metal, but it also says more about me than my own work does.
p20
What is your process? Do you keep a diary and draw from life?
I write out stories as they happen. I don’t have the luxury of retrospect. Retrospect is what most memoirs are written from—and that’s good, because you want to see people grow—but I prefer to create a narrative where I don’t afford myself the grace of afterthought. It’s embarrassing and raw. You have to watch me fuck up.
The Infinite Wait was the first story I wrote as a long-form script, but I pulled it from diary sketches. I did draw the stories of my childhood from memory, putting myself in the mind of a child rather than taking an adult perspective. I was selling golf balls, running off into the woods with my older brother and a dull pocketknife. We were on welfare when I was a kid, but I didn’t know it. I don’t attribute being poor to having a hard childhood. Rather, it forced my family to be together. If we went on vacation, we were all stuck together in my grandmother’s motor home, because at that time gas was maybe seventy cents a gallon. There were problems I was unaware of until later, when my parents broke up. But the good times are ingrained in my memory, and I like to write about them. It may make it painful because it all went bad later, but it’s that much more important to me to remember.
You’ve said that you originally tried writing short stories, but once you started telling stories with drawings, the art did the editing for you. How did that work?
Throughout my childhood and high school, I wanted to be a writer, but I don’t have the discipline to self-edit. I have good bones for storytelling, but I’m too loquacious and go off on too many tangents. I also wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t want to go to art class. I only wanted to draw what I wanted to draw. So I never was a good artist, and I never was a good writer. But with comics, I realized I could put art and writing together, and the physical constraint of nine panels or four panels creates an editorial process.
Within that framework, I look at a piece and ask myself what is absolutely essential—what can I draw, and what do I have to put in dialogue or words? Comics are minimal, so I can take three pages of writing and make a comic that’s nine panels. By selecting only the essential words and sentences, I see what I don’t need to talk about, where I don’t need to draw upon a tangent—I find all that matters.
You tend top9 disparage your skills, but in The Museum of Mistakes you include juvenilia and process sketches, and I see how your drawing has evolved. Is your style deliberate?
To paraphrase Charles Schultz, the simplest art form is the most effective. If you draw a simple face, readers can then project themselves into the story. In the early Peanuts, the characters were more childlike. The more “grown-up” versions are what most people know from the newspapers, but I prefer when they looked like kids. Similarly, in The Infinite Wait, I refined my drawings. But it’s like I decided to take it a little too seriously, for that book. In the comics I’m posting now, I am going back to my cruder, cartoony style from the Fart Party days. I’m going to play it looser.
I’m not a trained artist—that’s obvious. I can draw a good background, good buildings. It’s people I don’t like drawing.
That’s revealing!
I know, it’s my temperament in life.
The character Julia is so angry. I was a little afraid of you.
I’m a real bitch in my work. No one likes a happy-go-lucky character—that’s the character everyone wants to see destroyed. I portray and exaggerate the ugliest aspects of my personality. When I draw a comic where my eyes are bugging out, in real life I was mildly irritated at most. I build up an interaction in the story, and there’s an invisible end panel that I don’t draw, which is just me laughing at the situation. In real life, I’m more even-keeled, though I do my best work when I’m unhappy.
p15
You regularly draw yourself in isolation. But cities—particularly New York and San Francisco—feature prominently in your stories. How do you relate to being an artist alone in the social architecture of a city?
I have a conflicted relationship with the city. I do live an isolated life—I live alone, I work alone, I travel alone. In my urban exploring I’m going to places where humans no longer are—that’s the objective. But even when I don’t want it, the city still provides human interaction. Even basic subway encounters force me to remember that I’m a human being, that we’re all here doing this together.
What’s “urban exploring”?
I explore abandoned buildings, take photos of them, and go treasure hunting. I research and write up the history of the places, then weave in some autobio.
There are five levels of urban exploring. I don’t want to brag, but I’m very good at what I do. There are places, like Farm Colony on Staten Island, where you can walk right through a hole in the fence. Then there are decaying hotels and resorts, with cops on patrol, and, on a higher level, depending on security and the state of the building, an abandoned hospital and asylums. The fourth level includes super illegal sites to enter, like military bases and the subway system. Last, there are “world traveler” explorers—usually professionals, like photographers for National Geographic, who investigate places like Chernobyl and abandoned islands like Hashima in Japan.
Do you go alone?
I go alone if I’m familiar with the place. If I’m not, I bring a friend, because I don’t want to fall through the floor, and that’s how I die, laying there with two broken legs.
p1
You publish photos and documents you find. You unearth people’s private lives. What is the legality of that and what are the ethical issues?
