[{"slug":"consolidation-1898","title":"The Consolidation of 1898","kicker":"FIVE BOROUGHS","summary":"How Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island became one city on January 1, 1898, and what the merger changed.","keywords":["consolidation of New York City 1898","Greater New York 1898","five boroughs history","Andrew Haswell Green","Brooklyn joins New York City","City of Greater New York charter","New York City boroughs formed","Great Mistake of 1898"],"rooms":["panorama","customhouse","mcny"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"Two cities on one harbor"},{"p":"Before 1898 New York City meant Manhattan and the part of the Bronx it had annexed. Brooklyn was a separate city with its own mayor, its own police, and one of the largest populations in the country. Queens and Richmond (now Staten Island) were counties of farms, villages and shore towns. The five places shared a harbor, a river and an economy, but not a government."},{"p":"The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 and tied the two big cities together with a road. Ferries had crossed the East River for two centuries, but the bridge made the crossing ordinary. Commuters, freight and capital moved daily between the two shores, and the case for one city grew with every trip."},{"h":"The Father of Greater New York"},{"p":"Andrew Haswell Green, a lawyer and civic planner who had helped run Central Park, pushed the idea for decades. He argued that one government could plan streets, water, docks and transit across the whole harbor. He chaired the state commission that drew the plan. Later generations called him the Father of Greater New York."},{"p":"In 1894 voters in the affected areas answered a nonbinding question on the merger. Brooklyn said yes by a margin of fewer than 300 votes out of roughly 129,000 cast. Some Brooklyn residents fought the result for years and later called the merger the Great Mistake of 1898."},{"h":"The charter"},{"p":"The state legislature passed the Greater New York Charter and Governor Levi P. Morton signed it in 1897. It took effect on January 1, 1898. The new city had five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Richmond. Each borough elected a president, and a Board of Aldermen and a mayor governed the whole."},{"p":"Robert A. Van Wyck became the first mayor of the consolidated city. The 1900 census counted 3,437,202 people in the new city, which made it the second largest city in the world after London. The eastern towns of Queens County declined to join and became Nassau County in 1899."},{"p":"The boroughs were unequal from the start. In 1900 Manhattan held 1,850,093 people and Brooklyn 1,166,582, while the Bronx had 200,507, Queens 152,999 and Richmond 67,021. The merger multiplied the city's land many times over, from the 23 square miles of Manhattan to roughly 300 square miles of farms, marsh, villages and shore."},{"h":"What consolidation built"},{"p":"One city could borrow on one credit and build at one scale. Within a decade it opened the first subway line (1904), the Williamsburg Bridge (1903), the Manhattan Bridge (1909) and the Queensboro Bridge (1909). It unified water supply, fire and police, and it began the park and school systems the boroughs still use."},{"p":"The borough names outlasted the politics. Richmond became Staten Island in name in 1975. The Bronx remains the only borough with a definite article, after the Bronx River and the Bronck family who farmed there in the 1600s. The five borough map has not changed since 1898."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"This history lives in three museum rooms. The Panorama room holds the model of all five boroughs that the Queens Museum built for the 1964 World's Fair, the clearest picture of what 1898 joined. The Custom House room and the MCNY room show the civic and museum buildings that the consolidated city put up in the years that followed. On the atlas, every borough carries its share of painted New Yorkers: the clerks, ferry hands and borough presidents of the census."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The City of Greater New York took effect on January 1, 1898, uniting Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island under one government.","source":"Museum of the City of New York","url":"https://www.mcny.org"},{"fact":"The 1900 census counted 3,437,202 residents in the newly consolidated New York City.","source":"US Census Bureau","url":"https://www.census.gov"},{"fact":"Brooklyn was an independent city with its own mayor until it joined New York in 1898.","source":"Brooklyn Public Library","url":"https://www.bklynlibrary.org"},{"fact":"Andrew Haswell Green chaired the commission that drafted the consolidation plan and is known as the Father of Greater New York.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com"},{"fact":"The eastern towns of Queens County did not join the city and became Nassau County in 1899.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"},{"fact":"The Panorama of the City of New York, a scale model of all five boroughs, was built for the 1964 World's Fair and is on view at the Queens Museum.","source":"Queens Museum","url":"https://queensmuseum.org"}],"sources":[{"name":"Museum of the City of New York","url":"https://www.mcny.org","kind":"institution","note":"Collections and exhibitions on the city's political history, including consolidation"},{"name":"US Census Bureau","url":"https://www.census.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Decennial census counts for New York City, 1900 onward"},{"name":"Brooklyn Public Library","url":"https://www.bklynlibrary.org","kind":"institution","note":"Brooklyn collection and local history on the City of Brooklyn"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Newspapers and maps from the consolidation era"},{"name":"Queens Museum","url":"https://queensmuseum.org","kind":"institution","note":"Home of the Panorama of the City of New York"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on New York City history and Andrew Haswell Green"}],"faq":[{"q":"When did New York City become five boroughs?","a":"On January 1, 1898, when the Greater New York Charter took effect. Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Richmond (Staten Island) became boroughs of one city."},{"q":"Was Brooklyn its own city?","a":"Yes. Brooklyn was a separate city with its own mayor and government until 1898. It was one of the largest cities in the United States when it merged."},{"q":"Who was Andrew Haswell Green?","a":"A lawyer and civic planner who championed consolidation for decades and chaired the commission that drafted the plan. New Yorkers later called him the Father of Greater New York."},{"q":"What was the Great Mistake of 1898?","a":"A phrase some Brooklyn residents used for the merger with New York. Brooklyn voters had approved consolidation in 1894 by a margin of fewer than 300 votes."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/consolidation-1898"},{"slug":"the-subway-1904","title":"The Subway Opens, 1904","kicker":"UNDERGROUND","summary":"The IRT opened on October 27, 1904 with a nickel fare; how three systems became one in 1940 and how the map came to be.","keywords":["New York City subway history","IRT 1904","first subway line New York","nickel fare subway","IRT BMT IND","subway unification 1940","City Hall subway station","New York subway map history","August Belmont subway","William Barclay Parsons"],"rooms":["subway","grand","penn"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"October 27, 1904"},{"p":"At 2:35 on the afternoon of October 27, 1904, Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. took the controls of the first train at City Hall station. He was meant to hand them to a motorman after a short run. He kept driving most of the way uptown. That evening the public paid a nickel apiece and rode until after midnight."},{"p":"The first line ran 9.1 miles from City Hall north under Lafayette Street and Park Avenue to Grand Central, west under 42nd Street to Times Square, then north under Broadway to 145th Street. It had 28 stations. The company that built and ran it was the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the IRT."},{"h":"Digging the tunnel"},{"p":"The city already had trains in the air. Elevated railroads had run on iron trestles over Second, Third, Sixth and Ninth Avenues since the 1870s, and they darkened the streets beneath them and shook the buildings beside them. Planners wanted a line that was faster and out of sight. The answer was to go under the street and to give the new line four tracks, two for local trains and two for express."},{"p":"The state's Rapid Transit Act of 1894 let the city build a subway with public money and lease it to a private operator. William Barclay Parsons served as chief engineer. Contractor John B. McDonald won the bid, and financier August Belmont Jr. backed him. Ground broke on March 24, 1900 in front of City Hall."},{"p":"Crews used cut and cover. They opened the street, dug a trench, built a steel and concrete box, and put the street back. Most stations sat just below the surface, so passengers walked down a short flight of stairs. Tiled name plaques and mosaics by the design firm Heins and LaFarge decorated the stations, and City Hall station had vaulted Guastavino tile and skylights."},{"h":"Three systems"},{"p":"The IRT was one of three. In Brooklyn the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company ran elevated and surface lines and later became the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Corporation, the BMT. The Dual Contracts of 1913 split a vast expansion between the IRT and the BRT and pushed lines into every borough except Staten Island."},{"p":"The city built the third system itself. The Independent Subway System, the IND, opened its first line under Eighth Avenue on September 10, 1932. Its stations were plain and its trains were wider than the IRT's. That is why the numbered lines and the lettered lines still use different cars today."},{"h":"The nickel and unification"},{"p":"The fare stayed at five cents from 1904 until 1948, through two wars and a depression. The frozen fare drained the private companies. In June 1940 the city bought the BMT and the IRT and folded them into the IND under the Board of Transportation. The fare rose to ten cents on July 1, 1948. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has run the system since 1968."},{"h":"The map"},{"p":"Each company printed its own map until unification. In 1972 the MTA issued Massimo Vignelli's diagram, which drew every line as a straight or 45 degree colored stroke and set stations as dots. Riders complained that it bent the city. In 1979 a committee led by John Tauranac replaced it with a geographic map, the ancestor of the one in stations now. The system today has 472 stations and runs 24 hours a day."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Subway room hangs the Underground family: the conductors, the straphangers, the platform musicians and the late night riders. The Grand Central and Penn Station rooms hold the commuters who pass through the two terminals that the first line and the later lines were built to serve. On the atlas the subway characters cluster along the old IRT route from City Hall to Harlem, and along every line that followed."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The first New York subway line opened on October 27, 1904, running from City Hall to 145th Street with 28 stations.","source":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info"},{"fact":"The subway fare was five cents from 1904 until July 1, 1948, when it rose to ten cents.","source":"New York Transit Museum","url":"https://www.nytransitmuseum.org"},{"fact":"The city took over the BMT and IRT in June 1940 and unified them with its own IND system.","source":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info"},{"fact":"The city owned IND opened its first line under Eighth Avenue on September 10, 1932.","source":"New York Transit Museum","url":"https://www.nytransitmuseum.org"},{"fact":"Massimo Vignelli's diagrammatic subway map was issued in 1972 and replaced by a geographic map in 1979.","source":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info"},{"fact":"The original City Hall station, with Guastavino tile vaults and skylights, is a designated New York City landmark.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc"},{"fact":"The subway has 472 stations and runs 24 hours a day.","source":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info"}],"sources":[{"name":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info","kind":"primary","note":"Official operator; system facts, history and maps"},{"name":"New York Transit Museum","url":"https://www.nytransitmuseum.org","kind":"institution","note":"Collections on the IRT, BMT and IND and the fare history"},{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc","kind":"primary","note":"Designation reports for City Hall station and other subway interiors"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Newspaper coverage of the 1904 opening and construction photographs"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on the New York City subway"}],"faq":[{"q":"When did the New York City subway open?","a":"October 27, 1904. The first line, run by the IRT, went from City Hall to 145th Street and Broadway. Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. drove the first train."},{"q":"How much was the first subway fare?","a":"Five cents. The nickel fare lasted until 1948, when it rose to ten cents."},{"q":"What do IRT, BMT and IND mean?","a":"They were the three original systems: the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Corporation and the city owned Independent Subway System. The city unified them in 1940."},{"q":"Why are some subway lines numbers and some letters?","a":"Numbered lines run on the old IRT routes, which have narrower tunnels and cars. Lettered lines run on the former BMT and IND routes, built for wider trains."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/the-subway-1904"},{"slug":"brooklyn-bridge-1883","title":"The Brooklyn Bridge, 1883","kicker":"THE CROSSING","summary":"The Roeblings, the caissons, the opening day of May 24, 1883, and what the first East River bridge did to Brooklyn.","keywords":["Brooklyn Bridge history","John Roebling","Washington Roebling","Emily Warren Roebling","Brooklyn Bridge opening 1883","caisson disease Brooklyn Bridge","Brooklyn Bridge construction","East River bridge history","Brooklyn Bridge facts"],"rooms":["brooklynbridge","brooklyn","seaport"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"A river with no bridge"},{"p":"In 1869 the East River carried more ferry traffic than almost any water in the world. Winter ice stopped the boats. Fog stalled them. New York and Brooklyn were two of the largest cities in the country and no bridge joined them. The East River is a tidal strait, deep and fast, and the ships that used it needed clearance."},{"p":"John A. Roebling, a German born engineer who had built suspension bridges at Niagara and Cincinnati, proposed a span with a deck high enough for masts and a main span longer than any yet built. The New York Bridge Company hired him in 1867. In June 1869, while surveying the Brooklyn tower site, a ferry crushed his foot against a piling. Tetanus killed him within weeks."},{"h":"Down in the caissons"},{"p":"His son Washington Roebling took over at 32. To found the towers on bedrock the crews sank two timber caissons, huge upside down boxes filled with compressed air, and dug out the riverbed from inside while the masonry rose on top. The Brooklyn caisson reached 44 feet below the water; the Manhattan caisson stopped in sand at about 78 feet."},{"p":"Men who came up from that pressure too fast got caisson disease, now called the bends. Several died. Washington Roebling was struck in 1872 and never fully recovered. From a room in Brooklyn Heights he directed the work by letter and by watching through a telescope."},{"p":"His wife, Emily Warren Roebling, carried his instructions to the site and taught herself the mathematics and engineering to answer questions in his place. For more than a decade she was the daily link between the chief engineer and the bridge. On opening day she rode across in the first carriage."},{"h":"Steel and stone"},{"p":"The towers rose 276.5 feet above high water in granite and limestone, with Gothic arches for the roadways. Four main cables, each spun from thousands of steel wires, carried the deck. This was the first major bridge to use steel wire rather than iron. The main span measured 1,595.5 feet, the longest in the world at the time."},{"h":"May 24, 1883"},{"p":"The bridge opened on May 24, 1883 after 14 years of work and about $15 million. President Chester A. Arthur and Governor Grover Cleveland walked across. Brooklyn declared a holiday. Fireworks lit the towers that night. Pedestrians paid one cent to cross on the elevated promenade."},{"p":"Six days later a rumor that the bridge was collapsing started a panic on the stairs and 12 people died in the crush. The next year P. T. Barnum marched 21 elephants across to show the span was sound. It has carried traffic every day since."},{"h":"What it did to Brooklyn"},{"p":"The bridge made Brooklyn a place a Manhattan worker could live. Row houses and trolley lines spread east and south. Brooklyn's population, about 400,000 in 1870, passed 1,000,000 by 1900. The bridge also made the case for a single city, and the two shores it joined merged in 1898. The city named it a landmark in 1967 and the federal government named it a National Historic Landmark in 1964."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Brooklyn Bridge room paints the crossing itself: the walkers, cyclists and the people who stop at the towers to look back at Manhattan. The Brooklyn room holds the borough the bridge built, and the Seaport room keeps the ships and dockhands of the river the bridge had to clear. On the atlas the bridge characters stand on the walkway between City Hall Park and Dumbo."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883 with a main span of 1,595.5 feet, then the longest in the world.","source":"NYC Department of Transportation","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot"},{"fact":"John A. Roebling designed the bridge and died in 1869 of tetanus after a ferry crushed his foot during surveying.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com"},{"fact":"Washington Roebling, the chief engineer, was disabled by caisson disease in 1872 and directed the rest of the work from his home.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"},{"fact":"Emily Warren Roebling relayed her husband's instructions to the site for more than a decade and rode across first on opening day.","source":"Brooklyn Public Library","url":"https://www.bklynlibrary.org"},{"fact":"The Brooklyn Bridge was the first major bridge built with steel wire cables.