Untapped New York: Michelle Young on Seeing Cities Differently and Participating in Change
By Julia Gamolina
Michelle is the founder of Untapped New York, an online magazine and experience company that unearths New York City’s secrets and hidden gems. She is a graduate of Harvard College in the History of Art and Architecture and holds a master’s degree in urban planning from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is also an Adjunct Professor of Architecture. She is the author of Secret Brooklyn: An Unusual Guide, New York: Hidden Bars & Restaurants, and Broadway.
Originally from New York, Michelle has traveled to over forty countries and is always looking for the next adventure. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Michelle talks about building a company at the intersection of journalism and urbanism, and advises those just starting their careers to explore and follow through.
JG: How did your interest in all things cities first develop?
MY: I can trace it back to my early childhood - I grew up in Setauket, Long Island, which is a Revolutionary War town where the first spy ring was created by George Washington. I was trained as a classical cellist, so since I was really young, I was driven into the city by my parents to go to Juilliard. That quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby about New York - “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,” - feels like it was written for me. That was the early fascination, seeing New York as it was then.
Then my parents bought a place at Lincoln Center. That area was not considered to be a very good area at the time, as it was post-urban renewal from the sixties when Lincoln Center was first built. Being able to see the evolution of even one neighborhood has been fascinating for me, so by the time I graduated in 2000, I decided to study art and architectural history in college.
How did you then decide to study urban design at Columbia?
The real kicker for me was seeing La Paz in Bolivia. I was sent there for work when I worked for Abercrombie - after I graduated, I worked in fashion for five years. At Abercrombie, we had factories in La Paz and I was working on getting t-shirts out of the country. When I landed, I remember thinking that it was a city unlike I had ever seen before - it looks like a big crater, and you land at the top and drive down. In La Paz, the power and challenges of the informal economy are on full display. That made me realize that in my early attempts to study cities when I was in college, that education was really biased since it was primarily about Boston and garden cities in England. We learned almost nothing about anything contemporary outside of the US, and nothing about the Global South.
When I realized that I didn’t want to work in fashion anymore, I decided that I needed to give the study of cities another chance. I also looked around my apartment at that time, wondering what I was going to do with my life, and noticed that every book in there was about architecture [laughs]. It reminded me, at a time when I was a little bit lost, that that was my original core interest, so I went to Columbia to study urban planning.
Michelle photographing from the top of the Flatiron Building for a story on the building's secrets, September 2018
Michelle with host Geoffrey Baer on a shoot for the PBS documentary "10 Streets That Changed America," August 2017. Photo by Nathan Kensinger.
That’s advice I got from Ashley Mendelsohn, who studied architecture but who is now an assistant curator at the Guggenheim. When I was asking her for advice on career recalibration and figuring out what is right for me, she told me to look at the books I had at home. What I noticed is that I had a ton of autobiographies [laughs].
It’s really true!
What was solidified for you at Columbia? What were you looking to get out of this degree?
Going in, I didn’t really know - I just knew I had an interest in cities. However, right before I got to Columbia is when I started Untapped New York, so ultimately, Columbia ended up being an amazing springboard for me to build it.
How did you start?
Before Columbia, I had all this free time - along with my friends in their mid-20s, a lot of whom had left their jobs - so we just explored New York. I had taken one class at NYU with Kate Asher, who wrote the book The Works, which is about how New York City works, as well as The Heights, which is about how a skyscraper works. One of the things I learned from The Works is that mail used to be sent underground in New York, by pneumatic tubes. This was mind blowing for me, and I thought, “Wow, if I didn’t know about that in New York, what else don’t I know about?” So in its early stages, Untapped New York was a way for me to go explore something, and then write about it.
When I started at Columbia, my professors were extremely supportive, but so were my peers - they would contribute articles. That’s also one of the biggest things I got out of Columbia, the excitement people had for my ideas. Then, once I realized that Untapped New York is what I wanted to keep building, I had the opportunity at Columbia to take all kinds of classes, including journalism, videos for storytelling, all kinds of things like this. The variety of experiences that could all feed into Untapped New York is the thing I took away from my time there.
“...mail used to be sent underground in New York, by pneumatic tubes...I thought, ‘Wow, if I didn’t know about that in New York, what else don’t I know about?’”
It has now been ten years since you first started - how were you able to build Untapped New York from what was essentially a blog into a self-sustaining company?
The year after I graduated from Columbia, I worked at Liquidnet, a tech finance company. While there, I had realized that I needed to make a decision - did I want to make Untapped New York a full-time endeavor, or not. I decided that it was indeed time to do it, so the next few years were about trying to find a business model for it.
One of the challenges was that I created it at a time when no one was thinking about business models for online media, and we’ve seen the repercussions of that. So, at some point, we started organizing some experiences for our readers. At the time, it wasn’t a business decision, we just wanted to see who was reading the website and it was a great way to get to know the people that do. Then we realized the popularity of these experiences - they were tours of things like the Woolworth Building, getting in when you normally can’t go in, things like this. We launched our first tour in the fall of 2013, while continuing to do the online content. Then we were in various incubators, including the GSAPP Incubator as well as the Center for Social Innovation. A significant milestone was that my husband joined me at the company - I roped him in [laughs]. He comes from marketing at L’Oreal, both in Paris and New York, so I knew that he had exactly what was needed to turn Untapped into a self-sustainable and profitable company.
You had some business experience yourself though, didn’t you?
I did, but I knew that it wasn’t the core thing that I liked to do or wanted to focus on with my day, and I also really wanted to have a partner to do that with me. So once he joined, the company really transformed. In the last few years, it’s been all about refining the model that we have, while trying to stay true, in an almost hardlined way, to our core mission. That means not taking outside funding and trying to do it on our own, which is a very hard thing in the media business today.