I’m holding onto a lot of paperwork, including patient files, from asylums. The institutions were supposed to destroy them when they abandoned the facilities. During the period of mass deinstitutionalization, from the sixties through the nineties, they considered files destroyed if they were sealed in the basement or the roof. But explorers get in there and discover people’s stories. We find diaries and interviews. In terms of legal issues, it’s trespassing and larceny. The ethical issues have to do with whether a patient has any living relatives. How much material can you publish and discuss without hurting family, without getting yourself in trouble?
I’m waiting to make some finds public. I’m waiting for buildings to be torn down. I’m also well versed in the statute of limitations for larceny and trespassing, so I’m waiting those out, too.
Are you searching for living family members?
I am hunting for the family of one patient who was institutionalized for homosexuality during World War II. He’s a genius. I found twenty years of handwritten personal letters where he’s writing to his mother, who is herself going into an institution. And she institutionalized him. The doctors talk about his IQ as a child, which was off the charts. In the documents, you see him go in an arrogant narcissist—he’s the worst, but I love him. He was totally functional, just gay. And he loses his mind completely over the years of being a smart person who’s institutionalized. Then he tries to go back out into the world, and he can’t function. He goes back to the hospital of his own accord. It’s so painful to see him unravel.
What compels you to share your own life?
It’s definitely not the money—there is none—and it’s not for fame or praise. I like doing it. I like talking about myself. It’s fun to ink. It’s fun to draw. It’s fun to tell stories. It’s a therapeutic process. When I cover something in a comic, it’s already a little less painful as I’m writing it. I can sit at home in my pajamas drawing and come to the same conclusions as I could by putting on pants, going to the city, and talking to a therapist. From a removed point of view, I look at myself on paper and identify behaviors that have to stop. I see patterns I can’t see otherwise. I’m learning about myself right along with the readers.
Meg Lemke is a contributing editor at MUTHA Magazine and chairs the comics and graphic novel programming committee at the Brooklyn Book Festival. You can find her online @meglemke and meglemke.tumblr.com.
bio/contact
Julia Wertz is a professional cartoonist, amateur historian and part time urban explorer/photographer. She made the comic books The Fart Party vol 1 and vol 2, (collected in Museum of Mistakes) and the graphic novels Drinking at the Movies, and The Infinite Wait and Other Stories, both of which were nominated for Eisner Awards. Her newest book, Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional, Illustrated History of New York City, was published by Black Dog & Leventhal/Hachette in Oct 2017. She currently does monthly comics and illustration for the New Yorker. Her work appears semi-regularly in publications such as the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Believer, and Medium. Her photography of abandoned places has appeared in The New York Post, the Daily Mail and some local rags. She is a repeated MacDowell Colony fellow. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she spent a decade in New York City, where her apartment was a subject of debate. As of 2018, she splits her time between Northern California and NYC.
You can read some of her comics at Museum of Mistakes, and see her research and photos of abandoned places on Adventure Bible School.
EVENTS/AVAILABILITY: If you’d like me to visit your college/school/workshop/convention, please contact me directly. Over the years, I’ve created different lectures/workshops/curriculum for students of varying ages, including kids. I prefer doing college lectures in person, however Skype can be arranged as well.
For book readings, talks and comedic events, I’m usually around, email me! as of 2017, I’m in the bay area, but I travel frequently.
CONTACT:
Questions, commentary and love/hate mail can be sent directly to me at juliajwertz(at)gmail(dot)com. If you’re contacting me about something on Adventure Bible School, please know that for the most part, I do not give out location information.
You can contact me for everything, but if you insist on doing it the businessy way, please contact my agent Michelle Brower a tmbrower(at)aevitascreative(dot)com
REVIEW COPY CONTACTS
If you’re looking for a review copy of one of my books, please contact the following people:
Tenements, Towers & Trash- Betsy.Hulsebosch(at)hbgusa(dot)com
The Infinite Wait & Other Stories– info(at)koyamapress(dot)com
Drinking at the Movies– info(at)koyamapress(dot)com
And then of course there’s all that internet junk:
Adventure Bible School – my other website about urban exploring
Flickr– urban exploring/abandoned places photos only
Amazon
Pizza Island– now inactive, this site is a homage to what was once a studio in Greenpoint that consisted of six cartoonists/friends. We disbanded in 2013, for various reasons.
tumblr
Goodreads– be a pal and review one of my books if ya want!
Q&A
Sometimes readers have questions about Museum of Mistakes, sometimes I have answers! Here are some of the more common ones, but if you have more, you can just email me at juliawertz(at)gmail(dot)com
Q: Why did you once call your comic “Fart Party” and what exactly is a fart party?
