A literary atlas for the city that never sleeps

I put New York off for at least a decade. As a youngster, I loved the early comedies of Woody Allen; as a teenager, I learned that from The New York Times comes all wisdom, and that the restaurants in Manhattan are the best in the world, bar none. But there's something a bit frightening about the place - it towers over mere mortals, a bristling collection of attitude, money and self-importance. As cities go, it's both the most terrific and the most terrifying.

An e-mail changed my mind, and put me on the train to Manhattan.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood ." A bit of clicking revealed something remarkable: His site was a sprawling, evolving literary atlas of New York. After exploring it, I soon began to wonder how anyone could visit the Web site without deciding, then and there, to visit the city.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is based on a simple concept. The site is comprised of a photographic map of Manhattan. The user can scroll around, and select a section to explore in closer detail. Scattered across the more detailed maps are dots. Some dots just tell you where you are on the map: Morningside Park. 3rd Avenue and 14th Street. The Empire State Building.

But other dots offer more: they tell stories. They spin tales of barbers and architects, magazine archives and gang rumbles. They tell stories of post offices and out-of-towners, of pick-up artists and egg creams. The red dots, in short, tell stories of New York, and they are almost as numerous and polyglot as the great metropolis' many avenues and intersections.

The red dots - and their rich and varied content - were enough to get me packing for the trip from Boston to New York. One train ride later, I arrived in Penn Station, and my brief sojourn in Manhattan began. After grabbing dinner at a terrific Turkish restaurant, and exploring Columbia University with a friend , I called it a night.

The next morning, I met Mr. Beller himself in a coffee shop called The Hungarian, at 112th and Amsterdam. The place was teeming with literati, which added atmosphere, and made it hard to get a table.

Beller himself showed up soon after my arrival, and we soon struck up a conversation about his emerging online world.

Almost as soon as we began talking about the genesis of the site, it became evident that Mr. Beller's Neighborhood isn't Beller's first foray into the world of literature - far from it. Beller is a former staff writer for the New Yorker, the author of "The Sleep-Over Artist" and "Seduction Theory," and the founder of Open City , which lives a dual life as a publishing house and literary journal.

So it was a bit surprising to discover that with all his New York history, Beller got a fair bit of the site's original spirit from across the Atlantic.

"I spent some time in England at one point in my life," Beller said, "and the journalism scene over there is so intense and fascinating. One of the weird features of that culture is that there's this whole world of columnists, which is basically just people wheezing off twice a week about whatever. Because it's an entrenched concept in English journalism, they do it pretty well; there's a certain voice."

The voice that Beller cultivates for his site is inquisitive, but polite, quirky, but professional - the voice of an urban storyteller with a keen eye, inquisitive spirit and a dedication to craft. It's a style that goes down easy, but is packed with substance - it's hard to read a story without learning something.

And while the soul of the site may come from Beller's benevolent oversight, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is home to dozens of contributors (some of whom are deceased writers whose estates have allowed Beller to publish their work on the site).

After about 45 minutes, Beller and I were joined by Sabin Streeter, a senior editor at the now-defunct Word.com and author/editor of Gig , and Tomas Clark, another member of the Word crew who built the site's novel architecture and navigation scheme.

Streeter and Clark's enthusiastic presence lend credibility to Beller's ambitions: to keep Mr. Beller's Neighborhood fueled with New York stories, and expand the interactive map + story concept to new urban horizons.

"My wishlist is Mr. Beller's Chicago, LA, London, San Francisco... I'll stop there," Beller said.

He didn't, however.

"I kind of want to do Mr. Beller's Cleveland, or Mr. Beller's San Antonio - I want to do a city that was kind of not so obvious to do."

With the recruitment of new editors for new cities, Mr. Beller's America could very well serve as a national literary atlas - a way for Americans and citizens of the world to walk through the virtual streets of the country, hearing the stories of its people, and getting a sense for the tiny little urban details that give each city its own distinctive feel.

Moreover, Beller said he's thought about trying to take the Mr. Beller's interface and turn it into a tool for educators.

"I've been thinking about Mr. Beller's as an application, where I'd take all of my dots off, and provide someone like a high school with the program," Beller said. "Say you're a high school in Madison, and you teach 9th graders in a writing class - I would provide a Mr. Beller's Neighborhood with Madison as the map, and the teacher could have their students go out, research the pieces and write them, and using this program and a tiny bit of HTML, post them on the map."

But literary merit and educational potential, sadly, don't necessarily make a Web site fiscally lucrative. Mr. Beller's Neighborhood doesn't feature e-commerce or synergy schemes like most of the biggest and most aggressively expanding sites on the Web. But as content sites tumble like dominoes, and fickle venture capital deserts dotcom after dotcom, Beller's strategy of lying low and building the site on his own time seems to be a wise one.

"You can in fact generate some revenue with page views, click-throughs, maybe a bit of e-commerce... but can you generate enough revenue to support 150 people, putting out content that changes every day?" asked Beller.

"Can you generate revenue to support three people? That seems to be a different question. Everything that's on Inside today is old tomorrow - same for Salon . But my site is different - it's like a park. An amusement park, or a museum. It's a structure people enter. A museum's structure doesn't change every day. It's like a world, or a novel. I see it having daily readers, but I also see it being like 'War and Peace,' where over a three or four week period, you can just disappear into it."

But when I asked Beller and his friends whether they were trying to build a new kind of Internet literature, they demurred. The role of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, said Sabin Streeter, isn't to create some experiemental form of "new" writing - it's to serve as a filter for content, and to ensure that readers get material of a consistently high quality.

"I think that's a great thing about the Web - it's egalitarian, and anybody can publish something - it's a great thing about it," Streeter said. "The question then becomes, who decides what's good, who filters it, who presents it, who makes it in a way accessible. I don't know if you've seen these e-book offerings of some of these bigger places - they've got 70,000 published works and it's impossible to sort through any of it."

"There's no filter, and it's daunting as a reader. This site presents a filter, it presents an interface, it's engaging - you want to read more. You're not just numbed by the experience of the sheer volume. That's what I see about the great thing about the Web and Web publishing."

However, as a reader, it's hard not to be excited by the vision that Mr. Beller's Neighborhood presents. By building an interactive map of literature - not just capsule reviews, or bits of travel writing, or observations churned out in a discussion forum, but real literature - Beller's site does what few other sites really manage to pull off: It allows readers to explore a city.