On this day in New York.

336 days written up so far, and counting.

1. December 31, 1907 The First Ball Drops in Times Square The city banned fireworks over the crowd, so the New York Times built a glowing iron ball instead, and a New Year's tradition was born on a flagpole.
2. December 30, 1873 Al Smith Is Born on South Street A fish-market clerk's kid from the Fourth Ward grew up alongside the Brooklyn Bridge and became the first Catholic ever nominated for president.
3. December 29, 1975 The LaGuardia Bombing Nobody Ever Answered For A locker bomb tore through the TWA baggage claim at LaGuardia on the Monday after Christmas, killed eleven people, and left a case file that never closed.
4. December 28, 1954 Denzel Washington Is Born in Mount Vernon A preacher's son from a Westchester suburb grows up to win two Oscars and become the biggest movie star this city ever produced.
5. December 27, 1932 Radio City Music Hall Opens (And Nearly Flops) The world's largest indoor theater debuted at Rockefeller Center with an opening show so long that even John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave up and left before it ended.
6. December 26, 1947 The Blizzard Nobody Saw Coming No wind, no warning, and by the end of the day after Christmas 1947, New York was buried under more snow than anyone alive had ever seen fall in a single day.
7. December 25, 1899 Humphrey Bogart Is Born on West 103rd Street Before he was Rick Blaine or Sam Spade, he was just the surgeon's kid on the Upper West Side, and his family didn't even hand out kisses on his birthday.
8. December 24 December 24, 1931 The First Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree In the worst year of the Depression, the men digging the foundation for Rockefeller Center put up a scrap balsam fir with their own money and their own cranberries, and nobody asked them to.
9. December 23 December 23, 1823 The Poem That Invented Santa Claus A Manhattan professor who didn't want his name near it wrote the poem that gave every kid in New York the sleigh, the eight reindeer, and the chimney landing still waited on every December 24th.
10. December 22 December 22, 1877 The American Museum of Natural History Opens Its First Building A young museum with no real home finally got one on empty parkland on the Upper West Side, and a sitting president came up from Washington to declare it open.
11. December 21 December 21, 1913 The First Crossword Runs in a Sunday Paper A Liverpool-born editor filled a hollow diamond with letters to pad out a slow Sunday page, and gave the world its most durable way to kill a subway ride.
12. December 20 December 20, 1946 It's a Wonderful Life Opens to a Shrug The movie that now owns Christmas Eve in a million living rooms opened at a Times Square movie palace to so-so reviews and a box office that lost RKO money.
13. December 19, 1903 The Williamsburg Bridge Opens A steel-towered upstart beat the Brooklyn Bridge's own suspension span by four and a half feet, and within a year peddlers and pushcarts had turned it into the busiest sidewalk in New York.
14. December 18, 1970 DMX Is Born in Mount Vernon A kid named Earl Simmons enters the world in Mount Vernon, five years before Yonkers' School Street projects hand him the childhood that ends up in every bar he ever wrote.
15. December 16 December 16, 1835 The Great Fire of 1835 On the coldest night anyone could remember, Wall Street burned for fifteen hours while the rivers that should have put it out sat frozen solid.
16. December 15, 1940 The Sixth Avenue Subway Finally Opens After sixty years of a train screeching overhead, Sixth Avenue got its tunnel, and Midtown got a new spine.
17. December 13, 1928 Gershwin's Paris Taxi Horns Honk at Carnegie Hall George Gershwin carried four Parisian taxi horns home in his luggage so Carnegie Hall could hear the real sound of a Paris street corner.
18. December 12, 1936 The Henry Hudson Bridge Opens A single steel arch over the Spuyten Duyvil linked Manhattan to the Bronx and put Robert Moses's fingerprints on how New Yorkers would drive for the next century.
19. December 11 December 11, 2008 The FBI Knocks on Bernie Madoff's Door One morning on the Upper East Side, the city's most trusted money manager ran out of new investors to pay off the old ones, and the largest Ponzi scheme in American history finally collapsed.
20. December 10 December 10, 2018 Fearless Girl Gets Her Own Corner of Wall Street After 21 months squaring off with the Charging Bull at Bowling Green, the little bronze girl packed up and planted herself right in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
21. December 9, 1793 Noah Webster Launches the American Minerva Before he spent decades locked up with his dictionary, Noah Webster ran a Federalist newspaper in lower Manhattan, bankrolled by Alexander Hamilton's cash.
22. December 8, 1980 John Lennon Is Shot Outside the Dakota A man he'd signed an autograph for hours earlier was waiting in the archway when John Lennon came home for the last time.
