Visiting the 9/11 Memorial

We are just back from visiting the new memorial at the World Trade Center site. Since many of our walking tour clients have asked about the memorial, we thought we'd share our experience. It is well worth a visit and one of those moments when the reality of the design is better than the architectural renderings. And, despite the prediction that this will be one of the most visited places in New York, it manages to stay (mostly) serene.

Having printed out tickets in advance, we arrived about ten minutes before our 5:45 p.m. reservation and there was no line; there were, however, about 30 people in line who had 6:00 p.m. reservations and had arrived early. At least right now, there's no need to get there in advance (and, indeed, they explicitly ask on the ticket that you don't arrive more than 30 minutes before your reservation.)

The very first memorial staff member you encounter will ask you to keep your ticket handy as you will need to show it at least four times as you wend your way through security and into the memorial itself. Despite this admonition, we saw numerous folks scrambling to find their tickets. It's only about ten minutes from the time you arrive until you enter the memorial; just keep your ticket in hand. And while life sometimes doesn't allow such advance planning, if you can leave all your bags at home, it will speed up the security line.

The staggered ticket times ensure that the memorial doesn't feel crowded. If you are looking to find a particular name (or names), you can look that information up online before you get there or go to the information kiosks located outside the Memorial Museum. (Note that the museum is not yet completed and won't open till next year; this fact seemed to surprise a number of visitors.) At the kiosks, you can either print out a map with the location of the name you are trying to find, or have that information sent to you as an email or text message. However, when we tried to send the information to a phone it didn't work. Maybe that was just us.

It took us about a half hour to walk around the entire area, looking at the memorial waterfalls from all sides. We could have lingered longer--there are benches and a number of visitors were sitting amid the trees, just soaking it all in.

If you don't have tickets, but still want to go down, there is a visitor's center at the corner of West and Albany streets where you can see artifacts found at the site and watch a video. (And buy gobs of 9/11 memorial paraphernalia.) Just outside the visitor's center is a staircase leading up to the pedestrian walkway to the World Financial Center. Take this passage until you are over West Street and you'll get a view into the memorial. You'll see the trees and get a peekaboo view of the waterfalls.

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Read more about the World Trade Center in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

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Christopher Columbus and Central Park Walking Tour

Sunday, October 9, 2011

at 3:30PM

Christopher Columbus & Central Park
Reservations taken 10/3 or earlier: $10 per person

Reservations taken 10/4 or later: $15 per person

RESERVATIONS TAKEN ON A FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVED BASIS

events@insidetheapple.net

Join James Nevius, co-author of Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, on Sunday, October 9, at 3:30 PM, for a walk celebrating Columbus Day and the importance of Italian-Americans in New York’s history. There’s no better place to do that than Central Park; we will talk about the four (that’s right four) different Columbus memorials once slated for the park, visit the bust of Giuseppe Mazzini, explore the history of the Mall and Terrace, and more. (We’ll also be looking at things in Central Park that have nothing to do with Columbus or Italian-American heritage.)

Copies of Inside the Apple will be available for purchase at the tour.

è  To reserve, send an email to events@insidetheapple.net with

• Your name
• The number in your party
• A contact cell phone number
• A good email address where we can send you information about where the tour will start.

PLEASE NOTE that if you reserve no later than Monday, October 3, the cost is just $10 per person. All reservations received starting Tuesday, October 4, will be $15 per person.

This tour will have only a limited number of spaces, so please reserve early to avoid disappointment.

Payment will be taken at the start of the tour by cash only. Directions to the tour’s starting point will be sent out after your reservation is confirmed.

Hope to see you there!

Henry Hudson's Arrival -- September 13? September 11?

Today is the day traditionally held to be New York's anniversary -- 402 years ago today, Henry Hudson sailed his ship the Halve Maen ("Half Moon") into the river the bears his name and thus began European involvement in the place we now call New York.

Two years ago, it was on September 13, that the city celebrated its 400th birthday, complete with a royal visit from the Prince of Orange and Princess Maxima.