A: Long story short, it stems from an inside joke regarding filling balloons with farts and then popping them when wanting guests to go home. The name was a last minute joke that fortunately or unfortunately stuck. The vast majority of my ideas are just not very good. Also, fart jokes should be used sparingly. In early 2011, I changed the title. No one cares though. I do not enjoy fart jokes more than the average person, nor do I enjoy farts, so please don’t tweet/email me fart related stuff.
Q: How much of your comics are online and how much in print?
A: About 20 pages of each of my books are available online as a sample. Each book is around 180-250pages.
Q: I sent you a link to my comics and you didn’t say anything about them. Did you hate them or are you just a bitch?
A: Despite the fact that I post comics online, I HATE reading comics online. Haaaaaaate it. And while I do try to respond to all emails, many slip through because I’m bad at email, so that’s the only reason I didn’t answer, not because I suck or I hated your comic. Depending on my current location, I usually provide a PO Box or address to send me mail. At the moment (summer 2016) I do not have one.
Q: I sent you some crazy, funny toys from the dollar store but you never answered back. What gives? do you not like crazy, dollar store toys?
A: I think you answered your own question with your question. If you really want to send me stuff, I appreciate all snail mail but please remember that I am a grown up, despite what you have read. Sometimes a funny toy is good for a temporary laugh but then I’m stuck with a permanent toy. If you really wanna give me something, send me a digital Amazon or Starbucks gift card. Yeah I said Starbucks, I’m not a snob, coffee is coffee and I need it all the time.
Q: I want to be a professional cartoonist, how do I do that?
A: Just get to work. Don’t wait for a deadline, a publisher, etc. Just get to work, get a website, put shit on it. Go to conventions, meet other cartoonists, get ideas from them. To quote Stephen King, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
Q: Is it possible to make a living off comics?
A: YES. I’m sick of cartoonists saying it’s not possible. It is possible if you’re very lucky, and there are a lot of lucky cartoonists. HOWEVER, you need to know what “a living” means to most cartoonists. It means scraping by month to month, working constantly and living at a poverty level. If you have to support a family, it’s much, much harder, unless you get lucky and sell a script to a movie company or something. But if you do what I do, which is live alone in a fairly cheap apartment, you can definitely get by doing just comics. Also, kids these days are doing great for themselves on Patreon, so that’s a thing to look into to supplement your income.
Q: Can I interview you for my dumb zine?
A: Yup! Obviously I love talking about myself, I’ve made a career out of it. I’m full of opinions about pretty much everything so feel free to email me and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can. However interviews are time consuming and sometimes I just don’t have the time, so if I say no, that is the reason, it’s nothing personal.
Q: I saw you in person and you looked so cranky so I didn’t approach you.
A: Not really a question, but a statement I’ve heard more than a few times that deserves an explanation. My comic character’s anger is mostly in jest, and that is often mistaken for reality due to the unfortunate fact of my face. I have resting bitch face. But I promise I’m not an asshole, I just play one on the internet. Please come talk to me! I want to talk to you! Or if you see me on the street, stop me and say hi! Especially if I’m with a dude, because maybe I’m on a date and then I’ll look hella cool if you recognize me and say so.
Q: I IMed you and you didn’t answer 🙁
A: was this you? if so, then fuck you too. Also please don’t IM me if we don’t know each other, it’s weird.
Q) I’m a college professor, I was wondering if you’d be open to visiting the school as a guest?
A) Yes! I really enjoy visiting colleges and talking to students. I am willing to travel (expenses paid) or skype. I have three prepared lectures and workshops that I’ve worked on over the last few years, but am willing to talk about anything really.
Q) I know your comics have adult content, but I’d like to have my young students (2nd grade) experience an afternoon comics workshop, is that something you’d be interested in?
A) Absolutely. I’ve taught kids comics workshops before and even have a few prepared activities that have gone over great in the past. Despite what you may have gleaned from my work, I am an adult and can refrain from swearing and being inappropriate. And for some reason, kids love me. Probably because they recognize me as one of their own.
Q) How do I contact you?
A) All my contact info is here. If I do not respond to your email within a week, or it’s urgent, please tweet at me, since I sometimes forget to check that email account regularly.
Sentimental Depictions Of New York
Parul Sehgal
The New York Times. (Oct. 18, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC1(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
On her website, the graphic novelist Julia Wertz offers an artist statement in the form of a short, looping video. A large, complacent-looking cat in a tightfitting bee costume looks blankly into the camera. Then it falls off the couch.