23. December 7, 1842 The Philharmonic Plays Its First Note A violinist who organized the whole thing himself raised his bow at the Apollo Rooms on Broadway and New York got its first orchestra, opening with Beethoven.
24. December 6, 1896 Ira Gershwin Is Born on Eldridge Street Before he was half of the sharpest songwriting duo Broadway ever had, he was just the oldest kid in a Lower East Side flat, cataloging the noise outside his window.
25. December 5, 1876 The Brooklyn Theatre Fire A curtain caught fire during the final act of a hit melodrama, and the cheap seats upstairs had only one stairway out.
26. December 4, 1783 Washington Says Goodbye at Fraunces Tavern In a back room on Pearl Street, the general who beat the British told his own army he was done, and meant it.
27. December 3, 1947 Brando's Streetcar Rewrites Broadway Acting A 23-year-old unknown named Marlon Brando pulled on a torn T-shirt at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and gave Broadway a new way to act.
28. December 2, 1923 Maria Callas Is Born in Manhattan Five months after her parents got off the boat from Greece, the woman who would remake opera arrived at a hospital on Fifth Avenue, and nobody in the delivery room had any idea what they had.
29. December 1 December 1, 2013 The Curve at Spuyten Duyvil A Metro-North engineer who'd switched to the early shift two weeks earlier drifted off at 82 miles an hour, and the curve at Spuyten Duyvil didn't forgive it.
30. November 30, 1924 Shirley Chisholm Is Born in Brooklyn The daughter of a Barbadian seamstress and a British Guianese factory hand grew up to become the first Black woman ever elected to Congress.
31. November 29 November 29, 1890 The Cadet Who Dared Navy to a Football Game A West Point cadet built a team from scratch, talked his class into a game nobody had asked for, and watched Navy hand him a 24 to 0 lesson in front of a thousand screaming spectators.
32. November 28, 1953 Frank Olson Goes Through a Statler Window Nine days after the CIA slipped him LSD without telling him, an Army scientist went out a tenth-floor window across the street from Penn Station, and his family spent decades being lied to about why.
33. November 27 November 27, 1910 Penn Station Opens, Modeled on a Roman Bath The Pennsylvania Railroad built New Yorkers a front door fit for an emperor, and lost it fifty-three years later in a demolition that built the city's preservation movement instead.
34. November 26, 1942 Casablanca Opens in New York Warner Bros. rushed a small war picture into one Broadway theater to ride real headlines out of North Africa, and by accident produced the most quoted movie ever made.
35. November 25, 1783 The Last Redcoats Leave New York After seven years of occupation, the British finally sailed out of the harbor, but not before someone greased the flagpole at the Battery for one last insult.
36. November 24, 1950 Guys and Dolls Opens on Broadway A show built out of Damon Runyon's crapshooters and mission dolls opened on 46th Street and turned out to be one of the best musicals New York ever produced.
37. November 23 November 23, 1903 Caruso Debuts at the Met A Naples-born tenor nobody in the house had heard sing walked onstage as the Duke in Rigoletto and turned the Met into the address every touring voice in Europe wanted next.
38. November 22 November 22, 1950 The Kew Gardens Train Wreck The night before Thanksgiving, a locked brake and a misread signal turned two packed LIRR commuter trains into the deadliest wreck in the railroad's history.
39. November 21 November 21, 1964 The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge Opens For one morning in November, the bridge linking Brooklyn to Staten Island was the longest suspension span on Earth, and it stitched the forgotten borough to the rest of the city for good.
40. November 20 November 20, 1888 The Clock That Started Clocking You In A jeweler in Auburn got tired of watchmen policing his workers, so he patented a machine to do it for him, and it grew up into IBM.
41. November 18, 1928 Mickey Mouse Gets His Voice at the Colony A near-broke California cartoonist bet his studio on a mouse, a steamboat, and a soundtrack that actually matched the picture, and Broadway went for it.
42. November 16, 1959 The Sound of Music Opens on Broadway Mary Martin climbed every mountain at the Lunt-Fontanne while the critics argued over how much sugar a New Yorker could take, and nine months later it was the last thing Oscar Hammerstein ever wrote.
43. November 15 November 15, 1926 NBC Goes on the Air From the Waldorf A thousand people in evening dress packed a Fifth Avenue ballroom to watch RCA turn radio into a national business, and the country hasn't been the same since.
44. November 14, 1851 Moby-Dick Hits New York Shelves Harper & Brothers put out the first American edition of a whale of a book that New York barely noticed, and it took the better part of a century for anyone to catch up to it.
45. November 13 November 13, 1927 The Holland Tunnel Opens Under the Hudson At one minute past midnight, New York and New Jersey stopped needing a boat to shake hands.