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov"},{"fact":"On May 30, 1883, a panic on the bridge stairs killed 12 people.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"},{"fact":"The Brooklyn Bridge was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a New York City landmark in 1967.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc"}],"sources":[{"name":"NYC Department of Transportation","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot","kind":"primary","note":"Owner and operator of the bridge; structural facts"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Historic American Engineering Record drawings, photographs and period newspapers"},{"name":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov","kind":"primary","note":"National Historic Landmark listing"},{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc","kind":"primary","note":"1967 designation report"},{"name":"Brooklyn Public Library","url":"https://www.bklynlibrary.org","kind":"institution","note":"Brooklyn collection on the bridge and the Roeblings"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on the bridge and the Roebling family"}],"faq":[{"q":"When did the Brooklyn Bridge open?","a":"May 24, 1883, after 14 years of construction. President Chester A. Arthur and Governor Grover Cleveland attended."},{"q":"Who built the Brooklyn Bridge?","a":"John A. Roebling designed it and died before construction began. His son Washington Roebling was chief engineer, and Emily Warren Roebling managed communication with the site after Washington fell ill."},{"q":"What is caisson disease?","a":"Decompression sickness, now called the bends. Workers who rose too fast from the pressurized caissons under the towers suffered it, and it disabled Washington Roebling in 1872."},{"q":"Was the Brooklyn Bridge the longest bridge in the world?","a":"Its 1,595.5 foot main span was the longest suspension span in the world when it opened in 1883."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/brooklyn-bridge-1883"},{"slug":"liberty-and-ellis-island","title":"The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island","kicker":"THE HARBOR","summary":"The gift from France, Bartholdi and Eiffel, Emma Lazarus, and the immigration station that processed about 12 million people from 1892 to 1954.","keywords":["Statue of Liberty history","Ellis Island history","Bartholdi Statue of Liberty","Gustave Eiffel statue framework","Emma Lazarus The New Colossus","Ellis Island immigration 1892 to 1954","Statue of Liberty dedication 1886","Annie Moore Ellis Island","Liberty Island","Statue of Liberty facts"],"rooms":["liberty","ellis","ferry"],"readMinutes":5,"body":[{"h":"A gift with a deadline"},{"p":"The idea came from Édouard de Laboulaye, a French scholar who admired the American republic and proposed a monument to mark the friendship of the two nations. The sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi took it on. France would pay for the statue; the United States would pay for the pedestal. Bartholdi chose Bedloe's Island, in the harbor every ship passed, on his first visit in 1871."},{"p":"The statue is copper sheet, hammered thin over wooden forms and riveted to an iron skeleton. Gustave Eiffel, before his tower, designed that skeleton: a central pylon with a flexible secondary frame that lets the skin move with wind and temperature. Bartholdi finished the arm and torch first and showed it at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia."},{"h":"The pedestal and the poem"},{"p":"American fundraising stalled. Richard Morris Hunt designed a granite pedestal inside the star shaped walls of Fort Wood, but money ran out. In 1885 Joseph Pulitzer used his newspaper, the World, to ask ordinary readers for pennies and printed every donor's name. More than 120,000 people gave, and the pedestal was finished."},{"p":"Emma Lazarus wrote the sonnet 'The New Colossus' in 1883 for an auction that raised pedestal money. It was largely forgotten until 1903, when a bronze plaque with the poem was placed inside the pedestal. Its lines became the statue's meaning for the people arriving past it."},{"q":"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.","by":"Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, 1883"},{"h":"October 28, 1886"},{"p":"The statue crossed the Atlantic in 1885 aboard the French ship Isère, packed in 214 crates. Crews reassembled it on the pedestal, and President Grover Cleveland dedicated it on October 28, 1886. The figure stands 151 feet 1 inch from base to torch; from the ground to the tip of the flame it is 305 feet. The tablet in her arm reads July IV MDCCLXXVI, and the crown has seven rays."},{"p":"The copper turned green within decades. Congress made the island a national monument in 1924, renamed it Liberty Island in 1956, and the National Park Service has run it since 1933. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984."},{"h":"Ellis Island, 1892 to 1954"},{"p":"Federal immigration inspection opened on Ellis Island on January 1, 1892. The first arrival recorded was Annie Moore, a girl from County Cork, Ireland. The wooden station burned in 1897, and the brick and limestone building by the architects Boring and Tilton opened on December 17, 1900. Its Registry Room, under a Guastavino tile vault, is where inspectors questioned newcomers."},{"p":"About 12 million immigrants passed through the island before it closed on November 12, 1954. The peak came in 1907, when more than 1,000,000 arrived. Most were inspected in a few hours. Roughly 2 percent were turned back, for disease or for the likelihood of becoming a public charge. First and second class passengers were usually cleared aboard ship and never saw the Registry Room. Quota laws in 1921 and 1924 cut arrivals sharply and moved inspection to consulates abroad."},{"p":"The island stood empty for decades. It joined the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965, and the restored main building opened as a museum on September 10, 1990."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Liberty room and the Ellis room hold the arrivals: the families at the rail, the inspectors, the interpreters and the ferry crews who worked the harbor. The Ferry room paints the Staten Island Ferry riders who still pass the statue every half hour, free of charge since 1997. On the atlas the harbor pins mark Liberty Island, Ellis Island and the ferry terminals at Whitehall and St. George."}],"facts":[{"fact":"President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov/stli"},{"fact":"Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the statue and Gustave Eiffel designed its internal iron framework.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov/stli"},{"fact":"The statue measures 151 feet 1 inch from base to torch and 305 feet from the ground to the tip of the flame.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov/stli"},{"fact":"Emma Lazarus wrote 'The New Colossus' in 1883; a plaque bearing the poem was placed in the pedestal in 1903.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"},{"fact":"Ellis Island opened as a federal immigration station on January 1, 1892 and closed on November 12, 1954.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov/elis"},{"fact":"About 12 million immigrants were processed at Ellis Island during its years of operation.","source":"Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation","url":"https://www.statueofliberty.org"},{"fact":"The Ellis Island main building opened as a museum on September 10, 1990.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov/elis"},{"fact":"The Staten Island Ferry has been free to ride since 1997.","source":"NYC Department of Transportation","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot"}],"sources":[{"name":"National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument","url":"https://www.nps.gov/stli","kind":"primary","note":"Official history, dimensions and dates for the statue"},{"name":"National Park Service, Ellis Island","url":"https://www.nps.gov/elis","kind":"primary","note":"Official history of the immigration station"},{"name":"Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation","url":"https://www.statueofliberty.org","kind":"institution","note":"Passenger records and museum history"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Emma Lazarus papers, period photographs and newspapers"},{"name":"NYC Department of Transportation","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot","kind":"primary","note":"Staten Island Ferry operations"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on the statue and Ellis Island"}],"faq":[{"q":"Who gave the Statue of Liberty to the United States?","a":"The people of France. Édouard de Laboulaye proposed it, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi sculpted it, and American donors paid for the pedestal."},{"q":"Did Gustave Eiffel design the Statue of Liberty?","a":"He designed the iron skeleton inside it, not the figure. Bartholdi designed the sculpture and its copper skin."},{"q":"How many immigrants came through Ellis Island?","a":"About 12 million between 1892 and 1954. The busiest year was 1907, with more than 1,000,000 arrivals."},{"q":"Can you visit Ellis Island?","a":"Yes. The main building is a museum run by the National Park Service, reached by ferry from Battery Park in Manhattan or Liberty State Park in New Jersey."},{"q":"Where is 'Give me your tired, your poor' from?","a":"From 'The New Colossus,' a sonnet Emma Lazarus wrote in 1883 to raise money for the pedestal. A plaque with the poem has hung inside the pedestal since 1903."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/liberty-and-ellis-island"},{"slug":"grand-central-1913","title":"Grand Central Terminal, 1913","kicker":"THE TERMINAL","summary":"Electrification, air rights, the painted sky on the concourse ceiling, and the 1978 Supreme Court case that kept Grand Central standing.","keywords":["Grand Central Terminal history","Grand Central opened 1913","Grand Central ceiling zodiac","Penn Central v New York City 1978","Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Grand Central","William Wilgus electrification","Grand Central landmark case","Park Avenue tunnel crash 1902","Grand Central Terminal facts"],"rooms":["grand","penn"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"Smoke in the tunnel"},{"p":"On January 8, 1902 a New York Central train ran past signals in the smoke filled Park Avenue tunnel and struck a stopped train. Fifteen people died. The state responded with a law that banned steam locomotives from Manhattan south of the Harlem River after 1908. The railroad had to electrify or leave."},{"p":"William J. Wilgus, the railroad's chief engineer, turned the order into a plan. Electric trains need no smoke vents, so the yards could go underground on two levels and the land above could be sold or leased. Wilgus called it taking wealth from the air. The office and hotel blocks along Park Avenue north of the terminal rose on those air rights."},{"h":"February 2, 1913"},{"p":"The old Grand Central Station came down while trains kept running. The new terminal opened on February 2, 1913. Reed and Stem laid out the ramps and the loop tracks, and Warren and Wetmore designed the Beaux Arts exterior and the main concourse. The terminal has more than 40 platforms on two levels, more than any other station in the world."},{"p":"On the 42nd Street facade Jules Coutan's sculpture group, with Mercury at its center, surrounds a clock 13 feet across. Inside, ramps rather than stairs carry passengers from the street to the trains, and a four faced opal glass clock crowns the information booth at the center of the concourse."},{"h":"The ceiling"},{"p":"The concourse ceiling shows the winter sky in gold on green, with 2,500 stars, after a design by the French painter Paul César Helleu. The constellations appear reversed, as if seen from outside the heavens. A commuter noticed within weeks of the opening. The railroad kept the painting as it was."},{"p":"Decades of soot and cigarette smoke blackened it. Restorers cleaned the ceiling in the 1990s and left one small dark rectangle in the northwest corner, near the crab of Cancer, to show how dirty it had been. The restoration of the whole terminal finished in 1998."},{"h":"The case that saved it"},{"p":"The original Pennsylvania Station, McKim, Mead and White's building of 1910, was demolished beginning in October 1963. The loss moved the city to pass the Landmarks Law in 1965, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Grand Central in 1967. The next year the terminal's owner, Penn Central, proposed a 55 story tower by Marcel Breuer above the concourse."},{"p":"The Commission refused. Penn Central sued, arguing that the designation took its property without compensation. Preservationists, with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the most visible voice, rallied to the terminal's defense. In Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, decided in 1978, the Supreme Court upheld the landmarks law by a vote of 6 to 3. The decision remains the foundation of landmark law across the country."},{"h":"The terminal now"},{"p":"The Metro North Railroad has run the terminal since 1983. In January 2023 the Long Island Rail Road began service to Grand Central Madison, a new station built deep beneath the terminal. The National Park Service named Grand Central a National Historic Landmark in 1976."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Grand Central room paints the commuters under the painted sky: the people at the clock, the rail crews and the travelers on the ramps. The Penn Station room holds the other terminal and the memory of the one that was torn down. On the atlas the two stations sit twelve blocks apart on the map of Midtown, and the census places its rail characters at both."}],"facts":[{"fact":"Grand Central Terminal opened on February 2, 1913.","source":"Grand Central Terminal","url":"https://www.grandcentralterminal.com"},{"fact":"A 1902 collision in the Park Avenue tunnel killed 15 people and led to a state ban on steam locomotives in Manhattan.","source":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info"},{"fact":"The concourse ceiling depicts the constellations in reverse, with about 2,500 stars, after a design by Paul César Helleu.","source":"Grand Central Terminal","url":"https://www.grandcentralterminal.com"},{"fact":"The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Grand Central Terminal a New York City landmark in 1967.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc"},{"fact":"In Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City (1978), the Supreme Court upheld the city's landmarks law by a vote of 6 to 3.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com"},{"fact":"Grand Central became a National Historic Landmark in 1976.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov"},{"fact":"Long Island Rail Road service to Grand Central Madison began in January 2023.","source":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info"}],"sources":[{"name":"Grand Central Terminal","url":"https://www.grandcentralterminal.com","kind":"institution","note":"Official site with the terminal's history"},{"name":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info","kind":"primary","note":"Operator of the terminal through the Metro North Railroad; Grand Central Madison"},{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc","kind":"primary","note":"1967 designation and the landmarks law"},{"name":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov","kind":"primary","note":"National Historic Landmark listing"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Photographs of the terminal and of the old Pennsylvania Station"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on the terminal and the 1978 Supreme Court case"}],"faq":[{"q":"When did Grand Central Terminal open?","a":"February 2, 1913. It replaced an earlier Grand Central Station on the same site after the railroad electrified its lines."},{"q":"Why is the Grand Central ceiling backwards?","a":"The constellations are painted reversed, as if viewed from outside the sky. The error was noticed soon after the 1913 opening and was never changed."},{"q":"What was the Grand Central Supreme Court case?","a":"Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, decided in 1978. The Court ruled 6 to 3 that the city's landmark designation, which blocked a tower over the terminal, did not take the owner's property unlawfully."},{"q":"Is Grand Central a station or a terminal?","a":"A terminal. Trains end their runs there rather than passing through, which is why it is named Grand Central Terminal."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/grand-central-1913"},{"slug":"central-park-greensward","title":"Central Park and the Greensward Plan","kicker":"THE PARK","summary":"Olmsted and Vaux's 1858 plan, the village it displaced, Bethesda Terrace, Belvedere Castle and the Conservancy that rebuilt the park.","keywords":["Central Park history","Greensward Plan 1858","Frederick Law Olmsted Calvert Vaux","Seneca Village","Bethesda Terrace fountain","Angel of the Waters Emma Stebbins","Belvedere Castle","Central Park Conservancy","Central Park design competition","Central Park facts"],"rooms":["bethesda","belvedere","wollman","boathouse"],"readMinutes":5,"body":[{"h":"A park before the city reached it"},{"p":"In the 1850s the built city ended near 38th Street. Newspapers and civic leaders argued that New York needed a great public park like those of London and Paris, and in 1853 the state legislature set aside more than 700 acres in the middle of the island for it. The land was rocky, swampy and partly settled. The city took it by eminent domain."},{"h":"Seneca Village"},{"p":"The largest settlement on the site was Seneca Village, founded in 1825 when free Black New Yorkers began buying lots near what is now West 82nd to 89th Street. By the 1850s about 225 people lived there, most of them African American, along with Irish and German immigrants. The village had three churches, a school and a cemetery. Property owners there could vote, which few Black men in the state could do."},{"p":"The city paid the landowners and cleared the village in 1857. Its residents scattered and its history was largely forgotten until historians and archaeologists recovered it in the 1990s and 2000s. The Central Park Conservancy now marks the site with signs."},{"h":"The Greensward Plan"},{"p":"The park's commissioners held a design competition in 1857. Frederick Law Olmsted, then the park's superintendent, and Calvert Vaux, an English born architect, entered a plan they called Greensward. It won on April 28, 1858. Their idea was a pastoral landscape, with meadows, woods and water, that made the city disappear from view."