Wertz has become a cult favorite for her graphic memoirs ''Drinking at the Movies'' (2010) and ''The Infinite Wait and Other Stories'' (2012). She takes on serious themes -- her alcoholism and chronic illness -- but always makes time for silly stoner humor. To some lasting rue, she titled her first collections ''The Fart Party'' (2007) and ''The Fart Party Vol. 2.'' (2009) and is now trying to rebrand them as ''Museum of Mistakes.'' Futilely, I fear.
Her new book, ''Tenements, Towers & Trash,'' is a departure. The focus isn't on her life but on her great love, New York. It's a passionate anatomy of the city, a book of dramatic streetscapes and hidden histories -- mostly of infamous women, like the 19th-century celebrity abortionist Madame Restell, who catered to socialites and built her Fifth Avenue mansion a block away from a Catholic church, supposedly to taunt the faithful.
But we're still in Wertzworld: the velvety black and white illustrations, the crisp lines of the landscapes and the rounded, expressive faces of the characters who look straight out of a Tintin comic. The artist herself is still the tousled and anxious creature of the previous books, very much a large cat in a bee costume -- awkward, unlucky, straining for dignity and supremely lovable.
The city rises majestically in these pages. The crowded panels evoke the jostle of urban life. Your eye doesn't know where to settle; there's so much to absorb. Wertz loves New York down to its guts: the pneumatic tubes that stretch the length of the island and were once used to send gusts of letters from one post office to another. She loves the arteries of the subways, the lungs of the parks. She goes uptown to sketch movie theaters in the Bronx and peers down to the bottom of the Hudson River, the '' watery grave'' where illegal pinball machines were dumped by the city in the 1970s.
She unearths so many strange, wondrous facts that my exclamation marks in the margin resemble elaborate Morse code.
''You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now,'' Colson Whitehead wrote in his ode to his hometown, ''The Colossus of New York.'' The palimpsest of the city is Wertz's obsession. She draws the route of one of her 15-mile walks, pointing out what catches her eye -- ''patches of old slate sidewalk'' and intricate, antique doorknobs. ''I spend the whole walk in current New York City looking for evidence of the past New York City,'' she writes.
The graphic form, more than any other, can play host to this desire, monkey with chronology and reveal how the past creeps into the present -- no special effects or laborious exposition required. In ''Here,'' Richard McGuire followed a corner of a living room from 3,000,500,000 B.C. to A.D. 22,175. Wertz doesn't attempt quite so ambitious a span, but the effect she achieves is no less transporting. She juxtaposes sketches of street corners then and now: the cigar shops on Broadway that gave way to an Apple Store and a Jamba Juice; Harlem's fabled Lenox Lounge, lit up like a chandelier in the 1940s, shuttered and fallen into disrepair in 2016. She traces the evolution of food carts and street sweepers. On one page she pays homage to the heavy, embossed ''hotel keys of yore.''
Pete Hamill called nostalgia ''the most powerful of all New York emotions.'' It's reached a particular pitch in recent years with rising income inequality, the influx of investors for whom New York represents property not home and a lack of affordable housing that has come to constitute what some are calling ''a humanitarian emergency.'' There has been a drove of elegies to the lost diversity of the city: ''St. Marks Is Dead'' by Ada Calhoun, ''Vanishing New York'' by Jeremiah Moss, ''Arbitrary Stupid Goal'' by Tamara Shopsin, ''The Lonely City'' by Olivia Laing. Roz Chast's graphic love letter to the city, ''Going into Town,'' also published this month, is more sanguine than most about the evolution of New York but still strikes a melancholy note. (''I try not to freak out every time a favorite restaurant or bookstore closes. I remind myself that life is change, and that life in New York is definitely change.'') These writers long for what the city was once, a place people moved to find alternatives to the suburbs, not to recreate them, a place that allowed for failure, for reinvention.
Wertz registers the changes but without polemic. There's no need; the coda to her project is enough. After 10 years in the city, she was priced out of her Brooklyn neighborhood last year. She wrote this book in California.
Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York CityBy Julia WertzIllustrated. 284 pages. Black Dog & Leventhal. $29.99.Going into Town: A Love Letter to New YorkBy Roz ChastIllustrated. 176 pages. Bloomsbury. $28.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: PHOTOS (C1); PHOTOS (PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL HAYES); A drawing from the graphic novel ''Tenements, Towers & Trash.'' (PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIA WERTZ) (C4)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sehgal, Parul. "Sentimental Depictions Of New York." New York Times, 18 Oct. 2017, p. C1(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A510063706/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=107f438d. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A510063706
Tenements, Towers & Trash: An
Unconventional Illustrated History of
New York City
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.2 (Sept. 15, 2017): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Librar
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Wertz, Julia: TENEMENTS, TOWERS &
TRASH
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wertz, Julia TENEMENTS, TOWERS & TRASH Black Dog & Leventhal (Adult Nonfiction) $29.99 10, 3
ISBN: 978-0-316-50121-7
In busy cartoons and archly entertaining prose, New Yorker artist Wertz (Museum of Mistakes, 2014, etc.)
serves up a grandly alternative history of Gotham.There was a time, not so long ago, when Times Square
was a locus of hookers and nude dance shows rather than Disney-fied tourist traps. More pointedly, writes
the author, it was "a garbage covered shithole full of strip clubs, porn theaters and seedy characters"--which,
naturally, she characterizes as representing "the good old days." As Wertz cautions, the sordidness hasn't
entirely disappeared; you just have to know what to look for, and then look. This graphic book, rendered in
a style that seems a distant cousin to that of Roz Chast, is all about looking. Wertz is a transplant from the
Bay Area who came to New York, found her nirvana, and began exploring the history and actuality of the
place. It's a tragic note that, evicted from her studio in an up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood, she
couldn't find affordable digs anywhere in the city and returned to California, where she discovered that "it
was an absolute fucking torture drawing and writing about a city I no longer lived in but desperately loved."
It's easy to gauge that affection from her pages, which recount long walks through the city fueled by a
steady diet of histories and trivia ("Pinball was banned in NYC until 1978! It was a 'pinball prohibition,' and
officials would smash the machines with sledgehammers, and dump them in the river") that she recounts in
ever salty prose. Wertz, for instance, revisits the history of the many instances of Ray's Pizza, a synecdoche
of a kind: founded by mobsters as a money-laundering site, the operation became legit in the hands of
immigrants who worked there, quit, and opened their own versions of the place, name and all, so that there
are now somewhere between 20 and 40 unrelated Ray's outlets in the city. A delight for New York
aficionados. Every city needs a version of this artist and her book.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Wertz, Julia: TENEMENTS, TOWERS & TRASH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364728/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cb77e126.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364728
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Tenements, Towers & Trash: An
Unconventional Illustrated History of
New York City
Publishers Weekly.
264.25 (June 19, 2017): p99.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City
Julia Wertz. Black Dog & Leventhal, $29.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-316-50121-7
New York City is a land of architectural ghosts, and Wertz (Drinking at the Movies) is a skilled and
perceptive documentarian who here combines two of her talents--car-tooning and urban exploration--to
create a dense, informative package filled with her audacious personality. Wertz's method for uncovering
these ghosts involves a lot of wandering, sharp eyes, and tons of research that she translates into meticulous
drawings of structures throughout the city, often in a "then-and-now" format to document changes not only
to the structure itself, but to the culture of the city. Wertz tackles the pneumatic tube system with the same
gusto as she does the life of serial arsonist Lizzie Halliday. In presenting the life of the city, Wertz captures
change as the most important constant trait of New York City, with a vivid eclecticism that makes this an
indispensable guidebook to places lost and found. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City." Publishers
Weekly, 19 June 2017, p. 99. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496643898/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b089415e. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
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Wertz, Julia. Tenements, Towers & Trash:
An Unconventional Illustrated History of
New York City
Sonnet Ireland
Xpress Reviews.
(Sept. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Wertz, Julia. Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City. Black
Dog & Leventhal. Oct. 2017. 304p. ISBN 9780316501217. $29.99; ebk. ISBN 9780316501224.
HIST/MEMOIR
Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Wertz (Museum of Mistakes) spent ten years in New York
City before returning to her West Coast roots. Here, the author/illustrator shows a side of the Big Apple
usually reserved for native New Yorkers in vignettes describing everyday life in the five boroughs, then and
now, accentuated by beautiful drawings that seem to capture the spirit of each place. The history offers a
rare glimpse of how things have changed over time, as Wertz pictures the same locations years apart,
making it easy for readers to feel as though they've lived there, too. Pages dedicated to the art deco and
gothic doors found throughout Manhattan are particularly fascinating. More than reflecting the likeness of
Gotham, the combined text and art seem to absorb its very essence. With a list of recommended reading and
online sources.
Verdict For anyone who enjoys graphic nonfiction and biography and especially for those interested in New
York City's various buildings and types of architecture. [Previewed in Douglas Rednour's "Comics Cross
Over," LJ 6/15/17.]--Sonnet Ireland, St. Tammany Parish P.L., Mandeville, LA
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Ireland, Sonnet. "Wertz, Julia. Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New
York City." Xpress Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505303945/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6ea359ef.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505303945