New York History & Culture

Through rare and historic images, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade offers readers a chance to reminisce, explore, and delight in eighty years of this thoroughly American celebration.

""Let's have a parade"" is the phrase that begins a beloved American tradition, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 1924, employees of the R. H. Macy and Company store in Herald Square, many of whom were immigrants and first-generation Americans, chose to give thanks for their good fortune in a manner reminiscent of the festive parades held in their native countries. The excitement and praise from crowds lining the route that first year led Macy's to issue an immediate proclamation: the parade would become a tradition. Before the parade's first decade passed, Macy's welcomed the huge and spectacular helium character balloons that became its goodwill ambassadors. Since then, the parade has become a world-famous treasure.

To demonstrate the special place Italian immigrants hold in the city of New York to this day, readers will experience a visual tour of their traditions and landmarks.

New York City’s five boroughs have been home to more Italian immigrants than any other place in America. Over the last 140 years, scores of Italian neighborhoods have spanned Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx. These communities preserve their heritage by celebrating special events and feasts, such as Manhattan’s 130-year-old Feast of St. Rocco, the Dance of the Giglio in East Harlem and Williamsburg, and saint processions for Padre Pio and Maria Addolorata; maintaining famous Mulberry Street storefronts and the Arthur Avenue Market in Little Italy, as well as popular bakeries and restaurants in Greenwich Village and Queens; and supporting and worshipping at notable Italian churches, like Brooklyn’s Our Lady of Mount Carmel Shrine Church and Alba House, a religious bookstore on Staten Island.

New York City, one of the world's premier urban centers, is also home to the world's most famous and storied municipal law enforcement service: the NYPD.

Policing in New York is as old as the city itself, although much has changed since the first Dutch rattle watch patrolled streets in the 1620s. Technological improvements, advancing professional standards, and historical moments like the 1898 consolidation of New York City and the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, have each profoundly changed the way New York City police officers do their jobs. Still, as New York City Police emphasizes, certain elements of ""the job"" remain true through the decades and centuries. Being a police officer in New York City has always involved a certain amount of danger, sacrifice, and public coordination.

New York is a city of superlatives. It has the largest population, greatest wealth, broadest diversity and most elegant museums in the nation. With that comes an amazing history.

This tour of the Big Apple goes beyond the traditional guidebook to offer visitors and residents alike a chance to walk back in time along the streets of Manhattan. George Washington took his first oath of office on the steps of Federal Hall. Visitors can still dine at the famed Fraunces Tavern and worship at historic St. Paul's Chapel. From the Brooklyn Bridge to stunning skyscrapers, the city celebrates its own history and that of the nation. Join author Alison Fortier as she traces the history and heritage of America's largest metropolis.

In early twentieth-century New York, few could have imagined a train terminal as grandiose as Pennsylvania Station.

Sandhogs would battle the fiercest of nature to build tunnels linking Manhattan to New Jersey and Long Island. For decades, Penn Station was a center of elegance and pride. But the ensuing rise of the airplane and automobile began to diminish train travel. By the mid-1960s, the station was tragically destroyed. The loss inspired the birth of preservation laws in the city and the nation that would save other landmarks like Grand Central. Author Paul Kaplan recounts the trials and triumphs of New York's Penn Station.

Just off the coast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound sits Hart Island, where more than one million bodies are buried in unmarked graves.

Beginning as a Civil War prison and training site and later a psychiatric hospital, the location became the repository for New York City's unclaimed dead. The island's mass graves are a microcosm of New York history, from the 1822 burial crisis to casualties of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and victims of the AIDS epidemic. Important artists who died in poverty have been discovered, including Disney star Bobby Driscoll and playwright Leo Birinski. Author Michael T. Keene reveals the history of New York's potter's field and the stories of some of its lost souls.

See how the Upper West Side of Manhattan became a neighborhood as diverse in its population as it is in its architecture.

The Upper West Side of Manhattan, the residential and retail neighborhood between Central Park and the Hudson River, is famous for its liberalism, cosmopolitan culture, and appetizing. It is a neighborhood as diverse as there is. Known as Bloomingdale in the mid-19th century, it was renamed the West End by the century's end when real estate speculation and mass transportation made their way inevitably northward in Manhattan. It was at this time that the grand boulevards and avenues Central Park West, Broadway, Columbus Avenue, Amsterdam Avenue, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive each quickly assumed their impressive and distinct characters.

Bursting with laugh-out-loud jokes and fun facts, LOL Jokes: New York City combines the best of humor and history for young readers!