46. November 11, 1807 New York Gets Called Gotham A broke twenty-four-year-old lawyer wrote a joke about a village of fools in a magazine that barely lasted a year, and New York has been Gotham ever since.
47. November 10, 1969 Sesame Street Premieres on Public TV A fictional Manhattan stoop built by a foundation grant taught a generation of kids their letters, and proved public television could out-teach the cartoons.
48. November 9, 1965 The Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 A single misfiring relay near Niagara Falls knocked out power to more than 30 million people in five minutes, and New York spent that night finding out it was calmer in the dark than anyone expected.
49. November 8, 1977 Koch Beats Cuomo to Take City Hall In a city fresh off a blackout, a serial killer's arrest, and a brush with bankruptcy, voters picked the loudest guy on the ballot to clean it up.
50. November 7, 1989 David Dinkins Elected New York's First Black Mayor A Manhattan borough president who'd already knocked out three-term mayor Ed Koch turned around and beat Rudy Giuliani by less than three points, breaking a barrier the city had never crossed in three centuries.
51. November 6, 1928 FDR Wins the Governorship by a Whisker The same night New York turned its back on Al Smith for president, it handed his protege the governor's chair by a margin thinner than a subway platform gap.
52. November 5, 1968 Brooklyn Sends Shirley Chisholm to Congress A sound truck rolling through Bedford-Stuyvesant announced "fighting Shirley Chisholm" was coming through, and on Election Day the district answered by sending the first Black woman in American history to Congress.
53. November 4, 2009 Godzilla Wins It: The Yankees Take Their 27th Title At the brand-new Yankee Stadium, a soft-spoken slugger from Japan hit like nobody had in a World Series clincher in half a century, and the Bronx got its first parade in nine years.
54. November 3, 2014 One World Trade Center Opens for Business Thirteen years after the towers fell, workers walked back onto the same ground to start their jobs in a 1,776-foot answer to the hole in the skyline.
55. November 2, 1993 Giuliani Beats Dinkins in a Bitter Rematch Fifty-three thousand votes out of nearly 1.9 million decided who ran New York, and ended the city's first Black mayoralty after a single term.
56. November 1 November 1, 1918 The Malbone Street Wreck A dispatcher with under three hours of training took a Brooklyn subway curve at five times its speed limit, and the wooden cars behind him came apart.
57. October 31, 1974 The Village Halloween Parade Is Born A puppeteer tired of watching Halloween go to waste in his own neighborhood turned a walk around his apartment building into what would become the country's biggest Halloween party.
58. October 30, 1938 Orson Welles Panics America From a Madison Avenue Studio A 23-year-old actor read a fake news bulletin about Martians landing in New Jersey, and enough people believed it that the country is still arguing about what happened.
59. October 29 October 29, 1929 Black Tuesday Wipes Out Wall Street In one afternoon on the floor at Broad and Wall, sixteen million shares changed hands and the fortunes that built the boom of the 1920s went with them.
60. October 28, 1886 The Statue of Liberty Is Dedicated Grover Cleveland accepted France's gift in a harbor fog so thick the fireworks got postponed, and Wall Street clerks invented a New York tradition by accident.
61. October 27 October 27, 1904 Mayor-Motorman Opens the Subway New York's first subway opened on October 27, 1904, and the mayor liked driving the train so much he wouldn't let go of the controls.
62. October 26, 1825 The Wedding of the Waters New York finished a 363-mile ditch through the wilderness, and a New York City banker's dream instantly turned Manhattan into the mouth of a continent.
63. October 25, 1931 The George Washington Bridge Opens It came in eight months early, cost sixty million dollars, and the first two people across it were kids on roller skates.
64. October 23 October 23, 1929 The Chrysler Building's Secret Spire Goes Up For about ninety minutes on an October Wednesday, a stainless steel needle rose out of a hidden crown atop 42nd Street and made Manhattan taller than anything else on earth, one day before the market fell apart.
65. October 22 October 22, 1883 The Old Met Opens Its Doors New York's new-money families got tired of being shut out of the opera boxes downtown, so they built a bigger, gaudier opera house of their own and dared the old guard to compete.
66. October 21 October 21, 1959 The Guggenheim Opens on Fifth Avenue A white spiral ramp landed across the street from Central Park, and Frank Lloyd Wright never got to see New Yorkers walk it.
67. October 20, 1964 Herbert Hoover Dies at the Waldorf The man most Americans blamed for the Great Depression spent his last twenty-four years two floors above a Park Avenue lobby, and New York let him do it quietly.