},{"p":"Their most original move was to sink four transverse roads below grade so that crosstown traffic passed under the park unseen. They separated carriage drives, bridle paths and footpaths and joined them with bridges, each one different. Crews moved millions of cartloads of earth and rock, planted hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs, and laid drains under the whole site. Skaters used the Lake in the winter of 1858 while work went on around them."},{"h":"Bethesda Terrace and the Castle"},{"p":"Vaux and the designer Jacob Wrey Mould made Bethesda Terrace the park's one formal set piece, a two level plaza at the center of the park with a tiled arcade and carved stone. At its heart stands the Bethesda Fountain and its statue, Angel of the Waters, by Emma Stebbins, unveiled in 1873. It was the first major public art commission given to a woman in New York City."},{"p":"Belvedere Castle, a miniature castle of schist and granite by Vaux, rose on Vista Rock in the early 1870s as a lookout over the Ramble. Since 1919 it has housed the instruments that produce the official Central Park weather readings. Wollman Rink opened in 1950, and the Loeb Boathouse on the Lake opened in 1954."},{"h":"Decline and the Conservancy"},{"p":"By the 1970s the park was worn and unsafe, with bare lawns, broken benches and graffiti on the Terrace. In 1980 civic leaders founded the Central Park Conservancy, a private nonprofit, with Elizabeth Barlow Rogers as its first head. The Conservancy raised money, restored the landscapes one by one, and since 1998 has managed the park under contract with the city. The park covers 843 acres and draws more than 40 million visits a year."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"Four museum rooms belong to the park. The Bethesda room paints the people at the fountain and the arcade, the Belvedere room the walkers at the lookout, the Wollman room the skaters, and the Boathouse room the rowers on the Lake. On the atlas, the park is the densest green on the map, with characters spread from the Pond at 59th Street to the Harlem Meer."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The Greensward Plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the Central Park design competition on April 28, 1858.","source":"Central Park Conservancy","url":"https://www.centralparknyc.org"},{"fact":"Central Park covers 843 acres in the middle of Manhattan.","source":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org"},{"fact":"Seneca Village, a community founded by free Black New Yorkers in 1825, stood on park land until the city cleared it in 1857.","source":"Central Park Conservancy","url":"https://www.centralparknyc.org"},{"fact":"Emma Stebbins's Angel of the Waters, unveiled at Bethesda Fountain in 1873, was the first major public art commission awarded to a woman in New York City.","source":"Central Park Conservancy","url":"https://www.centralparknyc.org"},{"fact":"Belvedere Castle has housed the instruments for the official Central Park weather readings since 1919.","source":"Central Park Conservancy","url":"https://www.centralparknyc.org"},{"fact":"The Central Park Conservancy was founded in 1980 and has managed the park under contract with the city since 1998.","source":"Central Park Conservancy","url":"https://www.centralparknyc.org"},{"fact":"Central Park was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov"}],"sources":[{"name":"Central Park Conservancy","url":"https://www.centralparknyc.org","kind":"institution","note":"Park manager; history of the design, Seneca Village and the restoration"},{"name":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org","kind":"primary","note":"City agency that owns the park; acreage and facilities"},{"name":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov","kind":"primary","note":"National Historic Landmark listing"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Olmsted papers, maps and photographs of the park"},{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc","kind":"primary","note":"Scenic landmark designation of the park"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on Olmsted, Vaux and the park"}],"faq":[{"q":"Who designed Central Park?","a":"Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Their Greensward Plan won the 1857 design competition, with the result announced on April 28, 1858."},{"q":"What was Seneca Village?","a":"A settlement founded in 1825 by free Black landowners on what is now the west side of the park near 82nd to 89th Street. The city cleared it in 1857 to build the park."},{"q":"How big is Central Park?","a":"843 acres, running from 59th Street to 110th Street between Fifth Avenue and Central Park West."},{"q":"Who runs Central Park?","a":"The city owns it, and the Central Park Conservancy, a nonprofit founded in 1980, manages it under a contract with the city."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/central-park-greensward"},{"slug":"triangle-fire-1911","title":"The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 1911","kicker":"146","summary":"The fire of March 25, 1911 killed 146 garment workers in the Asch Building and drove the laws that remade the American workplace.","keywords":["Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire","Triangle fire March 25 1911","Asch Building Washington Place","Factory Investigating Commission","Frances Perkins Triangle fire","Rose Schneiderman speech 1911","Triangle fire victims 146","garment workers fire New York","Brown Building NYU","Triangle fire memorial"],"rooms":["washington","bowery"],"readMinutes":5,"body":[{"h":"Saturday, near closing time"},{"p":"The Triangle Waist Company occupied the top three floors of the ten story Asch Building at Washington Place and Greene Street, a block east of Washington Square. It made shirtwaists, the tailored blouses that working women wore. About 500 people worked there, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, some as young as 14."},{"p":"At about 4:40 on the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire started in a scrap bin under a cutting table on the eighth floor. Cotton scraps and tissue paper fed it. Workers on the eighth floor got out and the tenth floor was warned by telephone. No one warned the ninth floor. By the time its workers saw the flames, the fire filled the stairs."},{"h":"Thirty minutes"},{"p":"The door to the Washington Place stairway on the ninth floor was locked, a practice the owners used to stop theft and keep workers at their machines. The one fire escape twisted and collapsed under the weight of the people on it. The two freight elevators made trips until they failed. Fire Department ladders reached only the sixth floor."},{"p":"Dozens of workers jumped from the ninth floor windows to the pavement in front of a crowd. The fire was out in about half an hour. In all 146 people died: 123 women and girls and 23 men. The bodies were laid out at a pier on the East River for families to identify."},{"h":"The trial and the march"},{"p":"The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were tried for manslaughter over the locked door. A jury acquitted them in December 1911. A civil settlement in 1913 paid about $75 for each life lost. On April 5, 1911 a funeral procession for the unidentified dead moved through the rain, and hundreds of thousands lined the streets."},{"p":"A week after the fire, at a memorial meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, the union organizer Rose Schneiderman told a wealthy audience that public sympathy was not enough."},{"q":"I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship.","by":"Rose Schneiderman, April 2, 1911"},{"h":"The Commission"},{"p":"The state legislature created the Factory Investigating Commission in June 1911. State Senator Robert F. Wagner chaired it and Assemblyman Al Smith served as vice chair. Its investigators walked through hundreds of factories across the state and questioned workers on the record. Over four years its findings became dozens of new laws on fire exits, sprinklers, hours, and the labor of women and children."},{"p":"Frances Perkins had watched the fire from Washington Square. She worked for the Commission as an investigator, later ran the state's labor department under Governor Smith and Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in 1933 became Secretary of Labor, the first woman in a presidential cabinet. She called March 25, 1911 the day the New Deal began."},{"h":"The building"},{"p":"The Asch Building survived the fire, since its structure was fireproof. New York University bought it and named it the Brown Building; it holds science laboratories today. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1991 and a New York City landmark in 2003. In 2023 a permanent memorial, a steel ribbon with the names of the dead, was dedicated on its facade."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Washington Square room paints the square where Perkins stood and the students and neighbors who pass the Brown Building each day. The Bowery room holds the tenement and garment district life that the Triangle workers came from, the peddlers, seamstresses and union hands of the Lower East Side. On the atlas, the pin at Washington Place and Greene Street marks the corner."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The Triangle fire on March 25, 1911 killed 146 workers, 123 women and girls and 23 men.","source":"Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire","url":"https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu"},{"fact":"The factory occupied the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch Building at Washington Place and Greene Street.","source":"Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire","url":"https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu"},{"fact":"Owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were tried for manslaughter and acquitted in December 1911.","source":"Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire","url":"https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu"},{"fact":"The New York State Factory Investigating Commission, created in June 1911, was chaired by Robert F. Wagner with Al Smith as vice chair.","source":"Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire","url":"https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu"},{"fact":"Frances Perkins, who witnessed the fire, became Secretary of Labor in 1933, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet.","source":"US Department of Labor","url":"https://www.dol.gov"},{"fact":"The Asch Building, now NYU's Brown Building, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991 and a New York City landmark in 2003.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc"}],"sources":[{"name":"Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire","url":"https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu","kind":"primary","note":"Victim list, trial transcripts, Commission records and primary documents"},{"name":"US Department of Labor","url":"https://www.dol.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Biography of Frances Perkins and the department's history"},{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc","kind":"primary","note":"2003 designation report for the Brown Building"},{"name":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov","kind":"primary","note":"National Historic Landmark listing"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Newspaper coverage and photographs from 1911"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on the fire and its aftermath"}],"faq":[{"q":"How many people died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire?","a":"146 workers died on March 25, 1911: 123 women and girls and 23 men. Most were young immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe."},{"q":"Where was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?","a":"On the top three floors of the Asch Building at Washington Place and Greene Street in Greenwich Village. The building still stands as New York University's Brown Building."},{"q":"Were the Triangle factory owners punished?","a":"Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were tried for manslaughter and acquitted in December 1911. A 1913 civil settlement paid about $75 per victim."},{"q":"What changed after the Triangle fire?","a":"The state's Factory Investigating Commission produced dozens of laws on fire safety, hours and working conditions. Frances Perkins, a witness to the fire, carried that agenda into the New Deal as Secretary of Labor."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/triangle-fire-1911"},{"slug":"harlem-renaissance-apollo","title":"The Harlem Renaissance and the Apollo","kicker":"UPTOWN","summary":"The Great Migration made Harlem, the writers and musicians of the 1920s made it famous, and Amateur Night at the Apollo has run since 1934.","keywords":["Harlem Renaissance history","Apollo Theater history","Amateur Night at the Apollo","Great Migration Harlem","125th Street history","Strivers Row Harlem","Langston Hughes Harlem","Ella Fitzgerald Apollo 1934","Studio Museum in Harlem","Schomburg Center"],"rooms":["apollo","strivers","studiomuseum"],"readMinutes":5,"body":[{"h":"How Harlem became Harlem"},{"p":"Developers overbuilt Harlem in the 1890s and early 1900s, betting on the subway. When the market collapsed, landlords held empty apartment houses. In 1904 Philip A. Payton Jr. founded the Afro American Realty Company and leased buildings to Black tenants, who were shut out of most of the city. Block by block, Harlem filled."},{"p":"The Great Migration supplied the people. Between the 1910s and 1970 about 6 million African Americans left the South for the cities of the North and West. New York took a large share, and by 1930 more than 200,000 Black residents lived in Harlem. Churches, newspapers, lodges and businesses moved uptown with them."},{"h":"The Renaissance"},{"p":"In the 1920s Harlem produced a body of literature, art and music that the era itself named the New Negro movement and later generations called the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro set out its aims. Langston Hughes published The Weary Blues in 1926. Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen wrote in and about the neighborhood."},{"p":"The music ran all night. Duke Ellington led the band at the Cotton Club from 1927, where the audience was white and the performers were Black. The Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue, open from 1926 to 1958, admitted everyone and gave the Lindy Hop its home. In 1926 the New York Public Library bought the collection of Arturo Schomburg, the seed of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th Street."},{"h":"The Apollo and Amateur Night"},{"p":"The theater at 253 West 125th Street opened in 1914 as Hurtig and Seamon's New Burlesque Theater, and it did not admit Black patrons. In 1934 Sidney Cohen reopened it as the Apollo, with Black performers on stage and Black audiences in the seats, at a time when 125th Street was the shopping street of Harlem."},{"p":"Amateur Night began that same year. Contestants rub the Tree of Hope, a stump of a Harlem elm kept on stage for luck, and the audience decides. In November 1934 a 17 year old named Ella Fitzgerald came to dance, sang instead, and won. Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson 5 all played the Apollo early in their careers. The city named the theater a landmark in 1983."},{"h":"Strivers' Row"},{"p":"On West 138th and 139th Streets, between what are now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Frederick Douglass Boulevards, stand three rows of houses built between 1891 and 1893 for the developer David H. King Jr. Three firms designed them: James Brown Lord; Bruce Price with Clarence Luce; and McKim, Mead and White. The rear alleys still carry signs that read Walk Your Horses."},{"p":"The houses stood partly empty until they were sold to Black buyers beginning in 1919. Doctors, lawyers, musicians and ministers moved in, among them the composer W. C. Handy, and the blocks earned the name Strivers' Row. The city designated the St. Nicholas Historic District in 1967."},{"h":"Harlem now"},{"p":"The Studio Museum in Harlem, founded in 1968 to show the work of artists of African descent, opened a new building on West 125th Street in 2025. The Apollo runs as a nonprofit and Amateur Night still fills its Wednesdays."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Apollo room paints the marquee crowd and the contestants at the Tree of Hope. The Strivers room holds the brownstone families of 138th and 139th Streets, and the Studio Museum room the artists and curators of 125th Street. On the atlas, Harlem's pins run from Central Park North to the Harlem River, with the thickest cluster along 125th Street."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The Great Migration moved about 6 million African Americans out of the South between the 1910s and 1970.","source":"National Museum of African American History and Culture","url":"https://nmaahc.si.edu"},{"fact":"The Apollo Theater opened in 1914 as Hurtig and Seamon's New Burlesque Theater and was renamed the Apollo in 1934.","source":"Apollo Theater","url":"https://www.apollotheater.org"},{"fact":"Amateur Night at the Apollo began in 1934, and Ella Fitzgerald won it in November of that year at age 17.","source":"Apollo Theater","url":"https://www.apollotheater.org"},{"fact":"The New York Public Library acquired Arturo Schomburg's collection in 1926, the foundation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.","source":"New York Public Library","url":"https://www.nypl.org"},{"fact":"The Strivers' Row houses on West 138th and 139th Streets were built from 1891 to 1893 and designated the St. Nicholas Historic District in 1967.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc"},{"fact":"The Studio Museum in Harlem was founded in 1968.","source":"Studio Museum in Harlem","url":"https://www.studiomuseum.org"},{"fact":"Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, a founding text of the Harlem Renaissance, was published in 1925.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"}],"sources":[{"name":"Apollo Theater","url":"https://www.apollotheater.org","kind":"institution","note":"Theater history and Amateur Night"},{"name":"New York Public Library, Schomburg Center","url":"https://www.nypl.org","kind":"institution","note":"Research collections on Harlem and the Renaissance"},{"name":"National Museum of African American History and Culture","url":"https://nmaahc.si.edu","kind":"institution","note":"The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance"},{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc","kind":"primary","note":"Designation reports for the Apollo Theater and the St. Nicholas Historic District"},{"name":"Studio Museum in Harlem","url":"https://www.studiomuseum.org","kind":"institution","note":"Museum history"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Harlem Renaissance writers, photographs and recordings"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on the Harlem Renaissance"}],"faq":[{"q":"What was the Harlem Renaissance?","a":"A flowering of Black literature, art, music and thought centered in Harlem in the 1920s and early 1930s. