New York EXPLAINED
Get the brief

The history

New York, in its own words.

Four centuries of this city told the honest way: through the documents, the headlines, the speeches, and the letters of the people who were actually there. 58 primary sources across seven eras, each one linked so you can check it yourself. The myths get corrected. The hard parts stay in.

Start here

The big ones, in depth.

Full primary-source articles on the events that made New York, with every quote sourced and every myth corrected. More added all the time.

A handwritten 1626 Dutch letter reporting the purchase of Manhattan for 60 guilders and listing a cargo of beaver pelts. 1626 The "Purchase" of Manhattan No $24. No beads. No swindle. The most famous real-estate deal in history is mostly a myth, and the one real document is a single sentence. An 1823 oil portrait of DeWitt Clinton, the New York governor who championed the Erie Canal. 1825 The Erie Canal They called it "Clinton’s Folly." Then it cut the cost of reaching the interior by ninety percent and made New York the capital of American commerce. An 1863 wood engraving of a crowd storming and setting fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum during the New York City Draft Riots. July 13–16, 1863 The Draft Riots A protest against a draft the rich could buy out of became four days of racist terror, and the deadliest riot in American history. These are the names the relief committee wrote down. An 1883 color lithograph of the Brooklyn Bridge spanning the East River, its stone towers and cables rising over sailing ships. Opened May 24, 1883 The Brooklyn Bridge It took fourteen years, around twenty-seven lives, and three Roeblings to throw a steel road across the East River. The one who finished it was a woman nobody would let be an engineer. The upper floors of the Asch Building on fire on March 25, 1911, smoke pouring from the windows. March 25, 1911 The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire 146 garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, died in eighteen minutes behind a locked door. The city never treated its workers the same way again. The rainbow-flag-draped facade of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street during Pride weekend 2016. June 28 – July 3, 1969 The Stonewall Uprising The police raided a Mafia-run gay bar on Christopher Street, as they always did. This time the bar fought back, and a movement was born. Almost everything else you have heard is contested. A graffiti-covered subway train and platform at the Times Square station in New York City in the 1970s. 1975 The 1975 Fiscal Crisis The richest city in the country nearly went bankrupt, a teachers’ pension fund saved it by a couple of hours, and a tabloid put four words on the President that he never actually said. An engraving of a colonial courtroom as lawyer Andrew Hamilton addresses the bench at the 1735 Zenger trial. 1735 The Trial of John Peter Zenger A New York jury freed a printer the law said was guilty, and planted the idea that became the free press. It changed no law for seventy years. An 1869 color lithograph of crowds at Bethesda Terrace and the fountain in Central Park. 1857–1876 Central Park and Seneca Village America’s first great public park was built as a democratic gift to the city. To make it, New York razed a stable Black community and called it a slum. An 1886 painting of the Statue of Liberty’s dedication, the statue rising over a harbor full of boats and cannon smoke. Dedicated October 28, 1886 The Statue of Liberty It was a French gift about the end of slavery, not immigration. The famous poem was not added for seventeen more years, and a tabloid crowdfunded the pedestal. The tiled, vaulted platform of the original IRT City Hall subway station, around 1904. October 27, 1904 The First Subway The mayor took the controls of the first train and refused to give them back. The subway he drove would build the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. A 1936 black-and-white portrait of the poet Langston Hughes in a suit. c. 1918–1935 The Harlem Renaissance The Great Migration made Harlem the capital of Black America, and a generation of artists there refused, for the first time at that scale, to ask anyone’s permission. The brick apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, recognized as the birthplace of hip-hop. August 11, 1973 The Birth of Hip-Hop A back-to-school party in a Bronx rec room, thrown to buy school clothes, gave the world its most influential music. The block that started it had been gutted by a highway. Two columns of light rising into the night sky over Lower Manhattan, a memorial to the World Trade Center towers. September 11, 2001 September 11, 2001 The deadliest day in the city’s history. 2,753 New Yorkers were killed, and the firefighters climbed the stairs as everyone else came down. The aged, hand-written 1657 Flushing Remonstrance manuscript in iron-gall ink, the petition signed by about thirty residents of Flushing. December 27, 1657 The Flushing Remonstrance Thirty Englishmen in a Dutch colony refused an order to turn away Quakers, and wrote one of the first American arguments for religious freedom. None of them was a Quaker. A hand-drawn plan of colonial New York City around 1730, showing the streets and waterfront of lower Manhattan a decade before the 1741 trials. 1741 The 1741 "Conspiracy" Trials After a string of fires, New York tried scores of enslaved people for a plot to burn the city. About thirty were executed, thirteen burned at the stake. Historians still doubt the plot was real. Thomas Nast’s 1871 cartoon showing Boss Tweed and his Tammany Ring standing in a circle, each man pointing at the next to dodge the blame. 1871 Boss Tweed and the Tammany Ring William Tweed and his ring stole tens of millions from New York, until a dead man’s ledgers, a relentless newspaper, and a cartoonist’s pencil brought him down. Immigrants in the railed pens of the Registry Room at Ellis Island in the early 1900s, waiting for inspection beneath the great vaulted hall. 1892 to 1954 Ellis Island For sixty-two years, the front door to America for twelve million people. The names were not changed here, and almost no one was turned away. The Empire State Building rising over Manhattan in 1932, the year after it opened as the tallest building in the world. Opened May 1, 1931 The Empire State Building The tallest building on earth, raised in 410 days at the bottom of the Depression, then so empty they called it the Empty State Building. The Lower Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge across the East River in 1973, New York in the years of its fiscal crisis. July 13-14, 1977 The Blackout of 1977 Lightning, a cascade of failures, and twenty-five hours of darkness. Unlike the calm blackout of 1965, this one came with fire. An inverted pink triangle on a black background above the words SILENCE = DEATH, the emblem of 1980s AIDS activism. 