But why September 12 or 13, when--in fact--Hudson was already here days earlier?

We have a detailed description of Hudson's voyage thanks to the journal of his first mate, Robert Juet. Here's Juet's entry for September 13:

The thirteenth, fair weather, the wind northerly. At seven of the clock in the morning, as the flood came we weighed, and turned four miles into the river. The tide being done we anchored. Then there came four canoes aboard: but we suffered none of them to come into our ship. . . .

So, yes it appears that on September 13, the Halve Maen sailed four miles into the river. (A river which would only come to be known as the Hudson many years later; for a great portion of New York's history it was called the North River.)

This is what happened on the 12th:

Very fair and hot....we turned into the river two leagues and anchored.

And here is Juet's entry for September 11:

The eleventh was fair and very hot weather. At one of the clock in the afternoon we weighed and went into the river, the wind at south south-west, little wind. Our soundings were seven, six, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen fathoms. Then it shoaled again, and came to five fathoms. Then we anchored, and saw that it was a very good harbor for all winds, and rode all night. 

Thus, on September 11, Hudson also "went into the river" and anchored in the "very good harbor." That means that on September 11, 1609, the Halve Maen was at anchor somewhere in New York harbor. Today, of course, we cannot think of September 11 without turning to more recent New York City events, but there's still no reason not to commemorate Hudson on the day he actually sailed into the harbor.

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Read more about Henry Hudson and early New York in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

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Jenny Lind Comes to America

Do you remember the frenzy when the Beatles came to America in 1964? The enthusiasm that greeted them almost matched the public's reaction on September 1, 1850, when Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale" came to New York.

The difference between the two? People had actually heard the Beatles. With no phonographs or radios, Americans simply had to take it on faith and the word of the concert promoter that Lind was the greatest soprano they would ever hear. The name of that promoter? Phineas T. Barnum.

By 1850, Barnum was well established as one of the great American showmen. As we write in Inside the Apple:

In 1835, [Barnum] took over the promotion of Joice Heth, a black woman who claimed both to be over 160 years old and to have been George Washington’s nurse when he was a baby. She quickly was earning Barnum $1500 a week (this in an era when many Five Pointers might not make that much in three years). By the 1840s, Barnum was running variety shows and in 1841 he purchased a permanent home for his exploits at the corner of Broadway and Ann Streets. Called simply the American Museum, it featured everything from minstrel shows to Charles Stratton, who was just 25 inches tall and nicknamed “Tom Thumb.” It was here that Barnum could have—but probably did not—speak the oft-quoted words: “There’s a sucker born every minute but none of them ever die.” (He definitely said the less quotable: “The people like to be humbugged.”)

While on tour in Europe with Tom Thumb, Barnum heard about Lind and her ability to sell out theaters, but Barnum never actually heard her sing. That didn't matter to him: he met with Lind and convinced her to come to America on tour. Lind agreed on the condition that Barnum give her an advance of $20,000 (even being conservative, that's probably half a million dollars today). Barnum had to borrow the funds, and while Lind was preparing to sail to America in August 1850, Barnum was doing everything possible to convince New York's audiences that they were about to welcome into their midst the greatest singer alive--perhaps the greatest singer of all time.

When Lind's ship, the Atlantic, arrived in New York, it seemed like Barnum had succeeded. Throngs of people gathered along the shoreline to watch and as the Atlantic approached its berth at Canal Street, about 40,000 crammed themselves onto the surrounding piers and the roofs of buildings to catch a glimpse of the Swedish Nightingale.

Lind's carriage carried her and Barnum (who'd been piloted out to the Atlantic while it was still in the harbor) to the Irving Hotel at Broadway and Chambers. They passed through two triumphal arches erected for the occasion. Once ensconced at the hotel, Lind was forced to make appearances at the balcony to satisfy the well-wishers who crowded onto Broadway.

