Miss Manhattan (Koehler Books to be released Spring ‘25) is the semi-fictional tale of two women whose lives entwine though generations apart. One is the artist’s model Audrey Munson, known as “Queen of the Artists’ Studio” and “Miss Manhattan” and “American Venus” who—despite posing for a dozen of New York’s most familiar public statues—fell into obscurity after The Great War.
Nearly seventy years later, an aspiring young artist on the Lower East Side, after seeing what she gradually believes is the same face on many statues throughout the city, begins a search that evolves from curiosity into a fierce passion that this woman who gave so much to the city no longer remains so forgotten.
from Miss Manhattan: Having posed for both statues Miss Manhattan and Miss Brooklyn created by Daniel Chester French, Audrey attends the event of the statues’ presentation on the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge.
“With a buoyant breath of satisfaction Audrey felt as if she were the great city’s queen of a sort, its Miss Manhattan and Miss Brooklyn, then with her fingertip she began tracing an imaginary pathway of her own wondrous journey. Sands Street to one side and Jay Street to the other leading to the Manhattan Bridge were her Rochester and Providence, with grand statues for which she posed now paralleling its entrance. The roadway curves upward, gradually rising straight and true just like her career, then her fingertip touched the first of the distant towers of blue steel high above the river. This is where I am, and she could see beyond the tower to the roadway steadily rising and believed a rising pathway awaited her.
But from her folding chair that bright day of the dedications, Audrey could not see during her finger-tracing that the steady rise of the roadway has a summit, then the deck descends, nor on that mild spring day could she imagine that—like her fingertip journey—she had reached her own summit, that her finest days were already behind her in the vast, ever-changing city that she loved.”
