New York from on High: A Guide to the View from the Empire State Building

The eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building offers a panorama of New York City and the entire metropolitan region that is world famous. There is only one problem with the view for the average visitor and tourist. They generally don1t know what they are looking at. If they ask someone, they will usually be told the right thing. Frequently, however, they will be given misinformation by well-meaning but ill-informed people, or they will be met by a chorus of I don1t knows.That1s the situation that John Tauranac discovered while researching his critically acclaimed book, The Empire State The Making of a Landmark. Brooklyn might be identified as New Jersey, the Chrysler Building as a church (Well, look at that steeple!), and the sign for the New Yorker Hotel identified as the offices of The New Yorker Magazine. He set out to do something about it.The result is New York From On A Guide to the View From the Empire State Building ($9.95), a 48-page paperback that shows the views and identifies the places of interest. The views are arranged as if the viewer were walking around the building starting at the north, with a view from each of the eight compass points north, northeast, east, etc. - as well as views looking down. There is a view of the scene in color, followed by the same view in black and white with all the points of interest identified. First you see the view, then you are told what you are looking at. Short of having an informed and knowledgeable 3live guide, this book is all that viewers need.

As one of the acknowledged experts on the history of the Empire State Building -- John Tauranac is the author of The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark -- Tauranac has appeared on several television shows to discuss the building, he was the guest curator of A Dream Well Planned: The Empire State Building at the Museum of the City of New York in 1997, and he served as the consultant to the US Postal Service on the historical accuracy of the stamp issued in 1998 to commemorate the building.

Tauranac is also the author of Elegant New York, which is the story of who built the city in the period from 1885 to 1915, and Essential New York, a guidebook to the city's important buildings. He has contributed articles to The New York Times, The New York Observer, New York Magazine, Travel & Leisure, Seaport, and other publications.

In addition to being an urban and architectural historian, John Tauranac designs maps. He began his map-making career with the famous "Undercover Maps of Midtown and Lower Manhattan" that New York Magazine published in the early 1970s, but he is probably best known as the chief designer of many maps for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, including the New York City Subway Map that was printed in 1979, for which he was awarded a commendation for design excellence by the National Endowment for the Arts and the US Department of Transportation. Tauranac has designed maps for Kenneth T. Jackson's Encyclopedia of New York City, for Lee Stookey's Subway Ceramics, for Historic Battery Park, the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District, and the Grand Central Partnership.

Under the Tauranac imprint he has designed even more maps, maps that the Manhattan Users Guide has described as "models of clarity." Tauranac's street map of Lower Manhattan depicts bus and subway routes, places of interest, neighborhoods, the works; another recent map pairs up Manhattan's subways and buses to show the service at different times of day and different days of the week; and his map and guide to the New York City subway system also shows the system in three periods -- weekedays, evenings and weekends, and late nights -- and is published in a multilingual version. His design for the subway map, which Stan Fischler describes in his book The Subway as "the best New York subway map ever designed," is the only contemporary map in Robert Augustyn and Paul Cohen's Rizzoli publication, Manhattan In Maps.

A graduate of Columbia University and New York University, John Tauranac is an adjunct associate professor of art at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, where he teaches New York history and architecture. He has given lectures at the Bard Graduate Center, the Transit Museum, Columbia University, Cooper Union, the Municipal Art Society, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the New-York Historical Society. He has given tours of the city for years.

A native New Yorker, John Tauranac lives with his wife and daughter on Manhattan's Upper West Side and in West Cornwall, CT.