THE EDWARD MOONEY HOUSE 18 Bowery Street Located in the middle of Chinatown, the oldest surviving row house in New York is much older than Chinatown. It was built sometime soon after the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, but before 1789, the year George Washington was inaugurated as the first American President. The…
Category: Downtown
Little Italy – a Living Movie Set
At the end of the nineteenth century, when America was taking in “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Little Italy settled more than 40,000 tired and poor Italians, mainly from Naples and Sicily. New arrivals recreated little towns and villages they left behind here on the streets of New York. The Sicilians settled…
Eldridge Street Synagogue
At the turn of the 20th century, the Lower East Side emerged as the most densely populated Jewish community on the planet! Running for their lives, escaping pogroms and prosecution, more than 2.5 million Jews immigrated to America; nearly 85 percent of them came to New York City, with the vast majority settling on the…
Tweed Courthouse – a Building that Cost More than Alaska
Not known for its architectural merits, the Tweed Courthouse stands as a monument to the enormous grid and epic corruption. The Tweed Courthouse was a pet project of Boss Tweed, who, without ever holding an official city government position, controlled just about every office in the city from transportation to the press. He was an…