1981-1996 The AIDS Crisis and ACT UP New York was the epicenter. Tens of thousands died while the government looked away, until grief turned into the most effective protest movement of the city’s modern history. A 19th-century engraving of the Five Points: a crowded, chaotic intersection of brawls, peddlers, pigs, and Black and white residents in Lower Manhattan. The 19th century The Five Points The slum the world used as shorthand for urban poverty, built on a buried pond. It was also one of America’s first integrated neighborhoods, and a birthplace of tap. George Washington, hand on the Bible, taking the first presidential oath on the balcony of Federal Hall above a crowd on Wall Street in 1789. April 30, 1789 Washington’s Inauguration at Federal Hall The first president took the oath on a Wall Street balcony, in the nation’s first capital. He was so nervous he could barely read his speech. A black-and-white portrait of an elderly Andrew Haswell Green, the civic leader who spent thirty years campaigning for the 1898 consolidation. January 1, 1898 The Birth of Greater New York At midnight, five separate places became one city of 3.4 million. Brooklyn, then the fourth-largest city in America, approved the merger by 277 votes. A period photograph of the General Slocum, a large wooden side-wheel paddle steamer, before the fire that killed about 1,021 people. June 15, 1904 The General Slocum Disaster A church picnic boat caught fire in the East River with rotted life preservers and lifeboats wired in place. About 1,021 died, most of them women and children, the city’s deadliest day until September 11. Robert Moses in a suit standing beside a large tabletop model of a proposed New York bridge in 1939. The 1920s to 1968 Robert Moses, the Master Builder For four decades the most powerful man in New York held no elected office. He built the bridges, beaches, and expressways, and he displaced half a million people to do it. Aerial view of pumping equipment on Governors Island draining floodwater from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel after Hurricane Sandy. October 29, 2012 Hurricane Sandy A record fourteen-foot tide flooded Lower Manhattan, the subway, and the waterfront across all five boroughs. It killed at least 43 New Yorkers and forced the city to plan for the next one. A large crowd of men in hats and overcoats fills Wall Street outside the New York Stock Exchange during the crash of October 1929. October 1929 The Crash of 1929 The week the bottom fell out of Wall Street. The bankers called it "a little distress selling." The leaping-broker suicides were mostly a myth. The Depression was not. Men in suits and hats pour liquor from confiscated barrels into a New York street sewer during Prohibition. 1920 to 1933 Prohibition in New York The wettest city in dry America. New York had tens of thousands of speakeasies, stopped enforcing the law a decade early, and turned bootlegging into big organized crime. The Main Concourse of Grand Central Terminal looking south, sunlight streaming through the tall arched windows, in the early 1900s. Opened February 2, 1913 Grand Central Terminal The most platforms of any station on earth, built because a deadly tunnel crash forced the trains underground. Saved from the wrecking ball, decades later, by a Supreme Court case and a former first lady. The 1931 police mugshot of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, front and side profile, in jacket and tie. 1931 to today The Five Families How the New York Mafia organized itself into five families and a national board, ran the city’s rackets for decades, and was finally broken by an upstate traffic stop, a Senate witness, and the RICO law. People walking along a planted path on the elevated High Line park in Manhattan, with modern glass buildings rising around it. 1934, reborn 2009 The High Line A freight railroad built to lift deadly trains off "Death Avenue," abandoned for decades, then saved from demolition and turned into a park in the sky. Its co-founder later said it failed the neighborhood. A 1766 engraving of a satirical funeral procession on a riverbank, men in 18th-century dress carrying a small coffin representing the repealed Stamp Act. 1765 to 1766 The Stamp Act The first time the colonies acted as one against London, and they did it in New York. A tax on paper brought a congress, a riot, and the Liberty Pole. A 19th-century engraving of emaciated American prisoners crowded in the dim, foul hold of the British prison ship HMS Jersey. 1776 to 1783 The Prison Ships On rotting hulks in the bay off Brooklyn, the British held captured Americans in conditions so lethal that more died there than in all the battles of the Revolution. A 1664 Dutch watercolor of New Amsterdam: low houses, a windmill and fort, and sailing ships in the harbor at the southern tip of Manhattan. September 1664 New Amsterdam Becomes New York Four English warships sailed into the harbor, and the Dutch colony surrendered without a shot. Peter Stuyvesant wanted to fight. His own people would not let him. An 1842 print of the Croton Water Celebration: a long parade of marchers and banners through Lower Manhattan honoring the arrival of clean water. Opened October 14, 1842 The Croton Aqueduct Before it, New York drank from foul wells and watched fires burn for want of water. The Croton Aqueduct brought clean water 41 miles by gravity, and the city threw a party. An 1821 engraved map of Manhattan showing the rectangular street grid of numbered avenues and cross streets laid out by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. 1811 The Commissioners’ Grid Three men and a young surveyor drew a relentless rectangle over Manhattan, 12 avenues and 155 streets, and explained that right angles were simply cheaper to build. It is why the city looks the way it does. The interior of a New York City subway car covered in spray-painted graffiti in the 1970s, the era of the city’s disorder. 1990 The Deadliest Year New York hit a record 2,245 murders in 1990, about six a day. Then crime fell for a generation. Why it fell is still one of the city’s great arguments.

