From peglegged Peter Stuyvesant to CBGB’s, the story of the Bowery reflects the history of the city that grew up around it.It was the street your mother warned you about—even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well.The Bowery is New York’s oldest street and Manhattan’s broadest boule...

In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin Kaplan––Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain––vividly brings to life a glittering, bygone age.Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior.Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite det...

A beautifully written history of high society in Newport, Rhode Island, from the acclaimed author of Party of the CenturyNewport is the legendary and beautiful home of American aristocracy and the sheltered super-rich. Many of the country's most famous blueblood families?the closest thing we have to royalty?have lived and summered in Newport since the nineteenth century. The Astors, the Vanderbilts, Edith Wharton, JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Dori...

How much do you actually know about New York City? Did you know they tried to anchor Zeppelins at the top of the Empire State Building? Or that the high-rent district of Park Avenue was once so dangerous it was called “Death Avenue”? This lively and comprehensive guidebook brings New York’s fascinating past to vivid life.This narrative history of New York City is the first to offer practical walking tour know-how. Fast-paced but thorough, its bite-size chapters eac...

Uncle John loves New York, so he's taking the plunge…into the land of bagels, bluebirds, and the Brooklyn Bridge.Start spreading the news. You’re reading today. You’re going to be a part of it--New York, New Yooooork! In this ode to the greatest place on Earth, Uncle John takes you through Ellis Island and down the Hudson to bring you the tome about New York that could only come from the Bathroom Readers’ Institute. Find out why the Empire State is the Big Apple of...

In swift, witty chapters that flawlessly capture the pace and character of New York City, acclaimed diarist Edward Robb Ellis presents his masterpiece: a thorough, and thoroughly readable, history of America's largest metropolis. Ellis narrates some of the most significant events of the past three hundred years and more -- the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr's fatal duel, the formation of the League of Nations, the Great Depression -- from the perspective of...

In this "beautifully written, sharply observed, and heartfelt" guide to his hometown ( New York Times), legendary New York City journalist Pete Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves.Walking the Manhattan streets he loves, from Times Square to the island's southern tip, Pete Hamill combines a moving memoir of his own days and nights in new York with a lively and revealing history of the city's most enduring places and people.

“Supreme City captures a vanished Gotham in all its bustle, gristle, and glory” (Vanity Fair). In the 1920s midtown Manhattan became the center of New York City, and the cultural and commercial capital of America. This is the story of the people who made it happen.In just four words—“the capital of everything”—Duke Ellington captured Manhattan during one of the most exciting and celebrated eras in our history: the Jazz Age. Supreme City i...

An enlightening and entertaining inside look at the lifestyles of America's extremely wealthy from the bestselling author of "Our Crowd"It's no secret that the rich are different from the rest of us. But the rich, as author Stephen Birmingham so insightfully points out, are also different from the very rich. There's Society, and then there's Real Society, and it takes multiple generations for families of the former to become entrenched in the latte...

The classic social history of corruption and vice in nineteenth-century NYC: "A cacophonous poem of democracy and greed, like the streets of New York themselves" (John Vernon, Los Angeles Times Book Review).Lucy Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the ...

Who among us cannot testify to the possibilities of the night? To the mysterious, shadowed intersections of music, smoke, money, alcohol, desire, and dream? The hours between dusk and dawn are when we are most urgently free, when high meets low, when tongues wag, when wallets loosen, when uptown, downtown, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight, male, and female so often chance upon one another. Night is when we are more likely to carouse, fornicate, fall in love, murder,...

Thanks to Attorney and business owner Bill Patton, you won't miss a thing when you visit downtown Memphis, Tennessee with this guide. Need a practical, useful guide to downtown Memphis's historic streets, buildings and neighborhoods? Look no further than A Guide to Historic Downtown Memphis. From Beale Street to the Bluffs, this guidebook covers all the essentials that no explorer of the River City should be without. Each chapter provides a map for a different section of downtown Memphis, ...