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Nonfiction
The Gangs of New York
By Joe Bruno
 The
American Heritage College Dictionary defines a gang as, A group of criminals or
hoodlums who band together for mutual protection and profit. Such gangs have
been the staple of the city of New York City for close to two centuries,
spilling blood and breaking bones with alarming consistency and monstrous elan.
Since the English took over the city of New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664 and
gave it its present name, New York City has been the ideal place for the rich to
prosper and maximize their profits. Moreover, the less fortunate have been left
mostly to their devices, sometimes banding together and forcibly extracting what
they need to survive, mostly from luckless individuals like themselves.
In 1826, produce was scarce and affordable mostly to the affluent. Outside her
dingy produce shop on the north side of what is now Foley Square, Rosanna Peers
displayed decaying cabbage and frayed lettuce. Yet little did she care if she
sold even one dingy head. Rosanna made her real money in a dilapidated back
room, selling rot-gut whiskey... for less money than it was sold in saloons. It
was there among polluted patrons and hangovers the size of the Irish famine,
that the first New York City organized gang was created...
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Nonfiction
Washington
Heights, Inwood, Marble Hill
by Raanan Geberer
 For a long time,
Manhattan tourist maps routinely ended at 96th Street. Then several years ago,
Harlem began experiencing a second renaissance when foreign sightseers
discovered the good-time value of church gospel, and African-Americans with
money began laying claim to long-abandoned brownstones. Now, city streets seem
pretty well accounted for as far as 155th
Street...
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Faces
The Innocent New Yorker
By Sheri Stein
 New
Yorkers love to kid, but we don't kid ourselves. The world may flash its
countless images of the city, but only we know what it's actually like to be one
of us millions together in a crazy rush, everybody with single-minded purpose,
carrying too many shopping bags and running across the street against the light.
No one just winds up in New York City. Somewhere down the line there is a
reason. We come here to study or wield finances; we come to bus dishes and drive
taxis; we come to shelter with members of our own immigrant group and take up
the current family business; plenty of us came a long time ago and stayed for
generations on a single block...
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Monuments
Keeper of the Flame
By Christina Hamlett
 The original
inspiration for Liberty Enlightening the World came about at a French dinner
party in 1865. Abolitionist and scholar Edouard Rene Lefebvre de Laboulaye was
praising America's resolution of the slavery issue and opining to his guests
that it might be a nice gesture to bestow a gift reflecting the two countries'
mutual love of liberty. Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi - no stranger to success in
sculpting statues on a somewhat grandiose scale - began to take notes on his
cocktail napkin...
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Nonfiction
The Fire of 1835:
The Resolve of a
City Tested Again
By Christopher Carroll
 On the evening
of December 16, 1835, when a northeast gale dropped temperatures below zero and
people would no doubt have welcomed a hint of global warming, the City of New
York almost burned to the ground...
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Monuments
A Matter of Time
by Kate Walter
 In our city, clocks
tell more than the current time; they remind us of where we've come from and how
quickly we need to get to where we're going. They also preserve and link us to
our lost history. To bring me back to the days of an old city tabloid, all I
need is a glance at the intricate clock jutting from the corner building on
Broadway and Chambers Street. The clock's casing still reveals the former
paper's logo: The Sun. I love envisioning reporters racing to their typewriters
to file their stories ahead of all the city's other publications...
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Recollections
The Canarsie Rose
by Michael Lipstock
 In 1931 I was 11. Grandma was 93. It was the depression, and she lived with us in a cold-water tenement five floors up. She was bent, wrinkled, and had only one tooth left in her mouth. But, boy, she had a thousand years of magic stored in her head. And to a kid like me, she knew everything. She had all kinds of powders and colored liquids in her room, and when she mixed them up and we slugged them down, no one ever got sick...
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