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and musicians such as Duke Ellington defined it."},{"q":"When did Amateur Night at the Apollo start?","a":"In 1934, the year the theater reopened as the Apollo. Ella Fitzgerald won one of its first contests that November."},{"q":"What is Strivers' Row?","a":"Three rows of houses on West 138th and 139th Streets built from 1891 to 1893 and sold to Black professionals from 1919. The blocks form the St. Nicholas Historic District."},{"q":"Why is it called the Great Migration?","a":"Because of its scale. About 6 million African Americans left the South for Northern and Western cities between the 1910s and 1970, and Harlem was one of the main destinations."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/harlem-renaissance-apollo"},{"slug":"birth-of-hip-hop-1973","title":"The Birth of Hip Hop, 1973","kicker":"THE BRONX","summary":"A back to school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc, and the four elements that grew from the Bronx.","keywords":["birth of hip hop 1973","1520 Sedgwick Avenue","DJ Kool Herc","Cindy Campbell party August 11 1973","four elements of hip hop","Bronx hip hop history","Grandmaster Flash","Afrika Bambaataa Zulu Nation","Rapper's Delight 1979","hip hop 50th anniversary"],"rooms":["sedgwick","bronxmuseum","rucker"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"The Bronx in 1973"},{"p":"The Cross Bronx Expressway had cut through the borough's neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s. Landlords abandoned buildings and fires burned whole blocks in the 1970s. Jobs left and the city neared bankruptcy. In that Bronx, teenagers with turntables and a microphone built a culture from records their parents owned."},{"h":"August 11, 1973"},{"p":"Cindy Campbell wanted money for school clothes. She rented the recreation room of her apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in Morris Heights near the expressway, and threw a back to school party on August 11, 1973. Her brother Clive, who called himself Kool Herc, ran the music. Hip hop dates its birth to that night."},{"p":"Clive Campbell was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955 and moved to the Bronx in 1967. He had watched the sound system parties of Kingston and brought their volume to the Bronx. He noticed that dancers waited for the break, the stretch of a funk record where the band drops out and the drums carry the beat."},{"h":"The break"},{"p":"Herc played two copies of the same record on two turntables and switched between them to stretch the break for as long as the floor wanted it. He called the technique the Merry Go Round. The dancers who saved their best moves for the break became break boys and break girls, and the dance became breaking."},{"p":"A friend, Coke La Rock, talked over the beats to hype the crowd, and the master of ceremonies became the MC. Herc's parties moved from the rec room to Cedar Park and then to clubs, and other Bronx DJs studied his set."},{"h":"The four elements"},{"p":"Grandmaster Flash, born Joseph Saddler, worked out how to cue a record by ear with the crossfader and made the DJ precise. Afrika Bambaataa, a former gang member from the Bronx River Houses, founded the Zulu Nation in 1973 and turned rival crews into competing dancers and DJs. He named the culture's four elements: DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti writing, with knowledge as the fifth."},{"p":"For six years hip hop lived at parties and on cassette. The Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight, released in 1979, put it on the radio. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message, in 1982, put the Bronx itself into the lyrics. The Library of Congress added The Message to the National Recording Registry in 2002 and Rapper's Delight in 2011."},{"p":"Graffiti had its own beginning. In July 1971 the New York Times wrote about TAKI 183, a Washington Heights teenager who had written his name across the city, and tagging spread through the schools. By the mid 1970s writers painted whole subway cars in the yards at night. The MTA declared the fleet free of graffiti in 1989, and the style moved to walls, galleries and print."},{"h":"The birthplace"},{"p":"1520 Sedgwick Avenue is still an apartment building. In 2007 New York State recognized it as the birthplace of hip hop and found it eligible for the state and national registers of historic places. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted DJ Kool Herc in 2023, the culture's fiftieth year, and that August 11 a concert at Yankee Stadium marked the anniversary."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Sedgwick room paints the party: the DJ at two turntables, the crowd, the breakers on the floor. The Bronx Museum room holds the borough's artists, and the Rucker Park room holds the Harlem court where summer basketball and the same crowd met. On the atlas, the hip hop pins run along the Grand Concourse, the Bronx River Houses and Sedgwick Avenue."}],"facts":[{"fact":"Hip hop traces its origin to a party DJ Kool Herc played at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on August 11, 1973.","source":"National Museum of African American History and Culture","url":"https://nmaahc.si.edu"},{"fact":"DJ Kool Herc, born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955, moved to the Bronx in 1967.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com"},{"fact":"Herc extended the drum breaks of funk records by switching between two copies of the same record, a technique he called the Merry Go Round.","source":"National Museum of African American History and Culture","url":"https://nmaahc.si.edu"},{"fact":"Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message (1982) was added to the National Recording Registry in 2002.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"},{"fact":"The Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight (1979) was added to the National Recording Registry in 2011.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"},{"fact":"Rucker Park in Harlem is named for Holcombe Rucker, who started its basketball tournament in 1950.","source":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org"},{"fact":"The Bronx Museum of the Arts was founded in 1971 on the Grand Concourse.","source":"Bronx Museum of the Arts","url":"https://www.bronxmuseum.org"}],"sources":[{"name":"National Museum of African American History and Culture","url":"https://nmaahc.si.edu","kind":"institution","note":"Hip hop history and collections"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"National Recording Registry entries for early hip hop records"},{"name":"Bronx Museum of the Arts","url":"https://www.bronxmuseum.org","kind":"institution","note":"Museum history and Bronx art"},{"name":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org","kind":"primary","note":"Holcombe Rucker Park history"},{"name":"New York Public Library","url":"https://www.nypl.org","kind":"institution","note":"Research collections on hip hop and the Bronx"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on hip hop and its founders"}],"faq":[{"q":"Where was hip hop born?","a":"In the recreation room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, at a party on August 11, 1973 where DJ Kool Herc played. The building still stands."},{"q":"Who is DJ Kool Herc?","a":"Clive Campbell, born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955. He developed the technique of extending drum breaks with two turntables, the foundation of hip hop DJing."},{"q":"What are the four elements of hip hop?","a":"DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti writing. Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation named them and added knowledge as a fifth."},{"q":"What was the first hip hop hit record?","a":"The Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight, released in 1979, was the first hip hop record to reach a mass radio audience."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/birth-of-hip-hop-1973"},{"slug":"coney-island","title":"Coney Island","kicker":"THE BOARDWALK","summary":"Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland, the Wonder Wheel of 1920, the boardwalk of 1923, the Cyclone of 1927 and Nathan's nickel hot dog.","keywords":["Coney Island history","Steeplechase Park","Luna Park Coney Island 1903","Dreamland fire 1911","Coney Island Cyclone 1927","Wonder Wheel 1920","Nathan's Famous 1916","Riegelmann Boardwalk 1923","Parachute Jump Coney Island","Coney Island amusement parks"],"rooms":["coney","cyclone","rockaway"],"readMinutes":5,"body":[{"h":"A beach at the end of Brooklyn"},{"p":"Coney Island is the sandy south shore of Brooklyn, once a true island and now joined to the mainland by fill. Resort hotels and bathhouses arrived after the Civil War, and railroads brought day trippers from the city. Charles Feltman, a Coney Island restaurant owner, is credited with selling the first sausages in a roll there in the 1860s. By the 1890s the beach had racetracks, dance halls and a reputation."},{"h":"Three parks"},{"p":"George C. Tilyou opened Steeplechase Park in 1897 around a ride in which pairs of riders raced mechanical horses on a rail. The park's grinning Funny Face became the symbol of Coney Island. Steeplechase closed in 1964. Its Parachute Jump, a 250 foot steel tower moved from the 1939 World's Fair in 1941, still stands and is a city landmark."},{"p":"Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy opened Luna Park in 1903, a fantasy city of towers and spires lit by more than 200,000 electric bulbs. Dreamland, larger and whiter, opened across Surf Avenue in 1904. Dreamland burned to the ground on May 27, 1911. Luna Park burned in 1944 and never reopened. A new Luna Park, unrelated to the first, took the name in 2010."},{"h":"The Nickel Empire"},{"p":"The subway reached the Stillwell Avenue terminal in 1920, and a nickel fare put the beach within reach of every tenement in the city. Summer Sundays drew crowds in the hundreds of thousands. Newspapers called it the Nickel Empire. The New York Aquarium moved to the boardwalk in 1957 and is still there."},{"p":"Nathan Handwerker, an immigrant from Poland who had worked at Feltman's, opened a hot dog stand at Surf and Stillwell Avenues in 1916 and charged a nickel, half of Feltman's price. Nathan's Famous still stands on the corner. Its July 4 hot dog eating contest has run as an annual event since 1972."},{"h":"The Wonder Wheel and the boardwalk"},{"p":"The Wonder Wheel opened in 1920, a 150 foot steel wheel built by the Eccentric Ferris Wheel Company to a design by Charles Hermann. Sixteen of its 24 cars slide inward and outward along curved tracks as the wheel turns, and eight stay fixed. It has run every summer since and became a city landmark in 1989."},{"p":"The Riegelmann Boardwalk opened on May 15, 1923, named for Brooklyn Borough President Edward Riegelmann, who pushed the city to buy the private beachfront and open it to all. It runs about 2.7 miles from West 37th Street to Brighton Beach. The city designated it a scenic landmark in 2018."},{"h":"The Cyclone"},{"p":"The Cyclone opened on June 26, 1927 on the site of the country's first roller coaster, the Switchback Railway of 1884. Vernon Keenan designed it and Harry C. Baker built it: a wooden coaster with 2,640 feet of track and a first drop of 85 feet at about a 60 degree angle. A ride cost 25 cents. It became a city landmark in 1988 and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. It still runs on its original steel and wood frame."},{"h":"Rockaway"},{"p":"Across Jamaica Bay in Queens, the Rockaway peninsula grew as the other working beach, reached today by the A train. Its boardwalk was rebuilt in concrete after Hurricane Sandy struck in October 2012, and the surf breaks off Rockaway Beach draw the city's surfers."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Coney room paints the boardwalk crowd: the bathers, the Nathan's line, the Wonder Wheel operators and the Mermaid Parade marchers. The Cyclone room holds the riders at the top of the first drop. The Rockaway room paints the surfers and the A train beachgoers of the Queens shore. On the atlas, the pins run the length of the boardwalk from Sea Gate to Brighton Beach and out along the Rockaway peninsula."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The Cyclone roller coaster opened on June 26, 1927 with 2,640 feet of track and an 85 foot first drop.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc"},{"fact":"The Wonder Wheel opened in 1920 and stands 150 feet tall; it was designated a New York City landmark in 1989.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc"},{"fact":"The Riegelmann Boardwalk opened on May 15, 1923 and was designated a scenic landmark in 2018.","source":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org"},{"fact":"Nathan Handwerker opened his hot dog stand at Surf and Stillwell Avenues in 1916 and sold hot dogs for a nickel.","source":"Nathan's Famous","url":"https://www.nathansfamous.com"},{"fact":"Dreamland burned down on May 27, 1911, seven years after it opened.","source":"Brooklyn Public Library","url":"https://www.bklynlibrary.org"},{"fact":"Steeplechase Park operated from 1897 to 1964.","source":"Coney Island History Project","url":"https://www.coneyislandhistory.org"},{"fact":"The Parachute Jump was built for the 1939 World's Fair, moved to Steeplechase Park in 1941, and is a New York City landmark.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc"}],"sources":[{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc","kind":"primary","note":"Designation reports for the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, the Parachute Jump and the boardwalk"},{"name":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org","kind":"primary","note":"Riegelmann Boardwalk and Coney Island beach"},{"name":"Coney Island History Project","url":"https://www.coneyislandhistory.org","kind":"institution","note":"Oral histories and exhibits on the amusement parks"},{"name":"Brooklyn Public Library","url":"https://www.bklynlibrary.org","kind":"institution","note":"Brooklyn collection photographs and newspapers on Coney Island"},{"name":"Nathan's Famous","url":"https://www.nathansfamous.com","kind":"institution","note":"Company history"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"primary","note":"Photographs and films of Coney Island from the 1890s onward"},{"name":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com","kind":"reference","note":"General reference on Coney Island"}],"faq":[{"q":"When did the Coney Island Cyclone open?","a":"June 26, 1927. It is a wooden roller coaster with an 85 foot first drop and is both a New York City landmark and a National Register listing."},{"q":"What were the three great Coney Island parks?","a":"Steeplechase Park (1897 to 1964), Luna Park (1903 to 1944) and Dreamland (1904 to 1911). Only the Parachute Jump from Steeplechase survives from the three."},{"q":"How old is the Wonder Wheel?","a":"It opened in 1920 and has run every summer since. Sixteen of its 24 cars swing along inner tracks as the wheel turns."},{"q":"When did Nathan's open at Coney Island?","a":"In 1916, when Nathan Handwerker began selling nickel hot dogs at Surf and Stillwell Avenues. The stand is still on the same corner."},{"q":"How long is the Coney Island boardwalk?","a":"About 2.7 miles, from West 37th Street to Brighton Beach. It opened on May 15, 1923."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/coney-island"},{"slug":"blackout-1977","title":"The Blackout of July 13, 1977","kicker":"LIGHTS OUT","summary":"What happened when New York lost power on July 13, 1977, the looting and fires that followed, and how the 1965 and 2003 blackouts differed.","keywords":["New York City blackout 1977","July 13 1977 blackout","1977 blackout looting","Bushwick blackout fires","Northeast blackout 1965","2003 Northeast blackout","Con Edison blackout history","blackout hip hop myth","New York summer of 1977","Son of Sam summer"],"rooms":["bowery","bushwick","times"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"The night the grid failed"},{"p":"On the evening of July 13, 1977, lightning struck Consolidated Edison transmission lines north of the city. A second strike followed. Protective relays tripped, the system shed load, and it lost the ties to neighboring utilities that could have carried it. At about 9:30 p.m. the lights went out across the five boroughs. Only pockets served by other utilities stayed lit."},{"p":"The blackout lasted about 25 hours. Con Edison restored the last customers on the night of July 14. The city had gone dark in the middle of a heat wave, in the middle of a fiscal crisis, and in the middle of the Son of Sam summer. The heat and the mood together made the night unlike any blackout before it."},{"h":"The looting and the fires"},{"p":"Looting began within minutes in some neighborhoods and spread through the night. Crowds broke into stores along Broadway in Bushwick, along Utica Avenue and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, along Third Avenue in the Bronx, and along 125th Street in Harlem. Some took televisions and clothing. Some took food. Some set fires after the shelves were empty."},{"p":"The fire department answered more than 1,000 alarms that night and the next day. Police made 3,776 arrests, the largest mass arrest in the city's history, and the courts and jails could not hold them. Damage estimates ran past $300 million."},{"p":"Bushwick took the worst of it. Whole stretches of Broadway burned, and many stores never reopened. The neighborhood had already lost population and jobs through the 1970s, and the blackout sped the decline. Its recovery took decades."},{"h":"1965: the polite blackout"},{"p":"New York had lost power before. On November 9, 1965, a relay failure at a station near Niagara Falls set off a cascade that blacked out most of the Northeast and Ontario, about 30 million people. In New York the lights failed at the evening rush hour and stayed out through the night, about 13 hours in most of the city."},{"p":"The city stayed calm. Commuters slept in hotel lobbies and train stations. Strangers directed traffic with flashlights. Crime that night was low. The contrast with 1977 became the standard way to describe how much the city had changed in 12 years."},{"h":"2003: the grid fails again"},{"p":"On August 14, 2003, a cascade that began in Ohio blacked out about 50 million people in eight states and Ontario. New York lost power in the afternoon and got it back through the next day. Again the city stayed mostly calm. People walked home over the bridges. Bars sold warm beer on the sidewalk. Neighbors grilled what was in the freezer."