Diana Darling talked about that in her interview - how they bootstrapped The Architect’s Newspaper to make it what it is today.
It’s a hard thing to do.
Michelle with daughter Charlotte on a photoshoot for the brand Glowe, January 2019. Photo by Glowe.
Where are you in your career today?
I’m fighting to make sure that we can keep doing what we’re doing, simply because I just love it so much. I love discovering new things, I love being able to inspire other people to see New York City and other cities in new ways, and the people who come in contact with our brand really love it too. That’s the goal.
I’ve also gotten involved in the last year with a lot of boards of various organizations, like the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative and Columbia GSAPP’s alumni, so I think I’ve been making a little bit of an inroad into getting into the actual practice of city building.
What would you say your core mission is? What’s the impact you’d like to have on the world?
My mission is to share how people can see their city differently, understand it better, and ultimately become more active participants in how the city changes.
What I find in the narrative out there is that there’s a lot of complaining about what’s happening in New York, and probably in other cities too. One of the things that really amazed me was when I took a real estate class that had a section focused on zoning, and I realized that that’s why the skyline looks the way that it does. Most people don’t know that, nor how development is done in New York, and there’s this conception that things are happening without their control. But, if you understand the mechanisms better, and know how you can insert yourself in the conversation, then you have the potential to drive change.
“My mission is to share how people can see their city differently, understand it better, and ultimately become more active participants in how the city changes.”
We’re seeing a lot of company leaders right now that have become mothers while scaling their businesses - something you’ve gone through as well! Tell me about that.
I was never sure if I was going to have children, but at some point my husband and I decided to go for it. It’s a really magical thing. My daughter is two years and six months right now - she’s a quintessential New Yorker: bossy, opinionated, and confident [laughs]. What’s great is that I feel like I can show her what I love about New York and instill in her the confidence of navigating cities and places in general that are foreign to her. We bring her everywhere - we believe in putting our philosophies to the test.
Of course some periods have been harder than others - it was really difficult in the first few months after I gave birth because, to be frank, I was really bored at home. I had a difficult delivery too, and then after recovering for a month and a half, I realized I was super bored. I went back to work part-time, also just because we have such a small company, and I also continued teaching pretty quickly after I gave birth too. I would say though, as a result, I was really exhausted. I didn’t take the time to rest and acknowledge the fact that we do need that rest and recharge time. If I were to do that again, I would be more intentional about taking time off and allowing myself to do that. In the end though, having a child has been a great stress-reliever too, because even if you have a rough day, you can come home and enjoy time with her.
Speaking of which, what have been some of the biggest highlights for you?
The highlights have been about being able to access places that are off-limits to the public, or are really unique experiences, and then being able to share that with the greater public. Some of the most memorable have been last year - for Fleet Week, I was taken on an Osprey helicopter from the downtown heliport, onto an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Atlantic, and stayed overnight and with them as it pulled into New York harbor for Fleet Week.
Also last year, the US Department of State sent a delegation from Turkey to come to our office, and to learn about urbanism and journalism, how they come together, and how that can be monetized. Things like this are really special.
Michelle on board the USS New York for Fleet Week, day one of an overnight stay with the troops, May 2019. Photo by Erica Price.
Michelle on a shoot for the Netflix series, "Stay Here", hosted by Genevieve Gorder and Peter Lorimer, December 2017.
What about the biggest challenges?
That has really been the monetization piece - in the ten years of Untapped New York, online advertising has taken a nosedive. It often feels like each year we’re recalibrating and rethinking how to make the company sustainable. This could be a good thing, but it does mean that the ground is constantly shifting.
I also think that when you’re really passionate about something, especially when you start your own thing, you are very attached to it and it’s very personal. Some of the work that I do personally is to figure out ways to somewhat detach myself from certain things. That can be related to the structure of how your company is set up. Finding that balance of recognizing that this is your passion project, but needing to make it work in order to keep doing it, and not taking things too personally, has been a focus.
Who are you admiring right now?
Since I joined the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, I’ve been really impressed by the organization and how individual New Yorkers fight for so many years to get things done. One of the reasons why I didn’t pursue something in preservation academically and career-wise is because I didn’t know if I could wait decades for something to come to fruition. For me, working in an online world that’s super fast, and working on things that can be changed quickly, is more satisfying. Every morning brings fresh new things. But, to work on a project and to see people that have really dug in deep is cool for me to be a part of and see.
“Put yourself in contact with a variety of businesses, because there are a lot of things to be learned that you can cherry pick.”
What advice do you have for someone like me, like you, someone who is at the intersection of a lot of different things for which there may not be a straightforward path?
Put yourself in contact with a variety of businesses, because there are a lot of things to be learned that you can cherry pick. I was just in an event where architects were talking about how they run their firms, which is not related to me, but what they were talking about is how they structure their company, which was very applicable. Also, read a lot! You can get so many ideas on how to do things, even if you’re trying to forge through something new.
Finally, what advice do you have for those just starting their careers in the built environment, and for those who’d like to start something of their own?
For those wanting to start something of their own, spend some time creating a business model, which is not something I did from the get-go. At the same time, allow for that organic process, that iterative process, because that is what I did, and the product that we have now reflects that and makes me very excited to work on it.
For those wanting a career in the built environment, or for anyone starting out, first off, be humble! Secondly, my advice is that if you think you want to do something, you just have to get some experience doing it. Dive in fully, and then don’t be afraid to quit if it’s not correct for you! Although, you still need to give 100% to whatever you do. Finish what you start. Follow through, and then decide, after you’re done with what you’ve committed to, if it’s for you or not.