Chronicles of Old New York
Exploring Manhattan's Landmark Neighborhoods
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
The history of New York City is written in its streets; uncover it with Chronicles of Old New York. Discover 400 years of innovation through the true stories of the visionaries, risk-takers, dreamers, and schemers who built Manhattan. Witness life during the city's earliest days, when Greenwich Village was a bucolic suburb and disease was a fact of daily life. Find out which park covers a sea of unmarked graves. Explore the city's dark side, from the slums of Five Points to Harlem's Prohibition-era speakeasies. Then see it all for yourself with guided walking tours of each of Manhattan's historic neighborhoods, illustrated with color photographs and period maps.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Can a 260-page book do justice to Harlem, Turtle Bay, SoHo, Greenwich Village, and other landmark Manhattan hoods, both extant and long-gone? No. And yes. Roman, a real-estate broker and third-generation New Yorker, covers ground familiar to most locals, and maybe others: SoHo has the most cast-iron buildings in the world; Chinatown was populated by men because women weren t allowed to emigrate; the Dakota was the city s first high-end apartment building. Fortunately, the author peppers his effort with less familiar factoids as well: NYU s first building was built by Sing Sing prisoners; Congress exempted John D. Rockefeller, Jr. from gift taxes to facilitate the donation of land that the UN was built on. Though accounts can be cursory (the Lower East Side gets four pages), and the author sometimes announces the obvious ( America was thrilled when World War II ended ), the book includes walking tours and a guide to townhouse architecture, and packs a good bit of history into one handy source. It s not for the specialist, but New Yorkers will learn a few new things, and history-minded tourists will find it a useful addition to their other guidebooks.
