Michelle Young

“I see my work as one continuous project — to inspire urban discovery —with many spokes.”

WomenWhoBuild, Meet Michelle Young!

Michelle is an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. She is also the Founder of Untapped New York, an online publication and experience company which highlights New York’s hidden gem’s, as well as an author of a number of incredible books including Broadway, Secret Brooklyn: An Unusual Guide, and New York: Hidden Bars and Restaurants. Michelle is a frequent speaker on the subjects of Architecture, Urbanism, and Preservation. She has appeared on PBS, National Geographic and Huffington Post and her writing and photography has appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and Travel + Leisure.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in Architecture?

Since I was very little, I was always taking in the environment around me in a very detailed way. A common story told about my birth was that I entered the world with eyes wide open from the first minutes of life. I watched this happen with my daughter, who observes the world even more acutely than I do, even at just two and a half. I was fortunate to have parents and grandparents who had an interest in architecture, art and history, and we did a bit of traveling abroad as I was growing up. I loved seeing the buildings in new countries we’d visit, taking in all of the different types of architecture and city layouts that existed around the world. 

But I think the dichotomy that was most present growing up was the difference between the suburbs of Long Island, where I grew up in a Revolutionary War-era Colonial town called Setauket, and New York City, where I attended the Julliard School of Music Pre-College Division started when I was 12. We drove in every weekend, and the line by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby encapsulated my enchantment with New York City: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

What was your first introduction to the field?

I took AP Art History in 10th grade which included architectural history and I just fell in love with it. But even then, the path here was a bit circuitous. When I first went to college at Harvard, I felt the collective pressure to go the finance path so I majored first in economics. By sophomore fall, I started to realize that econ might not be for me. I remembered how much I loved art history and so I switched to be an History of Art and Architecture major at Harvard. It was great, but then the pressures of a career came back and I interviewed for the companies that recruited at Harvard at the time: investment banks, consulting firms, Google, and out of the blue, Abercrombie & Fitch. They gave me my first job, and I still think it was one of the best places to work right out of college. They empowered us with a lot of responsibility and freedom to problem solve and created a corporate culture that was, at least in the headquarters, very inclusive. I worked as a merchandiser in the corporate headquarters of several retail companies after that until I had my mid-20s crisis and left my last job at Calvin Klein. After playing cello in an indie rock band for a couple years, I decided to go to graduate school for urban planning at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). 

 You are the founder of Untapped New York, a magazine about architecture and urban discovery, what was your inspiration for the creation of the magazine? 

When I was thinking to go back to graduate school, I took two courses to see if it was really what I wanted to do. I took one class at NYU with Kate Ascher, the author of the book The Worksabout how New York City works. Many things I learned from her really blew my mind. My favorite was that pneumatic tubes used to transport mail underground! It inspired me to create Untapped New York, which celebrates all the amazing things to discover in New York City. We aim to surprise people every day, hopefully multiple times a day, with what we cover, whether it is going off-limits into well-known buildings, digging up obscure history, showcasing restorations of old buildings, or showing people the things they’ve seen a million times on their commute and never thought about it. A lot of times, you discover new things just by varying up your normal route. 

The original concept, which still guides us today, is that the content could bridge the gap between the academic discussion of urbanism and the popular consumption of it. I felt it was important to get people excited about New York City and how it operates so that residents can take a more active role in the city’s future. In the current climate, we are providing historical context to present-day events and covering how New Yorkers are making their city their own, even amidst a pandemic or social demonstrations.  

Can you tell us a little bit about how you grew the magazine into what it is today? 

Today, Untapped New York is not only an online magazine but also a tour company. We publish several new articles a day, offer public and private tours (pandemic aside), and have a membership program called Untapped New York Insiders for our most passionate followers. Diversifying the business was a necessary step, as the media industry is continuously being challenged financially and frankly, is quite beleaguered. We cater to a niche audience, so if we wanted to stay true to our mission, we were never going to be able to become a Buzzfeed or the like. 

During the pandemic, we pivoted the Insiders membership to be all virtual and have been offering 3 to 6 virtual talks and tours a week. In response to the hardship everyone has been facing, we offered two months free membership for any new members using code STAYHOME. People from around the country and the world have joined our events and it has been a wonderful experience meeting the expanded community of Insiders during these past few months. 

 You are the author of a number of successful books. Which book has been your favorite to compose and publish? Why? 

Secret Brooklynhas been my favorite and most personal. My husband and I bought our first apartment together in 2015, moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn. We had already done a book together, New York Hidden Bars & Restaurants (with fellow Untapped New York editor Laura Itzkowitz who is now a well-known travel writer). Augustin and I pitched the idea for Secret Brooklyn to our publisher, Jonglez. We used it as an opportunity to get to know Brooklyn even better and bring friends along with us. We created a Facebook group and posted where we would be going each weekend, and if people could join, they came along! We also got to meet really amazing Brooklyn residents who are doing such a wide range of inspiring things and contributing to the diverse culture that is New York. We have a lot of fun stories of what it is like to photograph places that people don’t necessarily want you to get photos of, or don’t expect interest in — including having to masquerade as a high school student in one case! We published the second edition of Secret Brooklyn in 2019 and we're offering autographed copies with dedication on Untapped New York (free shipping with code STAYHOME).

How do you approach each project? 

I see my work as one continuous project — to inspire urban discovery —with many spokes. I’m very much a “bottoms up" operator, subscribing very much in the design studio model where iteration is what produces great final products. So for Untapped New York, new ideas are constantly spinning out of my head while we continue to refine our core products and reacting to the present. But I am lucky to also work with my husband, who thinks in the complete opposite way that I do. He’s a top level operator, able to see the big picture and plot out a strategy for the future. He’s also able to contain and direct the numerous ideas that I get excited about — I’ve learned through him that you can’t pursue everything. Overall, the balance that we provide for each other is key. Even though I am able to put on my business hat, I know that I am happiest creating products and thinking about what our audience wants. But don’t ever ask the two of us to work on the same project at the same time, or sit next to each other at the office! We have a buffer “zone” so we don’t kill each other! 

