Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City [Paperback]

How much do you actually know about New York City? Did you know they tried to anchor Zeppelins at the top of the Empire State Building? Or that the high-rent district of Park Avenue was once so dangerous it was called “Death Avenue”? Lively and comprehensive,Inside the Applebrings to life New York's fascinating past.

This narrative history of New York City is the first to offer practical walking tour know-how. Fast-paced but thorough, its bite-size chapters each focus on an event, person, or place of historical significance. Rich in anecdotes and illustrations, it whisks readers from colonial New Amsterdam through Manhattan's past, right up to post-9/11 New York. The book also works as a historical walking-tour guide, with 14 self-guided tours, maps, and step-by-step directions. Easy to carry with you as you explore the city,Inside the Appleallows you to visit the site of every story it tells. This energetic, wide-ranging, and often humorous book covers New York's most important historical moments, but is always anchored in the city of today.Inside the Apple

1. Manna-hata: New York Before the Europeans

Walking through Times Square, surrounded by concrete, traffic, steel, and neon, it can be difficult to conjure up what this same tract of land must have looked like in 1608—a mere 400 years ago—before the arrival of Europeans. What would we see if we could strip away the generations of urbanization and return Manhattan to its pre-contact glory?

New Yorkers often wonder about what was here before. It can be tempting to invoke an Eden-on-the-Hudson, where wild animals roamed freely through tall forests and verdant meadows. And Manhattan did have all those things—but for nearly 11,000 years before Henry Hudson [2] there were also people using the land and alterinl³.