The next day, Barnum and Lind began searching for a proper theater in which Lind could perform. (Barnum had begun construction on a "Jenny Lind Theater," but it wasn't ready in time.) After rejecting famous spots like Niblo's Garden, Lind and Barnum finally decided on Castle Garden in Battery Park with September 11 to be the first performance.

Realizing that he could charge as much as the market would bear, Barnum decided to sell tickets to the performance at auction. The first ticket was purchased for $225--to put that in perspective, that amount was about the annual wage of most working class New Yorkers. While most tickets ended up selling for less than $10, Barnum was still able to rake in close to $25,000 in sales.

To further engage the public, a song-writing contest was held. The winning lyrics would be set to music and would be Lind's final song during the concert. The winner was Bayard Taylor (who also received $200), whose winning song featured such deathless prose as:

I greet with a full heart, the Land of the West,
Whose Banner of Stars o'er the world is unrolled;
Who empire o’ershadows Atlantic’s wide breast.
And opes to the sunset its gateway of gold! 

Lind's concert was a staggering success as was her subsequent tour of America, where she played in Boston, Charleston, New Orleans, St. Louis, and a host of other cities. At a certain point, Barnum decided to stop promoting Lind and without his showman's talents, she drew smaller and smaller crowds. In 1852, she returned to Europe a very rich woman, having earned perhaps as much as $3 million over the course of her stay in the United States.

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Read much more about the history of New York in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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The Great September Gale of 1815

As we wait for Hurricane Irene to arrive this weekend--the governor has already declared a state of emergency, and the city is preparing to take the unprecedented step of shutting down the entire bus and subway system--let's take a look back at an earlier storm that ravished the area. The most famous hurricane to come ashore in our region is undoubtedly 1938's "Long Island Express," a Category 3 storm that hit on September 31, 1938, wreaking havoc throughout New York and New England.

However, while that hurricane and its aftermath are well documented, an equally strong storm arrived on September 23, 1815, that is now largely forgotten. Known as the "Great September Gale of 1815" (the word hurricane was not yet in popular use), it very likely also a Category 3 storm. The storm originated, as many Atlantic storms do, in the warm waters of the Caribbean, striking the Bahamas before moving northward.

When the storm hit Long Island, it was probably packing 135-mph winds. Though wave heights aren't known, it seems likely that it matched the effect of the 1938 storm, which had a highest recorded wave height of 50 feet. The storm was so strong that it literally rewrote the landscape: before 1815, the Rockaways and Long Beach were connected as one, long barrier island. It was the Great September Gale that rent them asunder, permanently creating the inlet between them.

The worst of the storm's damage came in New England. An 11-foot storm surge rolled up Narragansett Bay, destroying over 500 homes, dozens of ships, and flooding Providence, Rhode Island.

Perhaps the most important after-effect of the gale was to cause Harvard mathematician John Farrar to realize that these types of gales were "moving vortexes," an essential first step toward the modern definition of a hurricane.

Stay safe everyone!

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Read much more about the history of New York in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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The Death of Anne Hutchinson

If you happen to be driving up the Hutchinson River Parkway tomorrow, you might pause a moment to think about the road's namesake, religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson, who was killed on August 20, 1643, somewhere in the vicinity of Split Rock, where the parkway meets the New England Thruway.

Anne Hutchinson, born in England in 1591, came to Massachusetts in 1634 with her husband, William. A "woman of ready wit and bold spirit" (as John Winthrop called her), Hutchinson's religious views soon ran afoul of the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Among other things, she promoted the role of women in the church--a challenge to the male-oriented orthodoxy of Puritan religion--as well as deviating from their teachings. Most importantly, she challenged the Puritan establishment over the age-old conflict of grace vs. works. Hutchinson believed that the Puritans were teaching people to achieve salvation through "good works," which made them little different in her eyes than Roman Catholics. Hutchinson argued that it didn't matter whether those who were saved did good works or not--they were members of the body of the elect no matter what. Hutchinson also claimed that she could tell who those saved souls were.

