When I heard a building might fall down in Manhattan, I thought not of the safety and security of me and those around me, but of John Wilson. I think of him often while navigating the disintegrating neighborhoods of New York, particularly when walking under scaffolding. He dedicates an entire episode of his HBO series How To With John Wilson to the overhead structures that pop up over sidewalks during construction and sometimes never come down. It’s one of 18 half-hour mini-documentaries that make up his show, most fixating on a single issue uniquely familiar to New Yorkers: alternate-side parking, public restrooms, real estate.
How To premiered in 2020, and over the course of three seasons, Wilson matched endless B-roll footage (much of it taken near his home in Ridgewood, Queens) with skittish, memoiristic narration and interviews with characters he finds on the street or in online forums. Together, they formed an odd yet deeply funny and ultimately uplifting time capsule of the years leading up to, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. What buoyed it all was Wilson’s sincere obsession with the false permanence of NYC and its residents’ collective tendency to take for granted the parts of it they assume are fixed.
Wilson’s newest project, the 100-minute documentary The History of Concrete, plays like an extended episode of How To.