},{"p":"The joint United States and Canada task force blamed an Ohio utility that had let trees grow into its lines and had lost its alarm system at the moment it needed it. The lesson of 1977 had been about the city. The lesson of 2003 was about the grid."},{"h":"Hip hop and the blackout: myth and fact"},{"p":"A story holds that the 1977 blackout made hip hop. Looters, it says, took turntables and mixers from electronics stores, and the new equipment put DJ sets in the hands of hundreds of teenagers who could never have afforded them. Some early DJs have told the story about their own neighborhoods, and documentaries and books have repeated it."},{"p":"The record says hip hop was already four years old. DJ Kool Herc played the party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on August 11, 1973, that most histories mark as the beginning. Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were working in the Bronx before 1977. The blackout may have put more equipment on the street. It did not start the music. The safe claim is the narrow one: the blackout was one of many things that happened to a culture already growing."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The blackout lives in the Bushwick room of the museum, where the census hangs the block characters, the corner kids and the shopkeepers who rebuilt Broadway. The Bowery room holds the city of the 1970s, the night people and the people who slept through it. The Times Square room shows the marquee crowd the night the bulbs went out. The atlas at map.html pins each character to the street where the painting sets them."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The 1977 blackout began on the evening of July 13, 1977, after lightning struck Con Edison transmission lines, and lasted about 25 hours.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com/place/New-York-City"},{"fact":"Police made 3,776 arrests during the 1977 blackout, the largest mass arrest in the city's history.","source":"Museum of the City of New York","url":"https://www.mcny.org"},{"fact":"The fire department answered more than 1,000 alarms during the 1977 blackout, and Bushwick's Broadway was among the hardest hit streets.","source":"Brooklyn Public Library","url":"https://www.bklynlibrary.org"},{"fact":"The Northeast blackout of November 9, 1965, cut power to about 30 million people across the Northeast and Ontario.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"},{"fact":"The blackout of August 14, 2003, began in Ohio and affected about 50 million people in eight states and Ontario.","source":"U.S. Department of Energy","url":"https://www.energy.gov"},{"fact":"DJ Kool Herc's party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on August 11, 1973, is the date most histories give for the birth of hip hop, four years before the blackout.","source":"Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture","url":"https://nmaahc.si.edu"}],"sources":[{"name":"Britannica, New York City","url":"https://www.britannica.com/place/New-York-City","kind":"reference","note":"General history of the city including the 1970s fiscal crisis and the blackouts"},{"name":"Museum of the City of New York","url":"https://www.mcny.org","kind":"institution","note":"Collections and exhibitions on the city in the 1970s"},{"name":"Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History","url":"https://www.bklynlibrary.org","kind":"institution","note":"Bushwick history and the 1977 blackout in Brooklyn"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"institution","note":"Newspaper archives covering the 1965, 1977 and 2003 blackouts"},{"name":"U.S. Department of Energy","url":"https://www.energy.gov","kind":"institution","note":"Final report of the joint United States and Canada task force on the 2003 blackout"},{"name":"Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture","url":"https://nmaahc.si.edu","kind":"institution","note":"Hip hop history and the 1973 Sedgwick Avenue party"}],"faq":[{"q":"How long did the 1977 New York City blackout last?","a":"About 25 hours. Power failed at about 9:30 p.m. on July 13, 1977, and Con Edison restored the last customers on the night of July 14."},{"q":"What caused the 1977 blackout?","a":"Lightning struck Con Edison transmission lines north of the city on the evening of July 13, 1977. Protective equipment tripped, the system lost its ties to neighboring utilities, and the load could not be carried."},{"q":"Did the 1977 blackout create hip hop?","a":"No. Hip hop's birth is usually dated to DJ Kool Herc's party on August 11, 1973. Some early DJs have said looted equipment spread the culture in 1977, and that may be true in part, but the music was already four years old."},{"q":"Why was the 1965 blackout so different from 1977?","a":"The 1965 blackout hit at the evening rush hour in November and the city stayed calm, with low crime. The 1977 blackout hit on a hot July night during a fiscal crisis, and looting and arson followed in several neighborhoods."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/blackout-1977"},{"slug":"stonewall-1969","title":"Stonewall, June 28, 1969","kicker":"CHRISTOPHER STREET","summary":"The Stonewall Inn, the police raid of June 28, 1969, the nights that followed, the first march in 1970, and the National Monument of 2016.","keywords":["Stonewall riots 1969","Stonewall Inn history","Stonewall uprising June 28 1969","Christopher Street Liberation Day 1970","first Pride march New York","Stonewall National Monument","Greenwich Village gay history","Marsha P. Johnson","Sylvia Rivera","LGBTQ history New York"],"rooms":["stonewall","washington"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"A bar on Christopher Street"},{"p":"The Stonewall Inn stood at 51 and 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, across from Christopher Park. In 1969 it operated without a liquor license, under Mafia ownership, and served a crowd that other bars turned away: gay men, lesbians, drag queens, transgender people, and street kids with nowhere else to go. The State Liquor Authority then treated serving homosexuals as grounds to pull a license, so gay bars ran outside the law almost by definition."},{"p":"Police raids were routine. Bars paid off officers, got a warning call, and cleared the dance floor. On the night of Friday, June 27, 1969, the warning did not come."},{"h":"The raid"},{"p":"At about 1:20 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, 1969, officers of the New York Police Department entered the Stonewall Inn. They checked identification, separated patrons by the sex on their papers, and began making arrests. Patrons who were released did not go home. They gathered on Christopher Street and watched."},{"p":"The crowd grew as the police loaded a patrol wagon. Coins flew, then bottles. The officers retreated into the bar and barricaded the door. The crowd broke the windows and tried to set the building on fire before the Tactical Patrol Force arrived and cleared the street. The fighting lasted until dawn."},{"h":"The nights that followed"},{"p":"The next night the crowd came back, larger. Protests and street fighting continued on and off for several nights, into the first days of July. The Village Voice ran its account that week. The Mattachine Society, which had worked for gay rights through petition and polite picketing for two decades, chalked a message on the boarded window asking for calm."},{"q":"We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village.","by":"Mattachine Society sign in the Stonewall Inn window, 1969"},{"p":"The uprising did not invent the movement. Homophile groups had picketed in Washington and Philadelphia since 1965. What Stonewall changed was the tone. Within weeks activists formed the Gay Liberation Front. By December the Gay Activists Alliance followed. The demand shifted from tolerance to liberation."},{"h":"The first march, 1970"},{"p":"On June 28, 1970, the first anniversary, marchers walked from Christopher Street up Sixth Avenue to Central Park for Christopher Street Liberation Day. Organizers expected hundreds. Thousands came, and the march stretched for dozens of blocks. Los Angeles and Chicago held marches the same weekend. The annual march grew into the Pride marches now held around the world each June."},{"p":"Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both present in the Stonewall years, founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in 1970 to house homeless queer youth. Their names are now on the record beside the bar."},{"h":"The monument, 2016"},{"p":"The Stonewall Inn joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 and became a National Historic Landmark in 2000. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it a city landmark on June 23, 2015, the first designation made for a site's role in LGBT history."},{"p":"On June 24, 2016, President Obama proclaimed the Stonewall National Monument, the first unit of the National Park System devoted to LGBTQ history. The monument takes in Christopher Park and the streets around the bar. A visitor center opened at 51 Christopher Street in June 2024."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"Stonewall has its own room in the museum, where the census hangs the Christopher Street characters: the bar crowd, the marchers, the kids who slept in the park. The Washington Square room holds the wider Village, the chess players and the folk singers who shared the neighborhood. The atlas at map.html pins each character to the corner where the painting places them."}],"facts":[{"fact":"Police raided the Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street in the early morning of June 28, 1969, and the crowd outside fought back.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov/ston/index.htm"},{"fact":"The first Christopher Street Liberation Day march took place on June 28, 1970, from Greenwich Village to Central Park.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"},{"fact":"The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Stonewall Inn a New York City landmark on June 23, 2015.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page"},{"fact":"President Obama proclaimed the Stonewall National Monument on June 24, 2016, the first national monument devoted to LGBTQ history.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov/ston/index.htm"},{"fact":"The Stonewall Inn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 and named a National Historic Landmark in 2000.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov/ston/index.htm"},{"fact":"The Gay Liberation Front formed in New York in the weeks after the uprising, and the Gay Activists Alliance followed in December 1969.","source":"New York Public Library","url":"https://www.nypl.org"}],"sources":[{"name":"National Park Service, Stonewall National Monument","url":"https://www.nps.gov/ston/index.htm","kind":"primary","note":"History of the uprising, the site, and the 2016 proclamation"},{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page","kind":"institution","note":"2015 designation of the Stonewall Inn"},{"name":"New York Public Library","url":"https://www.nypl.org","kind":"institution","note":"Archives of the Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance and Mattachine Society"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"institution","note":"LGBTQ history collections and the 1970 march"},{"name":"Britannica, Stonewall riots","url":"https://www.britannica.com/event/Stonewall-riots","kind":"reference","note":"Overview of the events of June 1969"}],"faq":[{"q":"What happened at Stonewall on June 28, 1969?","a":"Police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street, at about 1:20 a.m. Patrons and neighbors fought back, the police barricaded themselves inside, and protests continued for several nights."},{"q":"Was Stonewall the first gay rights protest?","a":"No. Homophile groups had picketed in Washington and Philadelphia since 1965, and the Mattachine Society had organized for two decades. Stonewall changed the tone and scale of the movement."},{"q":"When was the first Pride march?","a":"June 28, 1970, the first anniversary of the raid. Marchers walked from Christopher Street to Central Park for Christopher Street Liberation Day, and Los Angeles and Chicago held marches the same weekend."},{"q":"Is the Stonewall Inn a national monument?","a":"Yes. President Obama proclaimed the Stonewall National Monument on June 24, 2016. It includes Christopher Park and the streets around the bar, and a visitor center opened in 2024."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/stonewall-1969"},{"slug":"the-bodega","title":"The Bodega and the Corner Store","kicker":"OPEN LATE","summary":"Where the word bodega came from, the Puerto Rican, Dominican and Yemeni owners who built the corner store, the cat, and why nobody agrees how many there are.","keywords":["bodega meaning","New York bodega history","bodega cat","how many bodegas in NYC","Puerto Rican bodegas New York","Dominican bodega owners","Yemeni bodega owners","bodega strike 2017","corner store New York","deli vs bodega"],"rooms":["bowery","deli","bushwick","arthuravenue"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"The word"},{"p":"Bodega is Spanish for a storeroom, a wine cellar or a warehouse. The word descends from the Latin apotheca and the Greek apotheke, a place where things are put away, the same root that gives English the word apothecary. In Spain a bodega is a winery. In the Caribbean it became a small grocery. In New York it became the corner store."},{"p":"The New York meaning arrived with Puerto Rican migrants in the years after World War II. Today New Yorkers apply the word to almost any small store that sells milk, beer, lottery tickets and a sandwich, whatever the owner's origin."},{"h":"Who owns the store"},{"p":"Puerto Ricans, United States citizens since the Jones Act of 1917, moved to New York in large numbers from the 1940s through the 1960s. Many opened groceries in East Harlem, the South Bronx, Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. The stores sold plantains, rice, coffee and the brands people had known at home, and they extended credit to neighbors who ran short before payday."},{"p":"Dominicans followed. Migration from the Dominican Republic grew after 1961 and again after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Dominican families came to own a large share of the city's bodegas, concentrated in Washington Heights and across the Bronx, and many bought their stores from the Puerto Rican owners who had opened them."},{"p":"Yemeni immigrants came in a third wave, from the 1970s onward, and by the 2010s Yemeni families owned thousands of the city's corner stores. On February 2, 2017, about 1,000 Yemeni owned bodegas closed for the afternoon to protest a federal travel ban, and owners rallied at Brooklyn Borough Hall. The Yemeni American Merchants Association formed in the wake of that strike."},{"h":"The bodega cat"},{"p":"The cat sleeps on the chip rack, or on the cases of seltzer, or in the window. Owners keep cats to control mice and rats, and customers photograph them. The city health code bars live animals from food stores, so a cat can cost the owner a citation. Inspectors also cite stores for signs of rodents. Owners have said they would rather pay for the cat."},{"p":"The cat is also the mascot of a kind of store that runs on trust. The owner knows the regular's order, holds packages, lends a phone charger, and stays open when nothing else on the block does."},{"h":"How many bodegas"},{"p":"Nobody agrees on the number. Estimates in circulation run from about 7,000 to more than 13,000. The spread comes from definitions, not from bad counting. No law defines a bodega. New York State licenses retail food stores of every size, from supermarkets to gas station marts, and the license does not say which of them are bodegas."},{"p":"Studies that count bodegas set a rule first: fewer than a certain number of registers, or a certain floor area, or a certain share of packaged goods, or a Spanish name on the awning. Change the rule and the count changes by thousands. Public health researchers, city agencies and merchant groups have used different rules, which is why the numbers they publish disagree."},{"p":"The count also moves. Stores open and close every month. Chain pharmacies and dollar stores compete for the same shelf. What the numbers agree on is scale: several thousand small stores, one on most commercial corners in the outer boroughs, and a share of the city's daily groceries that no supermarket chain approaches."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The bodega hangs in the Deli room of the museum, where the census paints the counter, the coffee, the sandwich order and the cat. The Bowery and Bushwick rooms hold the corner store as street furniture, the awning that anchors a block. The Arthur Avenue room holds the older Italian version of the same store. The atlas at map.html pins each shopkeeper to a corner."}],"facts":[{"fact":"Bodega is a Spanish word for a storeroom or wine cellar, from the Latin apotheca and the Greek apotheke.","source":"Merriam Webster","url":"https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bodega"},{"fact":"Puerto Ricans have been United States citizens since the Jones Act of 1917, and their migration to New York peaked in the decades after World War II.","source":"Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College","url":"https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu"},{"fact":"Dominican migration to New York grew after 1961 and after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and Dominican families came to own a large share of the city's bodegas.","source":"CUNY Dominican Studies Institute","url":"https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/dsi"},{"fact":"On February 2, 2017, about 1,000 Yemeni owned bodegas closed for the afternoon in protest and owners rallied at Brooklyn Borough Hall.","source":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov"},{"fact":"The New York City Health Code prohibits live animals in food stores, so a bodega cat can bring a citation.","source":"NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/index.page"},{"fact":"New York State licenses retail food stores of all sizes, and no state or city license defines a bodega, which is why counts range from about 7,000 to more than 13,000.","source":"New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets","url":"https://agriculture.ny.gov"}],"sources":[{"name":"Merriam Webster, bodega","url":"https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bodega","kind":"reference","note":"Etymology and definition of the word"},{"name":"Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College","url":"https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu","kind":"institution","note":"Puerto Rican migration to New York"},{"name":"CUNY Dominican Studies Institute","url":"https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/dsi","kind":"institution","note":"Dominican migration and small business in New York"},{"name":"NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/index.page","kind":"institution","note":"Health code rules for food stores"},{"name":"New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets","url":"https://agriculture.ny.gov","kind":"institution","note":"Retail food store licensing"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"institution","note":"Newspaper coverage of the 2017 bodega strike and of immigrant merchants"}],"faq":[{"q":"What does bodega mean?","a":"In Spanish it means a storeroom, wine cellar or warehouse. In New York it means a small corner grocery, a usage that arrived with Puerto Rican migrants after World War II."