You had studied the History of Art & Architecture for your undergraduate degree at Harvard and received a M.S. in Urban Planning from Columbia University. How has your schooling influenced your current writing? 

Fortunately, my education before college really emphasized writing and my mom also had me participate in some after school things that further pushed it. My first language was actually Taiwanese. I started speaking English in pre-school so I’m fluent and have a completely unaccented American English, but I had to apply myself to master English grammar especially because my parents weren’t native born speakers. I’m really grateful for the opportunities I had growing up and in college to become a good writer. The ability to express ideas coherently, make a point effectively, and have a large vocabulary to do so, is priceless. We had a required expository writing class in freshman year at Harvard, and I credit that class with really teaching me how to really write. You can have a natural flair for writing but it’s only with rigorous effort that you learn how to write effectively to make your point. And in college, we were basically told that unless we had some new research to offer or new argument to make, don’t bother writing something that just rehashes old stuff. That moment of clarity, when you realize you’ve put together a thesis argument that provides a new look on something is an astonishing feeling. It gives you a rush. 

I treat all the feature articles I write on Untapped New York like an academic piece of writing structurally and research-wise. I still look for that thrill I described when you’ve discovered something truly new – those are the topics I search for. Then, writing-wise it’s about how to make the subject intriguing to any reader. It’s much easier to strip down than it is to build up.

You lead the Urban Studies Studio in the New York/Paris: A Shape of Two Cities Program at Columbia University. Can you tell us a little about that? How do you balance academia with your profession? 

Like I mentioned before, everything that I take on is part of one larger idea. I love the urban studies studio I teach at Columbia GSAPP I have the students, who may not have a design background at all yet, study a specific site a year — past years have included Rikers Island, Inwood in Manhattan, and Mott Haven and Port Morris in the South Bronx for several years. We work with local community groups and high school students to really get to know both the challenges and the great things happening in these neighborhoods. I have a personal interest in social and environmental justice, inspired by a legal workshop I had the opportunity to teach inside Rikers Island to the juvenile population back in 2011 and the studio I took at GSAPP with my mentor, the late Moji Baratloo. 

In my class, the students do an in-depth research of the neighborhood, hone in on an area of interest and specific site, then propose policies and designs that are rooted in their learnings. Like writing an essay, I make sure that the final proposals are rooted in fact, are supported by their research, and have something new to say. I enjoy having one hat in the academic world because I find the ideas students and fellow academics come up with really inspiring — the possibility of things keeps me engaged in the field. Time-wise, it’s not always as easy, and having a baby has definitely added even more things to juggle. But it’s about what you want to make time for. 

What has been your biggest challenge in your career? What has been the biggest reward? 

There have been some key turning points throughout my career in the architecture world. First, it was deciding to commit to building Untapped New York. I didn’t create it as a business and shifting to from a hobby to a business was really hard (I wouldn’t recommend anyone start anything without a business model now!). And unexpectedly at a critical point, I basically had an offer to work at an engineering firm for a division doing really unique public works in New York City. It was tempting — should I go for the interesting job with the salary and benefits or push forward just a bit more on my own business but with no knowledge if things would work out? In the end, I took the risk and didn’t look back, but it’s hard to know in the moment. I usually go with my gut in those moments.

Then, it was growing Untapped New York to being something that could sustain not just me, but a team. We had to take risks, which is not in my personality, and again, I’m lucky to have a business partner that could shoulder a lot of the fears that I had.  But right at the moment when it seemed like we were finally getting there, we were hit with an advertising network who refused to pay us saying it was because they were getting bought by another company. We were too small to fight them, and it was a real blow. They then offered to pay us significantly more than what was owed in future business from the new company but we would have to sign a shady non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement that said we could never talk badly about them. We didn’t take it. It was really stressful, but we learned a lot and protected ourselves better after that by diversifying and finding partners we can trust. One day, that new company came back around and asked us for our business, so we had the satisfaction of telling them if they paid us what they owed us, we could talk.  

Then a year after that experience, we woke up one day to discover that someone had scraped our entire website and recreated it on another domain, scraping it several times a day for new articles! It was another stressful, and really challenging time — we ended up being able to get the domain under our ownership eventually but in the process literally tried to track these internet thieves from the US to Panama to Amsterdam to the Seychelles. Every year, there’s some new challenge we haven’t faced before, but each time, we take it as a learning experience to become stronger and better prepared to face future risks. The coronavirus pandemic is the latest challenge we’re going through, like everyone else. 

For me, the biggest reward has been creating a community of people who love discovery as much as me. It’s a really positive group full of people who want to learn and see new things. And I think we really need this kind of positivity right now. Truly what has kept us going these past few months were our interactions with our members — so kind, supportive, and optimistic — whom we see in our virtual events several times a week. Also, on a personal level, I am so grateful that I get to do the thing I love every day. It’s not always easy, but I can’t imagine working on anything else. 

What is one piece of advice you have for women entering the field?

Whatever you do, forge your own path. The prevailing structures are not set up for women and minorities to succeed to the upper echelons. I have a lot of respect for women who make it up the corporate ladder. I don’t think I could have done it. But if you feel like It’s not for you and you’re feeling constrained by the structure, it’s ok to quit and do your own thing. Finally, don’t be afraid to speak up and stand for your principles, but know that it may have consequences. In the end though, being honest and principled in your business dealings, staying true to your core mission, and putting your customers first gains you long-term good will that you can’t buy. And, master your writing and presentation skills!