Branded a heretic, she was banished from Massachusetts and she and her followers moved to Portsmouth, Rhode Island. But soon after her husband's death, Hutchinson moved farther south to what was then New Netherland and settled in the Bronx near the Split Rock, a giant glacial erratic that had calved in two sometime during the last Ice Age.

On August 20, 1643, Hutchinson's family was attacked by a group of Native Americans. This was during the era in Dutch Colonial history known as Kieft's War. Not so much a war as a series of skirmishes between the Dutch and the Native Americans, it was a bloody period marked by a high number of civilian deaths. Hutchinson and her family, living in an isolated area, were likely easy targets. Only one of Hutchinson's daughters survived--legend has it by hiding in the split of the Split Rock--and she was taken and raised by the Natives.

Today, it is difficult, but not impossible, to visit the site of the massacre. Blake Bell gives instructions on his informative Historic Pelham blog.

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Read much more about the history of New Netherland in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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The Capture of Son of Sam

“You got me. What took you so long?”

Those were the words uttered 34 years ago tonight when the police finally caught up with and arrested David Berkowitz—aka the “Son of Sam”—perhaps the most notorious serial killer to ever stalk New York City.

Berkowitz, also known as the .44 Caliber Killer (for his preferred choice of weapon), had grown up in the Bronx to adoptive parents. His adoptive mother died when he was thirteen and he had restive adolescence.* He joined the army in 1971, was discharged three years later, and returned to New York where over the next few years he began to fall deeper into mental illness. He began setting fires; when the police searched his house on August 10, 1977, they found a diary claiming credit for hundreds of arsons. Some experts believe he may have set over 1,000 fires.

In 1975, he turned from arson to more personal attacks. On Christmas Eve, he stabbed and injured two women with a hunting knife, the beginning of a murderous crime spree that would last almost two years and culminate in eight shootings and six fatalities. It is too easy in retrospect to glamorize killers like Son of Sam—the American public seems to have a morbid fascination with murderers—but let’s take a moment, instead, to remember his known victims:

• Michelle Forman (stabbed with hunting knife; survived)
• Unknown victim (who was with Forman, survived)
• Donna Lauria (murdered)
• Jody Valenti (survived)
• Carl Denaro (survived, but with a metal plate in his skull)
• Rosemary Keenan (survived)
• Donna DeMasi (survived)
• Joanne Lomino (survived, but rendered a parapalegic)
• Christine Freund (murdered)
• John Diel (survived)
• Virginia Voskerichian (murdered)
• Alexander Esau (murdered)
• Valentina Suriani (murdered)
• Sal Lupo (survived)
• Judy Placido (survived)
• Stacy Moskowitz (murdered)
• Robert Violante (survived, but blinded)

The summer of 1977 was a volatile one in New York not only because Berkowitz had eluded capture. As we write in Inside the Apple:

[T]he city was plagued by countless other problems. For one, it was nearly out of money. The famous 1975 headline in the Daily News—“Ford to City: Drop Dead”—summed up the city’s problem in trying to secure a federal bailout. Even the election of New York-friendly Jimmy Carter in 1976 hadn’t helped much. The lack of funds meant that necessary city services were always on the verge of being cut. When John Lindsay was mayor, he’d tried to brand New York “Fun City.” When the city vowed to cut the police force, cops handed out flyers at the airports telling tourists it was now “Fear City.” The flyer recommended they not go out after dark and that they not ride the subway at all. The city made cuts to the NYPD nonetheless. Thousands of other jobs were lost, too. When city sanitation workers were furloughed, the entire department went on strike, causing massive amounts of garbage to pile up on city streets. Despite building projects like the World Trade Center, which were supposed to provide a new economic stimulus, the city had lost a record number of jobs since the early 1970s, with little end in sight.

The subways, strewn with litter and covered in graffiti, were the only affordable option for many New Yorkers. However, the budget gap meant that token prices shot up from 35 to 50 cents, a move necessary just to keep the trains running.

In the Bronx, five thousand apartments burned down every year, the result of persistent arson. The theaters along 42nd Street, once home to some of Broadway’s greatest theaters, had instead become XXX movie parlors; indeed the number of places to buy pornography had gone up by 2000% in a decade. 

