Hard-Boiled Charlie Chapin
In the golden age of American newspaper journalism, those 60 years between 1890 and 1950, New York had as many as 14 English-language dailies, with telegraphs and telephones to speed the...
View ArticleDiamond Jim Brady
Throughout his adult life, Diamond Jim Brady was a salesman working for pure commission. If he didn't sell, he didn't eat. Happily, his diverse and insatiable appetites were all the incentives he...
View ArticleHonore Jaxon, Professional Rebel
In December 1951, a ninety-year-old man was evicted from 157 East 34th Street. The building's former live-in janitor and furnace tender, his old age and ill-health had precluded satisfactory...
View ArticleThe Man Who Was Phileas Fogg
He went four times around the world and inspired Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. He devised the financing scheme for the transcontinental railroad, lobbied Congress to enact it, and made...
View ArticleThe Collyer Brothers of Harlem
Dr. Herman Livingston Collyer, a successful gynecologist, his wife Susie, and their sons Homer and Langley moved from Murray Hill to 2078 Fifth Avenue, at 128 Street, in 1909. The house was a...
View ArticleOur Dear Queen
The Royal Governors of the Province of New York, the men who ruled here in the names of Britain's kings and queens before the Revolutionary War, are forgotten. Place-names recall some. Fort Tryon Park...
View ArticleThe Witch, the Wench & the Colonel
At her death, the Witch of Wall Street was worth more than J. P. Morgan, and nearly all of it was in cash. Yet Hetty Green had worn the same dress for thirty years and lived in squalor. The Witch's son...
View ArticleThe Way of the Perfect Samurai
He wrote near the end that his life was divided into four rivers: writing, theater, body, and action. He memorialized all of it through photographs. Some were conventional. When Yukio Mishima came to...
View ArticleThe Gray Chrysanthemum
In his eight decades, Sadakichi Hartmann fried eggs with Walt Whitman, discussed verse with Stéphane Mallarmé, and drank with John Barrymore, who once described him as "a living freak presumably sired...
View ArticleWilson Mizner, Champion Wiseacre
Much to my embarrassment,” Wilson Mizner admitted, “I was born in bed with a lady.” His second passion was theft. One of his few heroes, Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith, the criminal boss of Skagway...
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