Tauranac deals with subjects that guidebooks usually ignore and passersby ordinarily overlook. There’s a statue of Belgium that was originally Germany, and a buffalo hunt depicted on the Manhattan Bridge, and a clock in a sidewalk. A sarcophagus stands in a public park, and the stones from the donjon that had incarcerated Joan of Arc now serve as the base for a statue that honors her. An architect’s likeness is worked into the statuary of a building that he designed (and, no, it’s not Cass Gilbert in the lobby of the Woolworth Building), an image of a hand-cranked movie camera adorns a neo-Renaissance facade, and there’s an apocalyptic vision of a collapsing Brooklyn Bridge on a cathedral wall.
There are 120 subjects in all, and all accompanied by Kathryn Gerhardt’s wonderful photographs that illuminate the essence of the subjects, plus two maps to put things in geographical perspective.