},{"q":"How many bodegas are in New York City?","a":"Nobody agrees. Estimates run from about 7,000 to more than 13,000 because no law defines a bodega and every count sets its own rule for what qualifies."},{"q":"Why do bodegas have cats?","a":"To control mice and rats. The city health code bars animals from food stores, so the cat can bring a citation, but many owners keep one anyway."},{"q":"Who owns most bodegas in New York?","a":"Puerto Ricans opened many of the first, Dominicans came to own a large share from the 1970s on, and Yemeni families now own thousands. Ownership changes block by block and the mix keeps shifting."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/the-bodega"},{"slug":"staten-island-ferry","title":"The Staten Island Ferry and the Harbor","kicker":"THE HARBOR","summary":"The ferry's route, the fare that went from a nickel to free in 1997, the Verrazzano bridge, and what the harbor was to the city.","keywords":["Staten Island Ferry history","Staten Island Ferry free","Staten Island Ferry route","Verrazzano Narrows Bridge opened 1964","New York Harbor history","Whitehall Terminal","St. George Terminal","Sailors Snug Harbor","Governors Island history","Statue of Liberty ferry view"],"rooms":["ferry","governors","snug","liberty"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"The route"},{"p":"The Staten Island Ferry runs 5.2 miles between Whitehall Terminal at the tip of Manhattan and St. George Terminal on Staten Island. The crossing takes about 25 minutes. Boats leave every 15 to 30 minutes, around the clock, every day of the year. The city's Department of Transportation runs the service, and it carries more than 20 million passengers in a normal year."},{"p":"The boat passes the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on one side, Governors Island on the other, and the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge ahead. It is the cheapest harbor cruise in the world because it costs nothing."},{"h":"The fare"},{"p":"Ferries have crossed the Upper Bay since the Dutch, first by sail and oar, then by steam. Cornelius Vanderbilt, a Staten Island native, ran a boat across the harbor as a young man in the 1810s. Private companies and railroads held the route through the nineteenth century. The City of New York took over the ferry in 1905, after Staten Island joined the consolidated city in 1898."},{"p":"The city charged a nickel. The fare stayed at five cents from 1897 until 1975, long after the subway had left the nickel behind. It rose to 25 cents in 1975 and to 50 cents in 1990. On July 4, 1997, the city made the ferry free. It has stayed free since."},{"p":"The boats are painted orange so they can be seen in fog. The fleet carries names from the boroughs and from the island's history."},{"h":"The Verrazzano"},{"p":"The Verrazzano Narrows Bridge opened on November 21, 1964. It joined Staten Island to Brooklyn across the Narrows, the channel where the harbor meets the ocean. Its main span of 4,260 feet was the longest suspension span in the world when it opened. Othmar Ammann designed it. Robert Moses, as chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, built it."},{"p":"The name honors Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Florentine navigator who sailed into the harbor in 1524, the first European known to have done so. The bridge carried his name with one z for 54 years, until New York State corrected the spelling in 2018. The bridge ended the island's isolation. Staten Island's population grew from about 222,000 in 1960 to about 379,000 in 1990."},{"h":"What the harbor was"},{"p":"The harbor made the city. It is deep, sheltered, and free of ice most winters, and it sits where the Hudson meets the sea. After the Erie Canal opened in 1825, goods from the Great Lakes came down the Hudson and out through New York, and the port handled more cargo than any other in the country. Ships from Europe landed here because the return cargo was waiting."},{"p":"The islands record the city's work. Governors Island held the Army and then the Coast Guard until 1996. Ellis Island processed about 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954. Liberty Island has held the Statue of Liberty since its dedication on October 28, 1886. On the Staten Island shore, Sailors' Snug Harbor opened in 1833 as a home for aged and infirm seamen, paid for by a sea captain's bequest, and its Greek Revival halls now house a cultural center and botanical garden."},{"p":"The shipping moved to New Jersey after the 1950s, when container ships needed room the Manhattan and Brooklyn piers did not have. The harbor is still one of the busiest in the country. It is just quieter from the ferry deck."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Ferry room of the museum hangs the deckhands, the commuters and the tourists who ride out and ride back. The Liberty room holds the statue's keepers and the harbor crowd, the Governors Island room holds the picnic day people, and the Snug Harbor room holds the old sailors and the gardeners. The atlas at map.html pins each character to a pier, a deck or a shore."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The Staten Island Ferry runs 5.2 miles between Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan and St. George Terminal on Staten Island, a crossing of about 25 minutes.","source":"NYC Department of Transportation","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/staten-island-ferry.shtml"},{"fact":"The Staten Island Ferry has been free since July 4, 1997; before that the fare was 50 cents.","source":"NYC Department of Transportation","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/staten-island-ferry.shtml"},{"fact":"The City of New York took over operation of the ferry in 1905.","source":"NYC Department of Transportation","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/staten-island-ferry.shtml"},{"fact":"The Verrazzano Narrows Bridge opened on November 21, 1964, with a main span of 4,260 feet, then the longest suspension span in the world.","source":"MTA Bridges and Tunnels","url":"https://new.mta.info"},{"fact":"The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886.","source":"National Park Service","url":"https://www.nps.gov/stli/index.htm"},{"fact":"Sailors' Snug Harbor opened on Staten Island in 1833 as a home for retired seamen.","source":"Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden","url":"https://snug-harbor.org"},{"fact":"Staten Island's population grew from about 222,000 in 1960 to about 379,000 in 1990, the decades after the bridge opened.","source":"U.S. Census Bureau","url":"https://www.census.gov"}],"sources":[{"name":"NYC Department of Transportation, Staten Island Ferry","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/staten-island-ferry.shtml","kind":"primary","note":"Route, schedule, fleet and fare history"},{"name":"MTA Bridges and Tunnels","url":"https://new.mta.info","kind":"institution","note":"The Verrazzano Narrows Bridge"},{"name":"National Park Service, Statue of Liberty","url":"https://www.nps.gov/stli/index.htm","kind":"primary","note":"Liberty Island and Ellis Island history"},{"name":"Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden","url":"https://snug-harbor.org","kind":"institution","note":"History of Sailors' Snug Harbor"},{"name":"Trust for Governors Island","url":"https://www.govisland.com","kind":"institution","note":"Governors Island history"},{"name":"U.S. Census Bureau","url":"https://www.census.gov","kind":"institution","note":"Borough population figures"}],"faq":[{"q":"Is the Staten Island Ferry free?","a":"Yes. The city stopped charging a fare on July 4, 1997. Before that the fare was 50 cents, and for most of the twentieth century it was a nickel."},{"q":"How long is the Staten Island Ferry ride?","a":"About 25 minutes each way over 5.2 miles between Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan and St. George Terminal on Staten Island."},{"q":"Does the ferry pass the Statue of Liberty?","a":"Yes. The route runs past Liberty Island and Ellis Island on one side and Governors Island on the other, with the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge ahead."},{"q":"When did the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge open?","a":"November 21, 1964. Its 4,260 foot main span was the longest in the world at the time, and New York State corrected the spelling of the name to Verrazzano in 2018."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/staten-island-ferry"},{"slug":"race-to-the-sky-1930","title":"The Race to the Sky, 1930 to 1931","kicker":"SKYLINE","summary":"The Woolworth Building, the 1916 zoning law, the Chrysler Building's secret spire, and the Empire State Building's 13 month climb to the top of the world.","keywords":["Chrysler Building secret spire","Empire State Building construction 1931","Woolworth Building 1913","1916 Zoning Resolution","setback skyscrapers New York","40 Wall Street vs Chrysler Building","tallest building in the world 1930","Art Deco skyscrapers New York","Flatiron Building history","Rockefeller Center construction"],"rooms":["chrysler","woolworth","rock","flatiron"],"readMinutes":5,"body":[{"h":"The tallest before them"},{"p":"The Woolworth Building opened on April 24, 1913, at 233 Broadway, across from City Hall Park. Cass Gilbert designed it in Gothic dress for Frank W. Woolworth, who paid for it in cash. At 792 feet it was the tallest building in the world, and it held the title for 17 years. A minister called it the Cathedral of Commerce, and the name stuck. President Wilson pressed a button in Washington to light it on opening night."},{"h":"The 1916 rule"},{"p":"In 1915 the Equitable Building rose straight up from its lot at 120 Broadway with no setbacks and threw a shadow over acres of neighboring property. The next year the city adopted the 1916 Zoning Resolution, the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States. It divided the city into use districts and, for tall buildings, drew a sky exposure plane: a tower had to step back as it rose so that light reached the street."},{"p":"The rule produced the setback skyline. Architects treated the stepped envelope as a form, and the ziggurat tops of the 1920s and 1930s are the law drawn in stone. Rockefeller Center, built from 1930 through 1939, is the largest single expression of it. The 1961 Zoning Resolution replaced the 1916 rule with the plaza bonus and the sheer glass slab."},{"h":"The race of 1929"},{"p":"Two men who had once been partners raced each other to the sky. H. Craig Severance designed 40 Wall Street for the Bank of Manhattan Company. William Van Alen designed the Chrysler Building at Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street for Walter P. Chrysler. Each revised his plans upward as the other's building rose. In 1929 Severance topped out at 927 feet, sure he had won."},{"p":"Van Alen had a secret. Inside the Chrysler Building's fire shaft his crews assembled a 185 foot steel spire. In October 1929, days before the stock market crash, they raised it through the roof and bolted it in place in about 90 minutes. The Chrysler Building stood 1,046 feet, higher than 40 Wall Street and higher than the Eiffel Tower. It opened in May 1930 as the tallest building in the world."},{"p":"Its crown of stainless steel arches and triangular windows, and its gargoyles modeled on Chrysler hood ornaments, made it the ornament of the Art Deco skyline. Chrysler refused to pay Van Alen his full fee. The architect sued and won, and never built another major tower."},{"h":"The Empire State"},{"p":"The Chrysler Building held the title for 11 months. The Empire State Building rose on the site of the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon and financed by a group led by John J. Raskob, with former Governor Alfred E. Smith as its public face. Construction took about 13 months. Crews set steel at a pace of more than four floors a week."},{"p":"The building opened on May 1, 1931. President Hoover pressed a button in Washington to turn on its lights. It stood 1,250 feet to the roof, 102 stories, with a mooring mast for airships that never worked as one. An antenna added later raised the total to 1,454 feet. It was the tallest building in the world until the World Trade Center's north tower passed it in 1970."},{"p":"It opened into the Depression with much of its office space empty, and New Yorkers called it the Empty State Building. Its observatory earned more than its rents for years."},{"h":"The one that started it"},{"p":"The Flatiron Building, finished in 1902 at the wedge where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, is not tall by later measure: 22 stories. Daniel Burnham's firm designed it with a steel frame and a limestone and terra cotta skin. Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen photographed it as a symbol of the new city, and it belongs at the start of the story the Empire State Building finishes."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The museum hangs the skyscraper characters in four rooms: the Chrysler room, the Woolworth room, the Rockefeller Center room and the Flatiron room. The census paints the ironworkers, the elevator operators, the window washers and the office crowds who fill them. The atlas at map.html pins each character to the block under the tower."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The Woolworth Building opened on April 24, 1913, at 792 feet, and was the tallest building in the world until 1930.","source":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page"},{"fact":"The 1916 Zoning Resolution was the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States and required tall buildings to step back as they rose.","source":"NYC Department of City Planning","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/index.page"},{"fact":"The Chrysler Building's 185 foot spire was assembled inside the building and raised through the roof in October 1929, bringing it to 1,046 feet.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chrysler-Building"},{"fact":"The Empire State Building opened on May 1, 1931, at 1,250 feet to the roof and 102 stories, after about 13 months of construction.","source":"Empire State Building","url":"https://www.esbnyc.com"},{"fact":"The Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world until the north tower of the World Trade Center passed it in 1970.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com/topic/Empire-State-Building"},{"fact":"The Flatiron Building, designed by Daniel Burnham's firm, was completed in 1902 at 22 stories.","source":"The Skyscraper Museum","url":"https://skyscraper.org"}],"sources":[{"name":"Empire State Building","url":"https://www.esbnyc.com","kind":"institution","note":"Official history of the building"},{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page","kind":"institution","note":"Designation reports for the Woolworth, Chrysler, Empire State and Flatiron buildings"},{"name":"NYC Department of City Planning","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/index.page","kind":"institution","note":"History of the 1916 and 1961 zoning resolutions"},{"name":"The Skyscraper Museum","url":"https://skyscraper.org","kind":"institution","note":"Exhibitions on the height race and the setback skyline"},{"name":"Britannica, Chrysler Building","url":"https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chrysler-Building","kind":"reference","note":"The spire and the 1929 race"},{"name":"Britannica, Empire State Building","url":"https://www.britannica.com/topic/Empire-State-Building","kind":"reference","note":"Construction and height records"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"institution","note":"Lewis Hine's photographs of the Empire State Building under construction"}],"faq":[{"q":"How did the Chrysler Building beat 40 Wall Street?","a":"William Van Alen had a 185 foot spire assembled in secret inside the building's fire shaft. In October 1929 crews raised it through the roof in about 90 minutes, taking the tower to 1,046 feet, above 40 Wall Street's 927."},{"q":"How long did it take to build the Empire State Building?","a":"About 13 months. Steel went up at more than four floors a week, and the building opened on May 1, 1931."},{"q":"What is the 1916 Zoning Resolution?","a":"The first comprehensive zoning law in the United States. It required tall buildings to step back as they rose so daylight reached the street, which produced the setback skyline of the 1920s and 1930s."},{"q":"What was the tallest building in the world before the Chrysler Building?","a":"The Woolworth Building at 792 feet, from its opening in 1913 until 1930."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/race-to-the-sky-1930"},{"slug":"times-square-ball-drop","title":"Times Square and the Ball Drop","kicker":"MIDNIGHT","summary":"Longacre Square, the New York Times tower of 1904, the first ball on December 31, 1907, the decline, and the remake of the 1990s.","keywords":["Times Square history","Longacre Square","first ball drop 1907","Times Square New Year's Eve history","One Times Square","42nd Street redevelopment 1990s","New Amsterdam Theatre restoration","Radio City Music Hall opened 1932","Times Square Alliance","Great White Way"],"rooms":["times","radiocity"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"Longacre Square"},{"p":"Before 1904 the crossing of Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 42nd Street was Longacre Square, named for the carriage district of London. It was the city's horse trade: stables, carriage shops, harness makers. Theaters had begun moving north up Broadway toward it in the 1890s, but the square itself was a place to buy a horse."},{"p":"In 1904 the New York Times moved from Park Row to a new tower on the triangle between Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 42nd Street. The publisher, Adolph S. Ochs, persuaded the city to rename the square for the paper, and the city did so in April 1904. The first subway opened on October 27, 1904, with a station named Times Square, and the name was fixed."},{"h":"The first ball, 1907"},{"p":"Ochs celebrated the new building on December 31, 1904, with fireworks from the roof at midnight. The crowd was large enough that the party replaced the old custom of gathering at Trinity Church to hear the bells. After a few years the city banned the fireworks, and Ochs needed something else."