68. October 19, 1987 The Dow's Worst Day On a Monday morning on Wall Street, the stock market didn't dip, it fell off a cliff, and nobody down there had ever seen anything like it.
69. October 18, 1776 Glover's Stand at Pell's Point Seven hundred and fifty men behind stone walls in what's now the Bronx bought George Washington the one thing his army couldn't survive without: time.
70. October 17 October 17, 1777 Burgoyne Surrenders at Saratoga Upstate mud, a beaten army, and one handed-back sword that ended up dragging France into the American Revolution.
71. October 16, 1916 Margaret Sanger Opens Brownsville's Birth Control Clinic For ten cents and a few questions in English, Yiddish, or Italian, women in one Brooklyn storefront got something no clinic in America had ever offered them out in the open.
72. October 15, 1939 New York Finally Gets Its Own Airport Sick of watching his city's planes land in New Jersey, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia built a $23 million airport in Queens, and 325,000 people showed up in Queens to watch him dedicate it.
73. October 13 October 13, 1843 Twelve Immigrants Found B'nai B'rith in a Lower East Side Café Twelve German Jewish immigrants, tired of facing a new country with no safety net, invented one for themselves over coffee on the Lower East Side.
74. October 12 October 12, 1920 Ground Is Broken on the Holland Tunnel A shovel went into the mud at Canal Street seven years before a single car would drive through, on a project that would kill the engineer who designed it.
75. October 11, 1884 Eleanor Roosevelt Is Born in Manhattan A lonely, motherless childhood among old New York money produced the woman who later helped write the rulebook for human dignity worldwide.
76. October 10, 1935 Porgy and Bess Opens on Broadway George Gershwin brought Catfish Row to the Alvin Theatre with an all-Black cast and a full orchestra pit, and the critics spent the next four months arguing about what to even call it.
77. October 9 October 9, 1825 The Restauration Reaches New York A leaky Norwegian sloop built for hauling iron and fish crossed the Atlantic crammed with 52 people fleeing a state church, and New York's customs officers arrested the captain for it.
78. October 8 October 8, 1956 Don Larsen Throws a Perfect Game in the World Series A journeyman pitcher who'd lost 21 games the year before threw the only perfect game in World Series history, and his manager still wouldn't call it his best.
79. October 7, 1765 Nine Colonies Meet at New York City Hall to Fight the Stamp Act Before there was a Continental Congress, there was this: delegates from up and down the coast crammed into a room on Wall Street and decided London didn't get to tax them without asking.
80. October 6, 1927 Broadway Watches the Silent Era End One ad-libbed line from Al Jolson at a Times Square movie palace, and the picture business would never be silent again.
81. October 5, 1921 The First Subway Series Two New York teams, one ballpark, and for the first time in history, a stranger's voice telling the city how the game came out before the next morning's papers hit the stoop.
82. October 4 October 4, 1955 The Dodgers Finally Win It All After seven trips to the World Series and seven letdowns, Brooklyn beat the Yankees on their own field and the borough finally got its parade.
83. October 3, 1951 The Shot Heard 'Round the World One swing at the Polo Grounds settled a tied pennant race and gave New York the most replayed home run in its history.
84. October 2 October 2, 1897 The Brooklyn Institute's Museum Opens Its Doors A borough about to lose its independence built itself a palace for art anyway, and only a slice of it ever got finished.
85. October 1 October 1, 1902 The Flatiron Building Opens Its Doors The tower everyone in New York bet would blow over in a strong wind opened for business on October 1, 1902, and never left.
86. September 30, 1927 Babe Ruth Hits Sixty One swing off a journeyman Washington lefty gave the Yankees a number that would take 34 years, and a teammate's understudy, to beat.
87. September 29, 1954 Willie Mays Makes "The Catch" With the World Series tied and two Cleveland runners ready to score, a 23-year-old Giants center fielder turned his back on home plate, ran down a ball no one else would have chased, and became a legend in the six seconds it took to catch it.
88. September 28, 1901 Ed Sullivan Is Born in Harlem A Harlem-born sportswriter turned Broadway gossip columnist would grow up to hand America its living room introduction to Elvis and the Beatles.
89. September 27, 1954 Steve Allen Invents Late-Night TV A comic sat down at a piano in a Broadway theater and, almost by accident, wrote the rulebook every late-night host has followed since.
90. September 26, 1898 George Gershwin Is Born in East New York The man who'd write the sound of American cities came into the world in a second-floor walk-up in East New York, with no piano in the house yet.
91. September 25 September 25, 1789 The Bill of Rights Gets Its Start on Wall Street Before it was ever ratified, the Bill of Rights was just twelve amendments Congress sent out the door from a building on Wall Street.
