Essential reading in my grad school program. His method is a really helpful way to understand cities. I happened to re-read it in the past month and am just amazed at how different a mental map might be today. I'd love to re-create his study and see what folks say these days.

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Yale and MIT credentials are not bad either.

Agreed - the book is one to get for any JC history buff.

Interesting old book (1960) I'd like to get a copy. It is a real time capsule to a Jersey City circa 1960 -- seems to mostly deal with Journal Square - I take it there were mostly trains and factories Downtown.

Here is the link to it on Google Books (you can read much of it there)
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Also about the Author:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_A._Lynch

It is interesting that the author studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Taliesin colony.

Anybody ever read the book "Image of the City" (1960) by Kevin Lynch?

My favorite excerpt about Jersey City is below:

"Jersey City, New Jersey, lies betwen Newark and New York City, and is a fringe area of both, with little central activity of its own. Crisscrossed by railroads and elevated highways, it has the appearance of a place to pass through rather than to live in. It is divided into ethnic and class heighborhoods, and is cut by the ramparts of the Palisades. What might have been its natural shopping center was stifled by the artifical creation of Journal Square on the upper land, so that the city has no single center, but rather four or five. To the usual formlessness of space and heterogeneity of structure that mark the blighted area of any American city is added the complete confusion of an uncoordinated street system. The drabness, dirt, and smell of the town are first overpowering. This, of course, is the first superficial view of an outsider."