},{"p":"On December 31, 1907, a ball of iron and wood, five feet across, weighing 700 pounds and lit by 100 bulbs, slid down the flagpole on the roof of One Times Square at midnight to welcome 1908. Jacob Starr, an immigrant metalworker, built it. The idea came from the time balls that ports dropped to signal the hour to ships."},{"p":"The ball has dropped every year since except 1942 and 1943, when the city dimmed its lights for the war and the crowd stood in silence for a minute at midnight. The Times left the tower in 1913 for 43rd Street. The ball stayed."},{"h":"The square in the twentieth century"},{"p":"Times Square became the theater district's front door and then the city's billboard. Electric signs went up before 1910, and by the 1920s the stretch of Broadway was known as the Great White Way for its lights. Radio City Music Hall opened at Rockefeller Center on December 27, 1932, with 5,960 seats, and the Rockettes have danced there since its first season."},{"p":"After World War II the square declined. Theaters on 42nd Street turned to grind house films and then to pornography. By the 1970s the block was a byword for crime, and city officials counted it among the most dangerous streets in the city."},{"h":"The remake of the 1990s"},{"p":"The 42nd Street Development Project, a state and city plan, condemned the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the early 1990s and leased its theaters to new tenants. The New Victory Theater reopened in 1995, the first of the restored houses. The Walt Disney Company took the New Amsterdam Theatre, restored it and reopened it in 1997. The Times Square Business Improvement District, formed in 1992, put sanitation crews and security on the street; it is now the Times Square Alliance."},{"p":"Zoning rules for the district required the new towers to carry lit signs, so the remade square kept its glare by law. Pedestrian plazas closed Broadway to cars through the square in 2009. The square now counts hundreds of thousands of pedestrians a day."},{"p":"The ball changed with the square. A crystal ball replaced the old one for the 2000 celebration, and the current ball, 12 feet across and covered in Waterford crystal, sits on the roof of One Times Square all year."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Times Square room of the museum hangs the census characters of the crossroads: the costumed hustlers, the tourists in the plaza, the ticket line, the stagehands. The Radio City room holds the ushers and the dancers. The atlas at map.html pins each to the corner where the painting sets them."}],"facts":[{"fact":"Longacre Square was renamed Times Square in April 1904 after the New York Times moved to its new tower there.","source":"Times Square Alliance","url":"https://www.timessquarenyc.org"},{"fact":"The first subway line opened on October 27, 1904, with a station at Times Square.","source":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info"},{"fact":"The first New Year's Eve ball, made of iron and wood and lit by 100 bulbs, dropped on December 31, 1907, to welcome 1908.","source":"Times Square Alliance","url":"https://www.timessquarenyc.org"},{"fact":"The ball did not drop in 1942 and 1943 because of the wartime dimout.","source":"Times Square Alliance","url":"https://www.timessquarenyc.org"},{"fact":"Radio City Music Hall opened on December 27, 1932, with 5,960 seats.","source":"Radio City Music Hall","url":"https://www.radiocity.com"},{"fact":"The New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street was restored by the Walt Disney Company and reopened in 1997.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com/place/Times-Square"}],"sources":[{"name":"Times Square Alliance","url":"https://www.timessquarenyc.org","kind":"institution","note":"History of the square and of the New Year's Eve ball"},{"name":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info","kind":"institution","note":"Opening of the subway in 1904"},{"name":"Radio City Music Hall","url":"https://www.radiocity.com","kind":"institution","note":"Opening and history of the hall"},{"name":"New York Public Library","url":"https://www.nypl.org","kind":"institution","note":"Theater collections and photographs of Times Square"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"institution","note":"Photographs and newspapers of Longacre Square and Times Square"},{"name":"Britannica, Times Square","url":"https://www.britannica.com/place/Times-Square","kind":"reference","note":"Overview of the square's history and redevelopment"}],"faq":[{"q":"Why is it called Times Square?","a":"The New York Times moved to a new tower on the square in 1904, and the city renamed Longacre Square for the paper that April. The subway station that opened in October 1904 carried the name too."},{"q":"When was the first ball drop?","a":"December 31, 1907, to welcome 1908. The first ball was iron and wood, 700 pounds, lit by 100 bulbs, and slid down a flagpole on the roof of One Times Square."},{"q":"Has the ball ever not dropped?","a":"Yes, in 1942 and 1943. The city dimmed its lights for the war and the crowd marked midnight with a minute of silence instead."},{"q":"When did Times Square clean up?","a":"Through the 1990s. The 42nd Street Development Project condemned the block of theaters, the New Victory reopened in 1995 and the New Amsterdam in 1997, and a business improvement district formed in 1992 to manage the street."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/times-square-ball-drop"},{"slug":"counting-new-york","title":"Counting New York","kicker":"THE COUNT","summary":"The decennial census from 1790 to 2020, the 2020 figure of 8,804,190, what the count decides, the undercount, and how a painted census differs.","keywords":["New York City census history","NYC population 2020 census","8,804,190","decennial census apportionment","census undercount New York","New York lost congressional seat 89 people","first census 1790 New York","why the census matters","NYC population by decade","painted census"],"rooms":["panorama","customhouse","mcny"],"readMinutes":4,"body":[{"h":"Why the country counts"},{"p":"The Constitution requires it. Article I, Section 2 orders an enumeration of the population within three years of the first meeting of Congress and every ten years after. The first census ran in 1790 under Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, with United States marshals riding the districts. It counted about 3.9 million people in the country, and 33,131 in New York City."},{"p":"The count has run every ten years since, through wars and epidemics, 24 times by 2020. The Census Bureau keeps individual answers confidential for 72 years, then releases them. The 1950 records opened in 2022."},{"h":"The city's numbers"},{"p":"New York was the largest city in the country by 1790 and has never given up the title. Within its old borders it passed 500,000 in 1850 and 1,000,000 in 1880. Consolidation on January 1, 1898, joined Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and the 1900 census counted 3,437,202 in the new city."},{"p":"The city passed 7 million in 1940. The count fell in the 1970s, to 7,071,639 in 1980, then climbed for four decades: 8,008,278 in 2000, 8,175,133 in 2010, and 8,804,190 in 2020. The 2020 figure was the largest population ever recorded for the city."},{"h":"What the count decides"},{"p":"The count decides seats. The 435 seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states by population after each census, and each state's share of the Electoral College follows. After 2020 New York State lost one seat. The Bureau's apportionment figures showed the state fell 89 people short of keeping it."},{"p":"The count decides money. Federal programs use census data to distribute hundreds of billions of dollars a year, for Medicaid, highways, school lunches, housing vouchers and more. A person not counted is a share not sent. The count also draws the lines: City Council districts, State Senate and Assembly seats, and the boundaries of many local services follow the numbers."},{"h":"The undercount"},{"p":"Some people are harder to count than others. Renters, young children, immigrants, people in crowded apartments, and people who distrust the government answer at lower rates. The Bureau measures its own error afterward with a survey that recounts a sample of blocks. For 2020 it found the national count had undercounted Black, Hispanic and Native American residents and overcounted white and Asian residents."},{"p":"New York City ran its own campaign in 2020, with a budget of $40 million, to push the response rate in neighborhoods that had been missed before. The pandemic hit in the middle of the count, and door knockers worked into October 2020. The debate over how many New Yorkers the count missed, and where, went on after the numbers were published."},{"h":"A painted census"},{"p":"A census counts everyone once, by address, with the same questions. It records where people live and what they say about themselves. It does not record what they look like on the platform at 8 a.m. or what they carry home from the bodega."},{"p":"NEW YORKERS is a painted census. It counts by type rather than by person: 7,541 characters across 19 eras, each a role the city contains, each assigned a place on the map. It is not a sample and it claims no statistics. It is a portrait of the categories the official count has no column for."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Panorama room of the museum stands over the model of the city built for the 1964 World's Fair, the count in miniature, and hangs the surveyors and the counters. The Custom House room holds the clerks and the harbor tallies. The Museum of the City of New York room holds the records. The atlas at map.html is the count itself, one pin per character."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The 2020 census counted 8,804,190 people in New York City, the largest population ever recorded for the city.","source":"U.S. Census Bureau","url":"https://www.census.gov"},{"fact":"The first federal census in 1790 counted 33,131 people in New York City.","source":"U.S. Census Bureau","url":"https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census.html"},{"fact":"The 1900 census, the first after consolidation, counted 3,437,202 people in the five boroughs.","source":"NYC Department of City Planning","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/index.page"},{"fact":"After the 2020 census New York State lost one seat in the House of Representatives, falling 89 people short of keeping it.","source":"U.S. Census Bureau","url":"https://www.census.gov"},{"fact":"Individual census records are kept confidential for 72 years; the 1950 records were released in 2022.","source":"National Archives","url":"https://www.archives.gov/research/census"},{"fact":"The Panorama of the City of New York, built for the 1964 World's Fair, models every building in the five boroughs.","source":"Queens Museum","url":"https://queensmuseum.org"},{"fact":"The Census Bureau's 2020 Post Enumeration Survey found a national undercount of Black, Hispanic and Native American residents and an overcount of white and Asian residents.","source":"U.S. Census Bureau","url":"https://www.census.gov"}],"sources":[{"name":"U.S. Census Bureau, Decennial Census","url":"https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census.html","kind":"primary","note":"History and results of the decennial census"},{"name":"U.S. Census Bureau","url":"https://www.census.gov","kind":"institution","note":"2020 results, apportionment and the Post Enumeration Survey"},{"name":"National Archives, Census Records","url":"https://www.archives.gov/research/census","kind":"primary","note":"The 72 year rule and released census schedules"},{"name":"NYC Department of City Planning","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/index.page","kind":"institution","note":"City population by decade"},{"name":"Queens Museum","url":"https://queensmuseum.org","kind":"institution","note":"The Panorama of the City of New York"},{"name":"Museum of the City of New York","url":"https://www.mcny.org","kind":"institution","note":"Records and exhibitions on the city's people"}],"faq":[{"q":"What was New York City's population in the 2020 census?","a":"8,804,190, the largest figure ever recorded for the city. The 2010 count was 8,175,133."},{"q":"Why does the census matter?","a":"It sets each state's seats in the House of Representatives and its electoral votes, guides the distribution of hundreds of billions of federal dollars a year, and draws local district lines."},{"q":"Did New York lose a congressional seat after 2020?","a":"Yes. New York State lost one seat, and the Census Bureau's figures showed it fell 89 people short of keeping it."},{"q":"How is NEW YORKERS different from the real census?","a":"The official census counts every person once by address. NEW YORKERS is a painted census of 7,541 characters across 19 eras, each a type the city contains, each placed on the map. It claims no statistics."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/counting-new-york"},{"slug":"jane-jacobs-and-robert-moses","title":"Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses","kicker":"THE CITY FIGHT","summary":"The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the Lower Manhattan Expressway fight, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and what each of them built.","keywords":["Jane Jacobs Robert Moses","The Death and Life of Great American Cities 1961","Lower Manhattan Expressway","Cross Bronx Expressway history","Washington Square Park road fight","Robert Moses parks commissioner","The Power Broker","East Tremont displacement","Highbridge Pool 1936","urban renewal New York"],"rooms":["washington","highbridge","halloffame"],"readMinutes":5,"body":[{"h":"Two ways to see a street"},{"p":"Robert Moses never held elected office. From 1924 to 1968 he held appointed posts, sometimes a dozen at once: state parks chairman, city parks commissioner from 1934 to 1960, city construction coordinator, chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. He controlled the toll money, and the toll money built the city."},{"p":"Jane Jacobs held no office at all. She wrote for Architectural Forum, lived at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, and watched her block. In 1961 she published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It argued that planners had it backward: the crowded, mixed, old, short blocks they wanted to clear were the healthy ones, and the towers in parks they built were the dead ones."},{"h":"What Moses built"},{"p":"The list is long. Jones Beach opened in 1929. The Triborough Bridge opened in 1936, the Bronx Whitestone in 1939, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in 1950, the Throgs Neck in 1961, the Verrazzano Narrows in 1964. He opened 11 city pools in the summer of 1936 alone, Highbridge Pool in Washington Heights among them, along with hundreds of playgrounds, the parkways of Long Island and Westchester, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium and the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows."},{"p":"He also built the expressways. The Cross Bronx Expressway, planned in the 1940s and opened in sections through 1963, cut a trench across the Bronx from the George Washington Bridge to the Bruckner interchange. It ran through East Tremont, a working class neighborhood, and took the homes of about 1,500 families along one stretch. Residents proposed a route a few blocks south that would have spared them. Moses refused it. The neighborhood emptied in the decade that followed."},{"h":"The Village fights"},{"p":"Moses wanted a road through Washington Square Park to feed a housing project to the south. Village residents, Jacobs among them, fought the road through the 1950s and won. The park closed to traffic in 1958 and the fountain became the center of the neighborhood."},{"p":"Then came the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Moses planned an elevated highway from the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges along Broome Street. It would have cleared much of what is now SoHo and cut Little Italy from the Village. Jacobs chaired the committee that fought it. In April 1968, at a state hearing, police arrested her after the crowd she led surged onto the stage and the stenographer's record came apart. The city killed the expressway in 1969."},{"p":"Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968, in part so her sons would not be drafted, and fought an expressway there too. Moses lost the last of his power the same year, when the Triborough Authority was folded into the new Metropolitan Transportation Authority."},{"q":"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.","by":"Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961"},{"h":"What each left"},{"p":"Robert Caro's The Power Broker, published in 1974, fixed the verdict on Moses for a generation: a builder who moved highways through people and never learned to drive. The verdict has softened since. The parks, the pools and the beaches are still in use, and the city has not found another way to build at that scale."},{"p":"Jacobs's ideas became the planning orthodoxy she had attacked: mixed use, short blocks, eyes on the street, old buildings kept. Her critics note that the neighborhoods she defended became the most expensive in the country. Both fights were about who decides what a street is for. Neither is over."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Washington Square room of the museum hangs the Village characters Jacobs wrote about: the shopkeepers who watch the sidewalk, the parents at the fountain, the chess players. The Highbridge room holds the pool, one of the 11 Moses opened in 1936, and the swimmers and lifeguards of the census. The Hall of Fame room stands on the Bronx ridge above the Cross Bronx trench. The atlas at map.html pins each character to its block."}],"facts":[{"fact":"Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jane-Jacobs"},{"fact":"Robert Moses served as New York City Parks Commissioner from 1934 to 1960 and chaired the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.","source":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org"},{"fact":"Moses opened 11 city swimming pools in the summer of 1936, including Highbridge Pool in Washington Heights.","source":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org"},{"fact":"The Cross Bronx Expressway opened in sections through 1963 and displaced about 1,500 families in East Tremont.