92. September 24, 1869 The Day They Cornered Gold and Wall Street Broke Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to corner the entire nation's gold supply using the President's own brother-in-law as their inside man, and for one Friday morning it almost worked.
93. September 23 September 23, 1962 Lincoln Center Opens Its First Hall, Sound and All Leonard Bernstein raised his baton for the first note ever played in a concert hall built just for it, and the room started arguing back before the applause died down.
94. September 22 September 22, 1776 Nathan Hale Is Hanged as a Spy A 21-year-old Yale grad turned Continental Army spy was caught with notes in his shoes and hanged near what's now 66th and Third, and the line he supposedly said on the rope outlived the failed mission by 250 years.
95. September 21 September 21, 1776 The Great Fire of New York Six days after the British took Manhattan, a fire tore through a quarter of the city overnight, and to this day nobody has ever proven who started it.
96. September 20, 1881 A President Sworn In at Two in the Morning on Lexington Avenue Hours after an assassin's bullet finally killed James Garfield, his vice president took the oath of office in his own front parlor because the country could not wait for daylight.
97. September 18, 1851 The Times Prints Its First Issue A one-cent, four-page paper came out of a basement on Nassau Street promising to be conservative about some things and radical about everything else, and it never stopped printing.
98. September 17, 2011 Occupy Wall Street Moves Into Zuccotti Park A few hundred people with no permit and no leader walked into a privately owned plaza in the Financial District and stayed for fifty-nine days, long enough to change how the country argued about money.
99. September 16, 1776 Washington's First Win Comes at Harlem Heights Ten days after losing New York City outright, Washington's battered army finally stood its ground on the bluffs above Manhattanville and didn't run.
100. September 15, 1776 The Landing at Kip's Bay Five Royal Navy warships turned the East River shore near today's East 30s into a wall of fire, and George Washington watched his own militia run before it.
101. September 14, 1948 New York Breaks Ground for the United Nations A bucket of dirt lifted from a stretch of old slaughterhouses and tenements on the East River kicked off the tower that would make Turtle Bay the capital of the world.
102. September 13 September 13, 1970 The First New York City Marathon A volunteer firefighter paid a dollar, ran four hot loops of Central Park, and became the answer to the city's favorite trivia question.
103. September 12, 1951 Sugar Ray Robinson Takes His Title Back at the Polo Grounds Bleeding from a reopened cut with the clock running out on him, Sugar Ray Robinson found one more right hand and took his middleweight crown back in front of 61,370 people in Upper Manhattan.
104. September 11 September 11, 2001 The Towers Fall Two hijacked jets turned a Tuesday morning skyline into a crime scene, and New York has been rebuilding around the hole ever since.
105. September 10, 1932 The City's Own Subway Finally Opens New York built a subway to break the grip of two private transit companies, and when it finally opened at midnight, the mayor didn't even show up.
106. September 9, 1971 Attica Prison Riot For four days in September 1971, inmates at a prison in western New York held the state's attention and forced a reckoning with what happens behind those walls.
107. September 8, 1810 The Tonquin Sails for Astor's Empire A New York merchant bankrolled a three-masted bark, packed it with fur traders and a hot-tempered Navy captain, and sent it around Cape Horn to stake a claim on the far edge of the continent.
108. September 7, 1860 Grandma Moses Is Born Upstate The woman who'd become America's most famous grandmother painter started out as the third of ten kids on a Washington County flax farm, seven decades before she ever picked up a brush.
109. September 5, 1882 New York's Workers Throw Their Own Parade On a Tuesday when they could have been earning a day's pay, 20,000 New York workers walked off the job and marched up Broadway to invent Labor Day instead.
110. September 4, 1882 Edison Turns On Lower Manhattan One flipped switch on Pearl Street proved a city could run on electricity sold straight into its buildings, no gas company required.
111. September 3 September 3, 1609 Henry Hudson Sails Into the River That Would Take His Name An Englishman sailing for the Dutch, hunting a shortcut to Asia, blew off his own bosses and steered straight into the harbor that would become New York.
112. September 2, 1969 The First ATM Opens in Rockville Centre A boxy machine on a Long Island sidewalk taught New York that the bank never had to close.
113. September 1, 1932 Beau James Resigns The best-dressed mayor New York ever had ran out of ways to explain where the money came from, and City Hall watched him sail for Europe instead of answering for it.
114. August 31, 1946 The Magazine That Ran One Story For one week in August 1946, The New Yorker gave up its cartoons, its listings, its whole personality, and let a 31,000-word account of one bombed city fill the entire issue.
