Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manhattan and the New York Idea
Title | Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manhattan and the New York Idea PDF eBook |
Author | Marc Aronson |
Publisher | Candlewick Press |
Pages | 441 |
Release | 2021-11-09 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 1536205931 |
From a Sibert Medalist comes the epic story of Manhattan—a magical, maddening island “for all” and a microcosm of America. A veteran nonfiction storyteller dives deep into the four-hundred-year history of Manhattan to map the island’s unexpected intersections. Focusing on the evolution of four streets and a square (Wall Street, 42nd Street, West 4th Street, 125th Street, and Union Square) Marc Aronson explores how new ideas and forms of art evolved from social blending. Centuries of conflict—among original Americans and Europeans, slavers and the enslaved, rich and poor, immigrants and native-born—produced segregation, oppression, and violence, but also new ways of speaking, singing, and being American. From the Harlem Renaissance to Hammerstein, from gay pride in the Village to political clashes at Tammany Hall, this clear-eyed pageant of the island’s joys and struggles—enhanced with photos and drawings, multimedia links to music and film, and an extensive bibliography and source notes—is, above all, a love song to Manhattan’s triumphs.
Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
Title | Twenty Minutes in Manhattan PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Sorkin |
Publisher | North Point Press |
Pages | 274 |
Release | 2013-03-12 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0865477582 |
Every morning, the architect and writer Michael Sorkin walks downtown from his Greenwich Village apartment through Washington Square to his Tribeca office. Sorkin isn't in a hurry, and he never ignores his surroundings. Instead, he pays careful, close attention. And in Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, he explains what he sees, what he imagines, what he knows—giving us extraordinary access to the layers of history, the feats of engineering and artistry, and the intense social drama that take place along a simple twenty-minute walk.
One Times Square
Title | One Times Square PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | David R. Godine Publisher |
Pages | 66 |
Release | 2011 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 156792364X |
Explores the story of this intersection, from when Broadway was a mere dirt path known as Bloomingdale Road, through the district's decades of postwar decay, to its renewal as a tourist-friendly mecca.
Mapping Manhattan
Title | Mapping Manhattan PDF eBook |
Author | Becky Cooper |
Publisher | Abrams |
Pages | 138 |
Release | 2013-04-02 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1613124694 |
Armed with hundreds of blank maps she had painstakingly printed by hand, Becky Cooper walked Manhattan from end to end. Along her journey she met police officers, homeless people, fashion models, and senior citizens who had lived in Manhattan all their lives. She asked the strangers to “map their Manhattan” and to mail the personalized maps back to her. Soon, her P.O. box was filled with a cartography of intimate narratives: past loves, lost homes, childhood memories, comical moments, and surprising confessions. A beautifully illustrated, PostSecret-style tribute to New York, Mapping Manhattan includes 75 maps from both anonymous mapmakers and notable New Yorkers, including Man on Wire aerialist Philippe Petit, New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov, Tony award-winning actor Harvey Fierstein, and many more. Praise for Mapping Manhattan: “What an intriguing project.”—The New York Times “A tender cartographic love letter to this timeless city of multiple dimensions, parallel realities, and perpendicular views.” —Brain Pickings “Cooper’s beautiful project linking the lives of New Yorkers is one that will continue to grow.” —Publishers Weekly online
Sugar Changed the World
Title | Sugar Changed the World PDF eBook |
Author | Marc Aronson |
Publisher | |
Pages | 176 |
Release | 2017-04-04 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9781536406962 |
Traces the panoramic story of the sweet substance and its important role in shaping world history.
Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles
Title | Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles PDF eBook |
Author | Fran Leadon |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Pages | 495 |
Release | 2018-04-17 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0393285456 |
“Part lively social history, part architectural survey, here is the story of Broadway—from 17th-century cow path to Great White Way.”—Geoff Wisner, Wall Street Journal From Bowling Green all the way to Marble Hill, Fran Leadon takes us on a mile-by-mile journey up America’s most vibrant and complex thoroughfare, through the history at the heart of Manhattan. Broadway traces the physical and social transformation of an avenue that has been both the “Path of Progress” and a “street of broken dreams,” home to both parades and riots, startling wealth and appalling destitution. Glamorous, complex, and sometimes troubling, the evolution of an oft-flooded dead end to a canyon of steel and glass is the story of American progress.
Five Points
Title | Five Points PDF eBook |
Author | Tyler Anbinder |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Pages | 684 |
Release | 2012-06-05 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1439137749 |
The very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words." So wrote a reporter about Five Points, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America, the place where "slumming" was invented. All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over. Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in the new world. Yet it was also a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters and dance halls, prizefighters and machine politicians, and meeting halls for the political clubs that would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America's immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich. Tyler Anbinder offers the first-ever history of this now forgotten neighborhood, drawing on a wealth of research among letters and diaries, newspapers and bank records, police reports and archaeological digs. Beginning with the Irish potato-famine influx in the 1840s, and ending with the rise of Chinatown in the early twentieth century, he weaves unforgettable individual stories into a tapestry of tenements, work crews, leisure pursuits both licit and otherwise, and riots and political brawls that never seemed to let up. Although the intimate stories that fill Anbinder's narrative are heart-wrenching, they are perhaps not so shocking as they first appear. Almost all of us trace our roots to once humble stock. Five Points is, in short, a microcosm of America.