Dreamers Rise

Over the years I've devoted several posts to the colorful early history of Manhattan's Water Street Mission, an institutio...

In the 1850s, the Five Points area in lower Manhattan, a now obliterated slum occupying the area adjoining what is now the Foley Square dist...

What I'll be reading this Fall: Mike Wallace's Greater Gotham , the long-awaited sequel to Gotham: A History of New York City to 18...

I would have preferred to write about Tyler Anbinder's superb new book about "immigrant New York" under happier circumstances,...

Herman Melville: Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find m...

This little "Manual of the Water Street Mission" in New York City was published in 1880, and seems to have served both as an int...

The first snows of December haven't yet fallen on the dirty streets of lower Manhattan, but already there's a chill in the air. Th...

Joseph E. Corrigan, the city magistrate who presided over the farcical legal proceedings reported in my last post , was a prominent New Y...

My next two posts will revisit two peripherally connected news stories, one comic and one tragic. The first is recorded in The Fourth Estate...

I have spun off a separate blog, The Rotograph Project , to serve as a virtual gallery for the display and interpretation of the American vi...

These receipts from The Williams & Guion steamship company were made out to a young Irish immigrant named Margaret Nagle for sums she se...

This postcard of the Brooklyn Bridge and the adjacent waterfront, published by the Rotograph Co., was postmarked in 1905. Offering a view of...

This is a moderately interesting postcard view of the City Hall Park in lower Manhattan area looking with the East River and Brooklyn in the...

Belle époque Paris boasted its arcades and flâneurs ; turn-of-the-century Manhattan had strolls under the El. This postcard, which was mail...

This tinted postcard depicts the Bowery in Manhattan, probably between 1901 and 1905. It was published by A. C. Bosselman & Co. of New Y...

The Cremorne McAuley Mission, at 104 West 32nd Street near Sixth Avenue, New York. The engraving, which probably dates from around 1883-84, ...

In the weeks that followed, Matilda returned to the apartment on Bedford Street every Saturday afternoon. She would have come more often, if...

Mr. Sullivan's lodgings occupied the back half of the top floor of a narrow four-story brick building on Bedford Street. There was a rat...

Matilda spent the month of July at her family's summer cottage in the Adirondacks. Her parents -- separately -- and her brothers, came a...