115. August 29, 1962 The George Washington Bridge Gets Its Martha One August morning the world's busiest bridge doubled its lanes and picked up a nickname borrowed from George Washington's wife.
116. August 28 August 28, 1922 Radio Learns to Sell Real Estate A ten-minute pitch for a Queens co-op turned a hobbyist's medium built to sell radio sets into one built to sell everything else.
117. August 27 August 27, 1776 Washington Loses Brooklyn On a hot August morning in what's now Brooklyn, the British trapped Washington's army in the biggest battle of the whole Revolutionary War, and only a nighttime retreat across the East River kept the fight alive.
118. August 26, 1970 The Women's Strike for Equality Takes Fifth Avenue On the fiftieth anniversary of the vote, tens of thousands of women walked off the job and filled Fifth Avenue sidewalk to sidewalk.
119. August 25 August 25, 1835 The Great Moon Hoax For six straight days a penny paper on Nassau Street told New Yorkers there were bat-winged men and blue unicorns living on the moon, and the city could not stop reading.
120. August 24 August 24, 1857 The Bank Failure That Struck Wall Street Like a Cannon Shot One overextended Ohio trust company's New York office ran dry on a summer morning, and within weeks half of Wall Street's confidence, and thousands of New Yorkers' jobs, went with it.
121. August 23, 1926 Valentino Dies, and Broadway Loses Its Mind The screen's biggest heartthrob collapsed in a Park Avenue hotel suite, and by the time he was gone the city outside his coffin had turned into a riot.
122. August 22 August 22, 1972 The Bank Job That Became Dog Day Afternoon A bungled Brooklyn heist turned into a fourteen-hour hostage standoff broadcast live to the whole city, and three years later Al Pacino made it a movie.
123. August 21 August 21, 1878 The Lawyers Get Their Own Club, in Saratoga Seventy-five lawyers skipped the racetrack and the mineral springs to sit in a town hall courtroom and invent the American Bar Association.
124. August 20 August 20, 1969 The Marine Midland Bombing A former draftsman named Sam Melville planted a bomb in a Wall Street bank tower and injured twenty night-shift workers, opening a months-long campaign that ended with his death at Attica two years later.
125. August 19, 1991 The Crown Heights Riot A station wagon ran a red light in a rabbi's motorcade, killed a seven-year-old boy, and Brooklyn spent three days finding out how much a city can hold before it cracks.
126. August 18, 1969 Hendrix Closes Woodstock Four days after half a million people flooded a dairy farm in Bethel, a few thousand mud-caked stragglers watched Jimi Hendrix turn the national anthem into a war zone.
127. August 17, 1807 Fulton's Steamboat Sails for Albany A weird, smoking contraption pushed off from a Manhattan dock, out-ran the wind, and turned the Hudson into the first commercial steamboat run in history.
128. August 16 August 16, 1920 The Only Man Killed by a Pitch A submarine fastball from a Yankees pitcher at the Polo Grounds ended a Cleveland shortstop's life, and it is still the only time it has happened in the majors.
129. August 15, 1965 The Beatles Take Shea Stadium Fifty-five thousand kids screamed so loud that nobody, not even the band on stage, could hear a single chord of the show.
130. August 14, 2003 New York City Goes Dark A tree branch in Ohio and a software bug nobody caught took down the whole Northeast grid, and by rush hour every subway car in New York had stopped dead between stations.
131. August 13, 1969 New York Gives Apollo 11 a Ticker-Tape Parade Three weeks after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, about four million New Yorkers buried Broadway in confetti to welcome the crew home.
132. August 12 August 12, 1988 Basquiat Dies on Great Jones Street The kid who wrote SAMO on Lower Manhattan walls was dead of an overdose at 27, ten years and a few million dollars later, in the same loft where he once painted alongside Andy Warhol.
133. August 11, 1973 Hip Hop Is Born in a Bronx Rec Room A teenager threw a back-to-school party to make some extra cash, her brother worked two turntables, and a whole art form walked out the door that night.
134. August 10 August 10, 1977 Son of Sam Is Arrested in Yonkers A parking ticket by a fire hydrant did what a 200-detective task force couldn't: it ended a year of citywide terror in one quiet moment outside a Yonkers apartment.
135. August 9, 1848 The Free Soil Party Is Born in Buffalo Twenty thousand Democrats, Whigs, and abolitionists packed a park by Lake Erie and walked out with a new party built on one promise: not one more acre of slave territory.
136. August 8 August 8, 1988 The Central Park Zoo Comes Back to Life After five years behind plywood walls, the zoo reopened with a $35 million rebuild, three climate zones, and a mayor who threw the first fish.