Then, on the night of July 13—just as the city was beginning a terrible heat wave—the power failed, plunging the city into darkness. That night, portions of the city erupted into looting and arson: over 1,000 fires were lit and more than 1,600 shops were looted. It was the worst disturbance in the city since the Civil War Draft Riots and the most widespread. No borough was exempted—from the Bronx to Bensonhurst the burning and robbery lasted well into the night. In the end, a congressional committee estimated the damage at $300 million dollars, though some guessed the real toll had been closer to $1 billion. By the time the power was restored a day later, over 3,700 people had been arrested.

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Read much more about New York in the '70s in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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Robert Moses

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death, at age 93, of Robert Moses, probably the person with the single greatest influence on the shape of New York in the 20th century.

As we write in Inside the Apple, “There is perhaps no figure in New York City’s history more likely to set off a heated debate than Robert Moses. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about the ‘Power Broker’ (as Robert Caro called him), and he is vilified and praised in equal measure—often in the same breath.”

A short blog entry is not enough to do Moses justice, but consider some of the projects that he had a hand in during his tenure:

• ·         Astoria Park
• ·         1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs
• ·         Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel
• ·         BQE
• ·         Central Park Zoo
• ·         Co-op City
• ·         Cross Bronx Expressway
• ·         East River Park
• ·         Jones Beach State Park
• ·         Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
• ·         New York Coliseum
• ·         Ocean Parkway
• ·         The Robert F. Kennedy (aka Triborough) Bridge
• ·         Shea Stadium
• ·         Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village

The list is endless and these are just a fraction of the projects that came about under his stewardship. At one point, Moses simultaneously held twelve different state and city offices, from being in charge of slum clearance to running the highways to overseeing the parks.

Of course, not every project was welcomed and many never came to fruition, such as his idea to run a Lower Manhattan Expressway across the Lower East Side and SoHo. As we note in Inside the Apple:

By the late 1960s, Robert Moses’ influence in New York was on the wane. His last big project in the city had been the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, and he had retired from most of his official positions. What ended up as his last great fight was the battle of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (sometimes called LOMEX), a road that had first been proposed in 1929 and did not ultimately go down in defeat until 1969.

The purpose of the expressway was to relieve downtown traffic and connect the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges to the Holland Tunnel. By the 1940s, Moses was proposing an eight-lane elevated highway roughly following the paths of Broome and Delancey Streets across the island. To Moses and other urban planners, the area that LOMEX would traverse—not yet called “SoHo,” a moniker that would come into use in the late 1960s—was the definition of urban blight.

Had the expressway been built, a number of wonderful cast-iron structures would have been lost—indeed, the city was well on its way to tearing down SoHo in its entirety. Luckily, Jane Jacobs and the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway convinced the city’s Board of Estimate not to move forward and SoHo was saved.

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Read much more about Robert Moses's influence in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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The Municipal Building

A reader and fan of Inside the Apple sent along the above photo and asked if we could delve a little into the history of the building. It is the Municipal Building, built 1909-14 by William Kendall, a junior partner in the venerable firm of McKim, Mead, and White. It was the first foray of that firm into skyscraper building, and it had a huge impact on the form--at least in the Soviet Union.

Despite its importance to New York City, many people aren't familiar with the Municipal Building, which sits at the intersection of Chambers and Centre streets. (Originally, Chambers Street actually went through the loggia and connected traffic to the Lower East Side; the construction of One Police Plaza in 1973 forced Chambers Street to dead-end.)

Starting in the last decades of the 19th century, the city began contemplating tearing down its 1812 City Hall, which was too small for the modern workings of government, and replace it with a grander building. They even went so far as to have a design contest, which was won by John Rochester Thomas. Meanwhile, a plan was concocted to move the old City Hall to 42nd Street and use it to house the New York Public Library. In the end, however, the American Scenic & Historic Preservation Society--one of the first preservation groups in the country--prevailed on the government to leave City Hall alone. Thomas's new City Hall was built, with modification, on Chambers Street, and became the Surrogate's Court.* This meant that the city was still in dire need of more office space for its workers--especially after January 1, 1898, when New York consolidated the five boroughs into one city.


