The Man with the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a New York City Block brings to life the ghosts who inhabit that row of townhouses on Manhattan’s stately Riverside Drive for the first fifty years of the 20th Century, including a vicious crew of hoodlums who carried out what at the time was the largest armored car robbery in American history.   It was a daring, minutely planned exploit that ended in blood, when one of the gangsters accidentally shot himself. Read more…

From peglegged Peter Stuyvesant to CBGB’s, The Bowery: The Strange History of New York’s Oldest Street explains 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 boulevard. Like the city itself, it has continually reinvented itself over the centuries. Read more…