137. August 7, 1974 Petit Walks the Wire Between the Twin Towers Before dawn on a summer morning, a 24-year-old Frenchman strung a cable between the World Trade Center's rooftops and stepped off the edge, 1,350 feet above Church Street, into nothing.
138. August 6, 1988 The Tompkins Square Park Police Riot A fight over a 1 a.m. curfew in the East Village ended with mounted police charging bystanders and reporters until dawn, and the police commissioner himself calling it a riot.
139. August 4 August 4, 1896 The Ten Days That Cooked the Lower East Side Before anyone called it a heat dome, New York baked for ten straight days and buried roughly 1,500 of its own, and the police commissioner who handed out the ice was a young Theodore Roosevelt.
140. August 3, 1863 John Morrissey Opens the Track at Saratoga A bare-knuckle heavyweight champion turned gambling boss threw open a makeshift racetrack upstate a month after Gettysburg, and it never really closed.
141. August 2, 1924 James Baldwin Is Born in Harlem A preacher's stepson born at Harlem Hospital would grow up to write some of the clearest sentences this country has ever produced about itself.
142. August 1, 1943 The Harlem Riot of 1943 A false rumor that a Black soldier had been killed by a cop sent Harlem into a night of rage that cost five lives and cracked open everything the city had been ignoring.
143. July 31, 1912 Milton Friedman Is Born in Brooklyn A Brooklyn baby born to penniless Jewish immigrants from the Hungarian countryside grew up to rewire how the world thinks about money, markets, and the size of government.
144. July 30 July 30, 1916 German Saboteurs Blow Up Black Tom A munitions depot in New York Harbor went up in the dead of night with a force felt for a hundred miles, and shrapnel struck the Statue of Liberty.
145. July 29 July 29, 1976 The Son of Sam Killings Begin in the Bronx A gunman walked up to a parked car in Pelham Bay and opened fire, starting a year of shootings that would grip New York with fear.
146. July 28 July 28, 1945 A Bomber Hits the Empire State Building Lost in thick fog over Manhattan, an Army B-25 flew straight into the 79th floor of the world's tallest building, and a young elevator operator survived a fall no one should have.
147. July 27 July 27, 1789 The First Federal Department Is Born in New York In the nation's first capital on Wall Street, Congress created the office that would become the State Department, the first arm of the new government under the Constitution.
148. July 26 July 26, 1788 New York Ratifies the Constitution, Barely By three votes, at a convention where the opponents held the majority, New York became the eleventh state to join a union it could not afford to sit out.
149. July 25, 1975 A Chorus Line Opens at the Shubert A show built entirely from taped confessions of anonymous Broadway dancers moved uptown from Joseph Papp's Public Theater and turned into the longest-running production Broadway had ever seen.
150. July 24 July 24, 1983 The Pine Tar Game at Yankee Stadium George Brett hit a go-ahead homer in the ninth, then watched an umpire call him out for too much pine tar, and lost his mind on national television.
151. July 23 July 23, 1885 Ulysses S. Grant Dies, and New York Claims His Tomb The general who saved the Union died of throat cancer upstate, and a million and a half people turned out in Manhattan to bury him.
152. July 22 July 22, 1933 Wiley Post Lands Solo from Around the World Fifty thousand New Yorkers mobbed a Brooklyn airfield to greet the one-eyed Oklahoman who had just flown around the planet alone.
153. July 21 July 21, 1983 Diana Ross Sings Through the Storm in Central Park Hundreds of thousands packed the Great Lawn for a free concert, and when the sky opened Diana Ross refused to leave the stage.
154. July 20 July 20, 1899 The Park Row Building Tops Out as the World's Tallest Office Thirty-one stories of brick and steel rose over Printing House Square, and for nearly a decade no office building on earth stood taller.
155. July 19 July 19, 1845 The Great Fire of 1845 Levels Lower Manhattan A predawn fire in a whale-oil shop reached a warehouse full of saltpeter, and the explosion that followed flattened block after block of the young city's business district.
156. July 18, 1999 David Cone Throws a Perfect Game on Yogi Berra Day The Yankees threw a party to finally make peace with Yogi Berra, and David Cone topped it by retiring every single Montreal Expo he faced.
157. July 17 July 17, 2014 "I Can't Breathe" on Staten Island A Staten Island father stopped for selling loose cigarettes died in a police chokehold, and his last words became the rallying cry of a movement.
158. July 16 July 16, 1964 A Police Killing Ignites Harlem The shooting of a fifteen-year-old boy by an off-duty police lieutenant set off six nights of unrest in Harlem, a preview of the summers that followed across urban America.