With consolidation, New York was, without question, America's largest city, and many felt it needed a true Civic Center to match. Only fifteen years earlier, the city had began systematically destroying the old Five Points neighborhood, which lay just north of Chambers Street, and over the first three decades of the 20th century, the building of the Civic Center allowed the city to clear the worst blocks of the Five Points. In rapid succession, the city, state, and federal governments erected the Municipal Building, Supreme Court, U.S. Court, Department of Health, and what's now called the Louis J. Lefkowitz State Office Building, in the area that only a few years earlier had been teeming with immigrant families.


The architecture of the Muncipal Building reflected New York's place in the world--and Manhattan's place in New York. The top of the building is crowned by Civic Fame by Adolph Weinman--the second tallest statue in New York after the Statue of Liberty, though no one can agree how tall it is: sources list it as 20 feet, 25 feet, and 30 feet. The figure represents New York leading the way into the future, a beacon for other cities to follow. (Being famous, in this instance, meant "setting a virtuous example for future generations" and not "being Kim Kardashian.") The statue sits atop a high tower that is surrounded by four smaller towers. The big tower is Manhattan--the four other towers are the outer boroughs, surrounding Manhattan like satellites.

The Municipal Building was evidently greatly admired by, of all people, Josef Stalin. Certainly copies of it soon began popping up all over Moscow and around the Soviet bloc, from Moscow University (pictured at right, on the school's crest) to the Hotel Družba in Prague.


Until 2009, many New Yorkers only knew the Municipal Building as the place to go for a civil marriage ceremony. However, that has moved to the Lefkowitz State Office Building, just a couple of blocks north, where, in just a few days, hundreds of couples will celebrate New York's marriage equality law.


* Thomas's Surrogate's Court building, based on the Opera in Paris, is the subject of a blog post we're working on right now. Don't change that dial!

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Do you have a picture of building in New York that you want to know more about? Send it to info@insidetheapple.net and we'll see what we can dig up!

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Read more about the Five Points and the Civic Center in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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July 11, 1804: Burr Shoots Hamilton

Today marks the 207th anniversary of the famous duel between then-Vice President Aaron Burr and former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. We blogged about the duel last year (and dedicated a chapter to it in Inside the Apple), but there have been a couple of new developments in the past year, most excitingly the imminent reopening of Hamilton's Harlem home, the Grange.

As the National Park Service notes:

The Grange has been closed to the public for nearly five years, going through a move and an "extreme makeover" designed to make Alexander Hamilton's "sweet project" look and feel as welcoming to us as it did to Hamilton and his family when they moved in in 1802.

The house was built by John McComb, Jr., the architect responsible for Castle Clinton in Battery Park and, along with Francis Magnin, New York's City Hall. Hamilton wanted to move his family to the heights of Harlem to get them away from the hustle and bustle--and disease--of the city. However, Hamilton only got to occupy his home, originally set in a vast, 32-acre property, for less than two years before being killed by Burr. In 1899, the house was moved about four blocks from its original location in Hamilton Heights to a lot owned by St. Luke's Church near the corner of Convent Avenue and 140th Street. Over the years, the house was surrounded by a church on one side and an apartment block on the other. As early as 1962, the National Park Service began thinking about relocating the home again.

That move finally took place in June 2008, when the house was jacked up off its foundations and rolled to a new site in St. Nicholas Park off 140th Street. The Grange's new location is more reminiscent of what Hamilton would have experienced when he lived in the house.

The house is set to reopen on September 17. It is worth noting that the other famous colonial house in Harlem, the Morris-Jumel Mansion, was the place where Aaron Burr got remarried in 1833 (to the home's owner, Eliza Jumel) and where he lived toward the very end of his life.

Read more about the history of Hamilton, Burr, and Colonial Harlem

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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