UPDATE: a new, improved, paperback version of TT&T is coming out May 6th, 2025! Much more portable that the original coffee table book. Preorder now at Hachette or get a free limited run print with a preorder from one of the bookstores on this page!

Tenements, Towers & Trash is available online and in bookstores. Here are some nice things said about the book by the New York Times, Hyperallergic, and the AV Club. You can see exclusive excerpts on Untapped Cities, CurbedNY, and Pen America (For interview, podcast and/or books for review requests, please go here.) Some of the comics/illustration in this book originally appeared on the New Yorker and Harper’s, but the majority of the material is new.

From the publisher: Here is New York, as you’ve never seen it before. A perfectly charming, sidesplittingly funny, intellectually entertaining illustrated history of the blocks, the buildings, and the guts of New York City, based on Julia Wertz’s popular illustrated columns in The New Yorker and Harper’s. In Tenements, Towers & Trash, Julia Wertz takes us behind the New York that you think you know. Not the tourist’s New York-the Statue of Liberty makes a brief appearance and the Empire State Building not at all-but the guts, the underbelly, of this city that never sleeps. With drawings and comics in her signature style, Wertz regales us with streetscapes “Then and Now” and little-known tales, such as the lost history of Kim’s Video, the complicated and unresolved business of Ray’s Pizza, the vintage trash and horse bones that litter the shore of Brooklyn’s Bottle Beach, the ludicrous pinball prohibition, Staten Island’s secret abandoned boatyard, and the hair-raising legend of the infamous abortionist of Fifth Avenue, Madame Restell. From bars, bakeries, and bookstores to food carts, street cleaners, and apartments both cramped and grand, Tenements, Towers & Trash is a wild ride in a time machine taxi from the present day city to bygone days of yore.

Preview pages: (please not that some of the preview pages are part of a longer comic or section, so you’re seeing pages out of order that are not meant to stand alone.)