Or browse all seven eras

  1. A 17th-century engraving of a low fort and small houses at the southern tip of Manhattan, with sailing ships and a Native canoe on the water. to 1664 Lenapehoking & New Amsterdam Before it was New York it was Lenapehoking, then a Dutch trading post at the tip of Manhattan. The record opens with a "purchase" that was nothing of the kind, a war on the people who were already here, and a tolerance the colony had to force on its own governor. 8 sources, from “Hudson Meets 'Loving People'” to “The Bloodless Takeover”
  2. A 19th-century painting of colonists and soldiers using ropes to topple a gilded equestrian statue of King George III at Bowling Green in 1776. 1664–1783 The Colonial City & the Revolution A century under the British crown that ended in revolution. The city gave America an early case for a free press, a panic that sent dozens to the gallows and the stake, a brutal seven-year occupation, and Washington’s tearful goodbye in a Pearl Street tavern. 7 sources, from “Zenger Acquitted, Press Freed” to “Washington’s Farewell”
  3. A 19th-century colored engraving of canal boats climbing a double flight of stone locks at Lockport on the Erie Canal. 1783–1860 The Empire City Rises Capital, canal, and grid. In two generations New York wired itself to a continent, inaugurated the first president, freed the last enslaved people in the state, and built the water main and the park that made the modern city livable. It also built the slum that became a byword for poverty. 8 sources, from “Washington’s First Oath” to “A Park for Everybody”
  4. An 1883 engraving looking from the Brooklyn Bridge’s stone tower across the span toward Manhattan, showing the roadway and the raised central walkway. 1860–1898 War, Machine & Bridge War came home in the deadliest riot in American history, a political machine ran the city for its own profit, and a bridge redrew the skyline. The age that raised the Statue of Liberty also perfected the tenement, and the cartoon that brought down a boss. 7 sources, from “The Colored Orphan Asylum Burns” to “Greater New York Is Born”
  5. A photograph of the newly completed Empire State Building rising above lower Manhattan, around 1931. 1898–1945 The Modern Metropolis The subway, the skyscraper, and a factory fire that changed how America treats its workers. Five boroughs became one machine, women won the vote, Harlem became the capital of Black culture, and a mayor read the funnies on the radio so kids wouldn’t miss them. 12 sources, from “The Mayor Drives the Subway” to “The Mayor Reads the Comics”
  6. A New York City subway car covered inside and out with spray-painted graffiti, mid-1970s. 1945–1980 Crisis & Reinvention The city almost died, then reinvented the culture of the world. A planner with a "meat ax," a writer who stopped him, an uprising at a Village bar, a near-bankruptcy summed up in one tabloid headline, a blackout, and a back-to-school party in the Bronx that started hip-hop. 8 sources, from “Moses and the Meat Ax” to “A Night of Terror”
  7. The smoking North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, seen across the water from Lower Manhattan’s waterfront. 1980–today Comeback & the 21st Century From the deadliest year on record to the morning that changed everything, and back. A plague the government ignored, a crime wave and the argued-over comeback that followed, the towers, a protest that gave the country a phrase, and a storm tide up the avenues. 8 sources, from “1,112 and Counting” to “Sandy’s Surge”

The next chapter is being written now.

We read every newsroom in New York and the state each morning and explain what it means. The history above is why the daily brief reads the way it does. Get it free.

Free to start. The unsubscribe link actually works.