Softcover

ISBN 10: 1482734699 ISBN 13: 9781482734690

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

During a productive period of unemployment in 1975, I wrote a book with a friend, “The Pedestrian Revolution: Streets Without Cars” (Vintage). This gave me a confidence about writing I never had had before. Once you start writing, it is not easy to stop. Over the past 38 years, I have written 400 personal essays. In a spirit of independence, I have never sought advance approval from an editor. I choose the subject, write the essay and then find a home for it. Many of my essays have appeared on the “Home Forum Page” of “The Christian Science Monitor” and in the “New York Law Journal”. Others on the Op-Ed pages of ‘The New York Times”, “Wall Street Journal”, “Newsday” and “International Herald Tribune”. My annual income from writing has rarely exceeded a few hundred dollars. (Mother provided sound advice when suggesting I attend law school.) Yet the pleasure these essays have given me, both in the writing and publication, has been enormous. For this collection, I have selected 83 essays. Topics include: Walking, Central Park, Grand Central Terminal Basketball and Opera, Rikers Island and Potter’s Field, Bridges, Rivers, the Harbor, Whitman and Thoreau in New York, New York and Venice. These essays, and others, reflect my close ties to New York, the city forever a part of me.

About the Author:

William J. Dean was born, raised, educated (college excepted), and continues to work and live in New York City. As a lawyer, he has been deeply involved in the life of the city, serving as executive director of Volunteers of Legal Service, an organization providing pro bono civil legal services to benefit poor people in New York City. As a volunteer, he has served as chairman of the Correctional Association of New York, a civic organization with statutory authority to visit and report on conditions in New York State prisons; as chairman of The New York Society Library, the oldest library in the city, founded in 1754; as the Wednesday night driver for the Coalition for the Homeless food van for thirteen years; and as a legal adviser to the Greenmarkets in New York City. For two decades, he conducted a forum series at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, “New York: Problem City in Search of Solutions.” Hundreds of his personal essays on a wide range of subjects have been published. In 2011 he was the recipient of the Brooke Russell Astor Award presented by The New York Public Library, an award honoring a person “who is relentless in his or her dedication to the City and who has contributed substantially to its enrichment.”