The Unknown City

A look beyond design process and buildings aimed at discoveringnew ways of looking at the urban experience.

The unspoken treasures and hidden skeletons of Canada's largest city.

A subcultural guide to Canada's capital city.

In this revised follow-up to Victoria: Secrets of the City, former Monday Magazine editor Ross Crockford (co-author of Victoria: Secrets) delves further into the hidden intrigues of Canada's westernmost provincial capital, whose polite, "just-like-England" exterior conceals a surprisingly quirky and rough-edged heart. Victoria has long been a city of contradictions; the home of the unfortunately phrased "newly wed and nearly dead" is also where you will find one of North America's oldest Chinatowns; where tales of secret satanic cults abound; and where the flowers bloom so early in the year, it's no surprise that Victoria is regularly named one of the world's (yes, the world's) top tourist destinations. Ross Crockford takes readers on a tour of the city's best-kept culinary, shopping, and bar-hopping secrets, along with little-known facts that will beguile tourists and residents alike. There are directions to find remnants of the original Fort Victoria, 150 years after it was demolished; details on a nearby island purchased for Marilyn Monroe by her secret lover; a list of infamous criminals who got caught in Victoria, from Brother XII to Ahmed Ressam; and even advice on how to avoid long waits and bad seats on the BC Ferries. So raise your teacup and make a toast to the outrageous, shocking, and glorious gems to be found in Victoria: The Unknown City. Now in 2nd printing.

The bestselling book from two prizewinning, critically acclaimed contemporary chroniclers of San Francisco-a rich, illustrated, idiosyncratic portrait of this great city. In Spirits of San Francisco, #1 bestselling Cool Gray City of Love author Gary Kamiya joins forces with celebrated, bestselling artist Paul Madonna to take a fresh look at this one-of-a-kind city. Marrying image and text in a way no book about this city has done before, Kamiya's illuminating narratives accompany Madonna's masterful pen-and-ink drawings, breathing life into San Francisco sites both iconic and obscure. Paul Madonna's atmospheric images will awe: his wide-angle drawings offer a new perspective on the “crookedest street in the world” and vistas across the city. And Kamiya's engaging prose, accompanying each image, offers striking vignettes of this incredible city: witness his story of “Dumpville,” the bizarre community that sprang up in the 19th century on top of a massive garbage dump. Handsome and irresistible-much like the city it chronicles-Spirits of San Francisco is both a visual feast and a detailed, personal, loving, informed portrait of a beloved city.

Deep inside Calgary's glass office towers beats a Wild West heart. It's a city of contradictions, a shiny corporate giant with a six-gun justice past. Calgary: The Unknown City ferrets out Cowtown's deepest secrets, exposing fun and offbeat factoids, anecdotes, and statistics about the city you only thought you knew.

In this treasury of Gotham's secrets--some dark, some light, and some just plain weird--there are tales of underground sex clubs, a secret tunnel in Grand Central Station, an electrocuted elephant at Coney Island, and little-known bars, cafes, hangouts, and other places to frolic.

The young people defined as "Gen Xers" in the media and popular imagination almost never include poor or working-class young adults. These young people - a huge and important part of our society - are misrepresented and silent in our national conversation. In The Unknown City, Michelle Fine and Lois Weis offer a groundbreaking, theoretically sophisticated ethnography of the lives of young adults (ages 23 to 35), based on hundreds of interviews. We discover their views on everything from the construction of "whiteness" and affirmative action to the economy, education, and new public spaces of community hope. Finally, Fine and Weis point to what is being done and what should be done in terms of national policy to improve the future of these remarkable women and men.