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Moses"},{"fact":"Washington Square Park closed to through traffic in 1958 after residents defeated a planned roadway.","source":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org"},{"fact":"The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority became part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968.","source":"MTA","url":"https://new.mta.info"}],"sources":[{"name":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org","kind":"institution","note":"History of the parks department, Robert Moses and the 1936 pools"},{"name":"MTA Bridges and Tunnels","url":"https://new.mta.info","kind":"institution","note":"The Triborough Authority and its bridges"},{"name":"Britannica, Jane Jacobs","url":"https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jane-Jacobs","kind":"reference","note":"Biography and the 1961 book"},{"name":"Britannica, Robert Moses","url":"https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Moses","kind":"reference","note":"Biography and public works"},{"name":"Museum of the City of New York","url":"https://www.mcny.org","kind":"institution","note":"Exhibitions on Moses and on Jacobs"},{"name":"NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission","url":"https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page","kind":"institution","note":"Greenwich Village and SoHo historic districts"}],"faq":[{"q":"Did Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses ever meet?","a":"Their fights ran through committees, hearings and the press rather than face to face. Jacobs opposed his Washington Square roadway in the 1950s and his Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s, and both projects died."},{"q":"What is The Death and Life of Great American Cities about?","a":"Published in 1961, it argues that dense, mixed, old, short blocked neighborhoods are the healthy ones and that clearance and tower in park planning kills street life."},{"q":"What did the Cross Bronx Expressway do to the Bronx?","a":"It cut a trench across the borough, opened in sections through 1963, and displaced about 1,500 families in East Tremont alone. The neighborhoods along it lost population for decades."},{"q":"What did Robert Moses build?","a":"Jones Beach, the Triborough, Bronx Whitestone, Throgs Neck and Verrazzano Narrows bridges, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, hundreds of playgrounds, 11 pools in 1936, Lincoln Center, and the parkways and expressways of the region."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/jane-jacobs-and-robert-moses"},{"slug":"before-the-city-lenape-new-amsterdam","title":"Before the City: Lenape, Mannahatta, New Amsterdam","kicker":"BEFORE 1664","summary":"The Lenape and Mannahatta, what the 1626 purchase documents actually say, New Amsterdam from 1624 to 1664, and the wall that named Wall Street.","keywords":["Lenape Manhattan history","Mannahatta meaning","Peter Minuit purchase of Manhattan","Manhattan bought for 24 dollars myth","New Amsterdam 1624","Peter Stuyvesant","Wall Street wall 1653","Dutch New York history","New Netherland","Lenapehoking"],"rooms":["wallstreet","customhouse","seaport","mcny"],"readMinutes":5,"body":[{"h":"Lenapehoking"},{"p":"The people who lived on the island when Europeans arrived were Lenape, speakers of Munsee, one of the Lenape languages. Their homeland, Lenapehoking, ran from the lower Hudson to Delaware Bay. They planted corn, beans and squash, fished the rivers and the harbor, harvested oysters by the ton, and moved with the seasons between the shore and the interior. Their trails crossed the island; the route that became Broadway follows a Lenape path for part of its length."},{"p":"Mannahatta is the name Europeans recorded for the island, written down in the log of Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage. The most common reading is island of many hills, though the etymology is not settled. The island then had streams, ponds, marshes and a hilly spine, most of it graded flat in the nineteenth century."},{"h":"The Dutch arrive"},{"p":"Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing for France, entered the harbor in 1524 and left. Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, came in 1609 and went up the river that bears his name, looking for a route to Asia. He found beaver instead, and Dutch traders followed for the furs."},{"p":"The Dutch West India Company, chartered in 1621, sent settlers in 1624. About 30 families, most of them Walloons, arrived that year and were placed at posts along the rivers, including Governors Island and Fort Orange, near present Albany. In 1625 the company laid out Fort Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan, and the town of New Amsterdam grew around it."},{"h":"The purchase story"},{"p":"The story says Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the Indians in 1626 for 24 dollars in beads. Here is what the documents show. One letter survives, written by Pieter Schagen to the States General in The Hague on November 5, 1626, reporting that a ship had arrived from New Netherland and that the colonists had bought the island of Manhattes from the natives for goods worth 60 guilders. No deed survives. The letter does not name Minuit, does not name the sellers, and does not say beads."},{"p":"The 24 dollar figure is a nineteenth century conversion of 60 guilders, and it has stayed fixed while the dollar has not. The Lenape did not hold land as private property to be sold outright, and it is likely they understood the transaction as a right to share the island's use. What is documented is a transaction of about 60 guilders in 1626. Everything more colorful is later invention."},{"h":"New Amsterdam, 1624 to 1664"},{"p":"New Amsterdam was small, a few hundred people for its first decades and about 1,500 by the end. It was also mixed from the start. A Jesuit visitor in 1643 reported 18 languages spoken in a town of a few hundred. Enslaved Africans arrived in 1626 and built much of the fort and the wall; some later won partial freedom and land on the edge of town. The first Jews arrived in 1654. Peter Stuyvesant, director general from 1647, ran the colony with a hard hand and tried to keep out Quakers and Lutherans; the company overruled him."},{"p":"In 1653 Stuyvesant had a wall of wooden palisades built across the island at the town's northern edge, to hold off an English attack from New England that never came. The road along it became Wall Street. The English pulled the wall down in 1699."},{"p":"In August 1664 English warships anchored in the harbor and demanded the town. Stuyvesant wanted to fight. The townspeople, his own son among them, petitioned him to surrender, and he did, on September 8, 1664, without a shot. The English renamed the town New York for James, Duke of York. The Dutch took it back in 1673, held it for a year as New Orange, and gave it up in the Treaty of Westminster in 1674."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The Wall Street room of the museum stands on the line of the 1653 wall and hangs the traders and the clerks of the census. The Custom House room, in the building on the site of Fort Amsterdam, holds the harbor characters. The Seaport room holds the waterfront. The Museum of the City of New York room holds the maps. The atlas at map.html pins each character to the modern street that follows the old shoreline."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The Lenape, speakers of Munsee, lived on Manhattan and across a homeland called Lenapehoking when Europeans arrived.","source":"Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian","url":"https://americanindian.si.edu"},{"fact":"Henry Hudson sailed into the harbor and up the river in 1609 for the Dutch East India Company.","source":"New Netherland Institute","url":"https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org"},{"fact":"The only surviving document of the 1626 purchase is Pieter Schagen's letter of November 5, 1626, which reports that the island was bought for goods worth 60 guilders.","source":"New Netherland Institute","url":"https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org"},{"fact":"The Dutch West India Company sent its first settlers, about 30 families, to New Netherland in 1624.","source":"New Netherland Institute","url":"https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org"},{"fact":"Peter Stuyvesant had a wooden wall built across the island in 1653; the street along it became Wall Street.","source":"Museum of the City of New York","url":"https://www.mcny.org"},{"fact":"Stuyvesant surrendered New Amsterdam to the English on September 8, 1664, and the town was renamed New York.","source":"Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Amsterdam"},{"fact":"The Mannahatta Project reconstructed the ecology of the island as it stood in 1609, with its hills, streams and marshes.","source":"Welikia Project, Wildlife Conservation Society","url":"https://welikia.org"}],"sources":[{"name":"New Netherland Institute","url":"https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org","kind":"institution","note":"Dutch colonial records, the Schagen letter and New Amsterdam history"},{"name":"Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian","url":"https://americanindian.si.edu","kind":"institution","note":"Lenape history; the museum's New York branch occupies the Custom House"},{"name":"Welikia Project, Wildlife Conservation Society","url":"https://welikia.org","kind":"institution","note":"The Mannahatta Project's reconstruction of the island in 1609"},{"name":"Museum of the City of New York","url":"https://www.mcny.org","kind":"institution","note":"New Amsterdam and the early city"},{"name":"New York Public Library","url":"https://www.nypl.org","kind":"institution","note":"Early maps and Dutch colonial documents"},{"name":"Britannica, New Amsterdam","url":"https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Amsterdam","kind":"reference","note":"Overview of the Dutch settlement and the 1664 surrender"}],"faq":[{"q":"Was Manhattan really bought for 24 dollars?","a":"The only surviving record is a 1626 letter reporting a purchase for goods worth 60 guilders. The 24 dollar figure is a nineteenth century conversion, no deed survives, and the letter says nothing about beads."},{"q":"What does Mannahatta mean?","a":"It is the Munsee name recorded for the island in the log of Hudson's 1609 voyage. The usual reading is island of many hills, but the etymology is not settled."},{"q":"Why is Wall Street called Wall Street?","a":"In 1653 Peter Stuyvesant had a wooden wall built across the island at the northern edge of New Amsterdam against a feared English attack. The road along it became Wall Street, and the wall came down in 1699."},{"q":"When did New Amsterdam become New York?","a":"Stuyvesant surrendered to an English fleet on September 8, 1664, and the town was renamed for the Duke of York. The Dutch held it again for a year in 1673 and 1674 before giving it up for good."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/before-the-city-lenape-new-amsterdam"},{"slug":"high-line-rewilded-city","title":"The High Line and the Rewilded City","kicker":"WEST SIDE","summary":"The West Side freight line, Friends of the High Line, the park's opening on June 9, 2009, Hudson Yards and the Vessel, and Little Island in 2021.","keywords":["High Line history","High Line opened June 9 2009","West Side freight line","Death Avenue West Side Cowboys","Friends of the High Line","Hudson Yards opening 2019","Vessel Hudson Yards","Little Island opened 2021","The Shed Hudson Yards","Piet Oudolf High Line planting"],"rooms":["highline","vessel","littleisland","theshed"],"readMinutes":5,"body":[{"h":"Death Avenue"},{"p":"Through the nineteenth century the New York Central Railroad ran freight trains at street level down the West Side avenues. The trains killed so many people that the papers called the route Death Avenue, and the railroad hired men on horseback, the West Side Cowboys, to ride ahead of each train waving a flag."},{"p":"The West Side Improvement, agreed among the city, the state and the railroad in 1929, lifted the tracks off the street. The elevated freight line opened in 1934. It ran from 34th Street south to a terminal at Spring Street, about 30 feet above the ground, and it passed through the middle of the blocks rather than over the avenue, so that trains could roll into the upper floors of warehouses and the Nabisco factory that is now Chelsea Market."},{"h":"The line falls quiet"},{"p":"Trucks took the freight. The southern section was torn down in the 1960s. The last train ran in 1980, carrying three carloads of frozen turkeys. For 20 years the structure stood empty over the Meatpacking District and West Chelsea, and a meadow of self seeded grasses, trees and wildflowers grew in the ballast. Property owners under it pressed for demolition, and in the 1990s the city signed papers to tear it down."},{"p":"In 1999 two residents of the neighborhood, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, met at a community board meeting and founded Friends of the High Line to save it. Photographs by Joel Sternfeld of the wild meadow on the tracks made the case in public. The Bloomberg administration reversed course in 2002, and the city won federal approval to convert the line to a trail in 2005."},{"h":"The park, 2009"},{"p":"The design team was James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. The plan kept the rails in the paving, replanted the self seeded meadow as a designed one, and pulled the walkway through the buildings the trains had passed through."},{"p":"The first section, from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street, opened on June 9, 2009. The second, to West 30th Street, opened on June 8, 2011. The third, around the West Side rail yards to 34th Street, opened on September 21, 2014, and the Spur over Tenth Avenue at 30th Street opened in 2019. The park runs about 1.45 miles. Friends of the High Line operates it under a license from the Parks Department and raises most of its budget."},{"p":"The park drew millions of visitors a year and a wall of new towers along it. Cities around the world copied it. Critics noted that the rents under it rose with the visitor count, and that the neighborhood the founders had wanted to keep changed anyway."},{"h":"Hudson Yards and the Vessel"},{"p":"The rail yards the third section wraps around became Hudson Yards, built on a platform over the working tracks, the largest private real estate development in the country. Its first phase opened on March 15, 2019. At its center stood the Vessel, a 150 foot structure of 154 interconnected flights of stairs designed by Thomas Heatherwick. The Shed, an arts center whose outer shell rolls out over the plaza on rails, opened the following month."},{"p":"The Vessel closed in 2021 after a series of deaths by suicide from its upper levels and reopened in 2024 with higher barriers and steel mesh on the climbable levels."},{"h":"Little Island, 2021"},{"p":"South of the High Line's start, on the site of Pier 54 in Hudson River Park, Little Island opened on May 21, 2021. Heatherwick Studio designed it with the landscape architects MNLA. It rests on 132 concrete pots shaped like tulips, on piles driven into the river, and holds a 2.4 acre park with a 687 seat amphitheater. Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg paid for most of it and committed to fund its upkeep. The Hudson River Park Trust owns the site."},{"p":"Together the High Line, Hudson Yards and Little Island turned a working waterfront the city had abandoned into a strip of parks, and did it mostly with private money. The rewilded city is a built one."},{"h":"In the census"},{"p":"The High Line room of the museum hangs the joggers, the gardeners and the tourists of the park. The Vessel room and the Shed room hold Hudson Yards, its climbers, its ushers and its cranes. The Little Island room holds the amphitheater crowd and the river. The atlas at map.html pins each character to a pier or a block on the West Side."}],"facts":[{"fact":"The elevated West Side freight line opened in 1934 and its last train ran in 1980, carrying three carloads of frozen turkeys.","source":"The High Line","url":"https://www.thehighline.org"},{"fact":"Friends of the High Line was founded in 1999 by Joshua David and Robert Hammond to save the structure from demolition.","source":"The High Line","url":"https://www.thehighline.org"},{"fact":"The first section of the High Line, from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street, opened on June 9, 2009.","source":"The High Line","url":"https://www.thehighline.org"},{"fact":"The High Line's third section, around the rail yards to 34th Street, opened on September 21, 2014, bringing the park to about 1.45 miles.","source":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org"},{"fact":"Hudson Yards opened its first phase on March 15, 2019, with the 150 foot Vessel at its center.","source":"Hudson Yards","url":"https://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com"},{"fact":"The Shed opened at Hudson Yards in April 2019 with a movable outer shell that rolls over the plaza.","source":"The Shed","url":"https://theshed.org"},{"fact":"Little Island opened on May 21, 2021, on 132 concrete pots at the site of Pier 54 in Hudson River Park.","source":"Little Island","url":"https://littleisland.org"}],"sources":[{"name":"The High Line","url":"https://www.thehighline.org","kind":"primary","note":"History of the freight line, Friends of the High Line and the park's sections"},{"name":"NYC Parks","url":"https://www.nycgovparks.org","kind":"institution","note":"The High Line as a city park"},{"name":"Hudson Yards","url":"https://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com","kind":"institution","note":"Hudson Yards and the Vessel"},{"name":"The Shed","url":"https://theshed.org","kind":"institution","note":"The arts center and its building"},{"name":"Little Island","url":"https://littleisland.org","kind":"institution","note":"Design and opening of the park"},{"name":"Hudson River Park Trust","url":"https://hudsonriverpark.org","kind":"institution","note":"Pier 54, Pier 55 and the park along the river"},{"name":"Library of Congress","url":"https://www.loc.gov","kind":"institution","note":"Historic American Engineering Record documentation of the West Side line"}],"faq":[{"q":"When did the High Line open?","a":"The first section opened on June 9, 2009. The second followed on June 8, 2011, the third on September 21, 2014, and the Spur in 2019."},{"q":"What was the High Line before it was a park?","a":"An elevated freight railroad opened in 1934 to take trains off the West Side streets. The last train ran in 1980 and the structure stood empty for 20 years while a wild meadow grew on it."},{"q":"Is the Vessel open?","a":"It closed in 2021 after deaths by suicide from its upper levels and reopened in 2024 with higher barriers and steel mesh on the climbable levels."},{"q":"When did Little Island open?","a":"May 21, 2021. It stands on 132 concrete pots at the site of Pier 54 in Hudson River Park and holds a 2.4 acre park with a 687 seat amphitheater."}],"url":"https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/high-line-rewilded-city"}]