The New Yorkers

31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City

Sam Roberts

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781620409794
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Nonfiction

From award-winning New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, the story of the world's most exceptional city, told through 31 little-known yet pivotal inhabitants who helped define it—now in paperback.

In Sam Roberts's pulsating history of the world's most exceptional metropolis, greet the city anew through thirty-one unique New Yorkers you've probably never heard of—just in time for the city's 400th birthday.

The New Yorkers introduces the first woman to appear nude in a motion picture, becoming the face of Civic Fame as Miss Manhattan; the couple whose soirée ended the Gilded Age with an embarrassing bang; and the husband and wife who invented the modern celebrity talk show. It reveals the victim of the city's first recorded murder in the seventeenth century and the high school dropout who slashed crime rates in the twentieth. The notorious mobster who was imperiously banished from the city and the woman who successfully sued a bus company for racial discrimination a century before Rosa Parks.
Some deserved monuments, but their grandeur was overlooked or forgotten. Others shepherded the city through its perpetual evolution, but discreetly. Virtually all have vanished into New York's uncombed history. The New Yorkers is a living biography of the world's greatest city, and no one knows New York better than Sam Roberts—or is better at bringing its history to life.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The New Yorkers
• Half Title
• Dedication
• By the Same Author
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. John Colman: Whodunit? The First Recorded Homicide
• 2. Anneke Jans Bogardus: This Land Is Our Land
• 3. John Bowne: Practicing What They Preached
• 4. Isaac Sears: America Began in New York
• 5. John Jay: The Capital of Capital
• 6. Levi Weeks: The Manhattan Well Mystery
• 7. Christian Harriot: The Original Road Hogs
• 8. Jacob Hays: The Constant Constable
• 9. James Gordon Bennett: A Penny for His Thoughts
• 10. David F. Launy: The First Broken Windows Theory
• 11. Thomas Downing: A Man for All Seasonings
• 12. John Randel Jr.: The Geek Who Invented Gridlock
• 13. John Hughes: The Bully Pulpit
• 14. Charles O’Conor: Why Irish Eyes Were Smiling
• 15. Elizabeth Jennings: The Right to Ride
• 16. The Bradley-Martins: After the Ball Was Over
• 17. Charles Dowd: The Day of Two Noons
• 18. Annie Moore: Coming to America
• 19. Andrew H. Green: Brooklyn’s Great Mistake
• 20. William J. Wilgus: The Making of Midtown
• 21. Rudolph Aronson: “Remember Me to Union Square”
• 22. Philip A. Payton Jr.: Harlem on His Mind
• 23. Audrey Munson: The Limitations of Statues
• 24. Clara Lemlich: The Little Lady Who Could
• 25. Charles F. Murphy: The Benevolent Boss
• 26. Ciro Terranova: The Mayor and the Mobster
• 27. Tex and Jinx: The Birth of Celebrity
• 28. Lillian Edelstein: Moses: “Let My People Stay!”
• 29. Preston Wilcox: The Pedigree of Black Power
• 30. Jack Maple: The Commonsense Cop
• 31. Carmelia Goffe: They Built This City
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• A Note on the Author
• Copyright