Inspired by all the wonderful sights, sounds, and . . . smells of the Big Apple, this local joke book delivers kid-friendly punchlines that will have readers laughing ’til they cry! Alongside hilarious jokes and puns are fascinating facts, goofy tidbits of local history, and engaging graphics that will keep readers chuckling and sharing with friends. LOL Jokes: New York City is sure to deliver hours of knee-slapping entertainment.

What’s the best borough to go to the bathroom?

Flushing!

Fun Factoid: TP or not TP?! Toilet paper was invented by Joseph Gayetty in New York City!

Still a relief from everyday life, theme parks are popular now. Rediscover the thrills of the past from the lost amusement parks of New York City.

Coney Island is an iconic symbol of turn-of-the-century New York, but many other amusement parks thrilled the residents of the five boroughs. Strategically placed at the end of trolley lines, railways, public beaches and waterways, these playgrounds for rich and poor alike first appeared in 1767. From humble beginnings, they developed into huge sites like Fort George, Manhattan's massive amusement complex. Each park was influenced by the culture and eclectic tastes of its owners and patrons--from the wooden coasters at Staten Island's Midland Beach to beer gardens on Queens' North Beach and fireworks blasting from the Bronx's Starlight Park. However, as real estate became more valuable, these parks disappeared. Rediscover the thrills of the past from the lost amusement parks of New York City.

A literary and pictorial stroll through the charming and history-filled streets of New York's West Village reveals the history and little known tales of this fascinating and picturesque neighborhood.

Greenwich Village is a tourist's dream and a favorite weekend destination for New Yorkers. A part of Manhattan Island that holds its own amid the noise and confusion of the twenty-first century, it still retains much of the character of the old farming community that was part of the original settlement of Manhattan. The West Village, the northwest section of the neighborhood, is bounded by the Hudson River on the west and Greenwich Avenue on the east and is where it all began. Famous people such as Sinclair Lewis, Fiorello LaGuardia, William ""Bill the Butcher"" Poole, Frank Serpico, James Baldwin and Jackson Pollock, among dozens of others, called this neighborhood home. Stroll down the back streets and along the waterfront and peer behind the facades of these historic structures to discover its fascinating history, hidden secrets and little-known tales.

On March 25, 1911, flames rapidly consumed everything within the Triangle Waist Company factory, killing 146 workers. Until September 11, 2001, the Triangle fire was the deadliest workplace disaster in New York City history.

The victims, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, died needlessly due to unsafe working conditions, such as locked or blocked doors, narrow stairways, faulty fire escapes, and a lack of sprinklers. Mass grief and outrage spread from New York's Lower East Side across the country. Garment union membership swelled, and New York politics shifted dramatically toward reform, paving the way for the New Deal and, ultimately, the workplace standards expected today. Through historic images, The New York City Triangle Factory Fire honors the victims' sacrifice and serves as a reminder of the ongoing struggle for the dignity of all working people.

Travel down the Bowery with New York City author and researcher Eric Ferrara, as he explores its rich, fascinating, and at times, troubling past.

Originally a Lenape trail running the length of Manhattan Island, The Bowery has become one of the most notorious thoroughfares in America. Developed in stages by the Dutch, the British, and then Americans, this stretch of street has continually risen from its own ashes, interminably experiencing periods of popularity, poverty and prosperity. It has been celebrated as a haven of culture, entertainment, and theatre, and denigrated as New York's ""skid row."" Home to bums, bohemians, criminals, artists, performers, and the rich and poor alike, The Bowery has attracted the most diverse population of any place in all of New York City's history.

The Lower East Side has long been one of Manhattan's most vibrant neighborhoods.

For centuries, it has been home to hundreds of enclaves of immigrants from every part of the world; as they became New Yorkers, the neighborhood in turn became infused with their cultures, foods, traditions, and personalities. In this book, Lower East Side historians Eric Ferrara and Nina Howes document the memories of 25 people who lived in this larger-than-life corner of New York. From childhood memories with family to observations of the constantly changing face of the neighborhood, discover the Lower East Side through the eyes and voices of the people who have made it what it is today.

German New York is an interesting history of the rich cultural heritage of this community.

German New York City celebrates the rich cultural heritage of the hundreds of thousands of German immigrants who left the poverty and turmoil of 19th- and 20th-century Europe for the promise of a better life in the bustling American metropolis. German immigration to New York peaked during the 1850s and again during the 1880s, and by the end of the 19th century New York had the third-largest German-born population of any city worldwide. German immigrants established their new community in a downtown Manhattan neighborhood that became known as Kleindeutschland or Little Germany. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much of the German population moved north to the Upper East Side's Yorkville and subsequently spread out to the other boroughs of the city.