159. July 15 July 15, 1976 New York Hosts a Convention and Barbara Jordan Steals It A nearly bankrupt city threw open Madison Square Garden for the Democrats, and a congresswoman from Texas gave the keynote that outlasted everything else said that week.
160. July 14 July 14, 1853 New York Opens Its Crystal Palace A dome of iron and glass rose behind the Croton reservoir, and a sitting president came to open America's first world's fair on the ground that is now Bryant Park.
161. July 13 July 13, 1863 The Draft Riots Set the City on Fire Days after the first names were drawn for a Civil War draft, working-class New York exploded into what is still the deadliest riot in American history.
162. July 12 July 12, 1871 The Orange Riot Turns Eighth Avenue into a Battlefield A Protestant parade the city first tried to ban, then chose to guard with soldiers, ended with more than sixty New Yorkers dead on Eighth Avenue.
163. July 11 July 11, 1804 Burr and Hamilton Meet at Weehawken The sitting vice president shot the man who built the nation's finances, and New York lost its most restless founder to a duel the city had every reason to prevent.
164. July 10, 1934 Hubbell Strikes Out Five Hall of Famers in a Row For one afternoon at the Polo Grounds, a Giants screwball artist made the American League's most feared lineup look like a Sunday beer league.
165. July 9, 1776 New Yorkers Tear Down the King Hours after Washington's troops heard the Declaration of Independence read aloud, a Manhattan crowd turned a gilded King George III into scrap metal at Bowling Green.
166. July 8 July 8, 1889 The Giants Come Home to Coogan's Hollow After spending half the season as baseball's most famous vagrants, the New York Giants moved into a half-built ballpark in upper Manhattan and won the crowd before the last out.
167. July 7, 1912 Houdini Goes Overboard Blocked by the NYPD at Pier 6, Houdini steered a tugboat to federal waters off Governors Island, had himself nailed into a weighted crate, and was free from the East River in 57 seconds.
168. July 6, 1971 Louis Armstrong Dies at Home in Corona The trumpeter who taught the world how to swing died in the same modest Queens house he'd refused to trade in, even after he became the most famous horn player on Earth.
169. July 5, 1852 Frederick Douglass Asks Rochester What the Fourth of July Means to a Slave A formerly enslaved man stood up in a packed Rochester hall the day after Independence Day and told the room, politely and devastatingly, that their holiday was not his.
170. July 4, 1827 Slavery Ends in New York New York freed its last enslaved residents on July 4, 1827, and the next morning thousands turned out for a march down Broadway that said what the Fourth of July still couldn't.
171. July 2 July 2, 1878 The Train That Built Brighton Beach Before Coney Island had a boardwalk or a Cyclone, it had a steam train and a hotel man named Engeman who figured out that a beach is worthless if nobody can get to it.
172. July 1 July 1, 1987 WFAN Signs On as the First All-Sports Station At 3 p.m. on a July afternoon, a country music frequency on the dial went dark and came back as something nobody in radio had ever tried: sports, all day, every day.
173. June 30, 1917 Lena Horne Is Born in Bedford-Stuyvesant A Brooklyn girl grows up to turn down segregated audiences, refuse the maid roles Hollywood kept offering Black actresses, and own one torch song so completely nobody else could touch it.
174. June 29, 1858 The Brooklyn Boy Who Finished the Panama Canal The engineer who beat malaria, mudslides, and Congress to open the Panama Canal grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, and today two boroughs' worth of drivers cross a bridge with his name on it without knowing why.
175. June 28 June 28, 1969 The Stonewall Riots A vice raid on a Christopher Street gay bar hit a wall of resistance at 1:20 in the morning, and New York has been arguing about what freedom looks like ever since.
176. June 27, 1929 New York Beams the First Color TV Picture A bouquet of roses and an American flag, rendered in full color on a lab bench in Manhattan, decades before anyone could buy a color set.
177. June 26 June 26, 1927 The Cyclone Opens on Coney Island A wooden roller coaster with a 58-degree first drop opened on Surf Avenue and immediately became the ride every other roller coaster on earth gets measured against.
178. June 25, 1906 Stanford White Is Shot Dead in His Own Rooftop Theater The architect who gave Madison Square Garden its rooftop pleasure palace died there, shot three times by the jealous husband of a chorus girl he had once seduced.
179. June 24 June 24, 1975 Eastern Flight 66 Falls Short of the Runway A Boeing 727 coming in from New Orleans flew into an invisible wall of wind on Rockaway Boulevard, and the crash that followed taught American aviation to fear a storm cell it didn't even have a name for yet.
180. June 21, 1948 Columbia Debuts the Long-Playing Record At the Waldorf Astoria, a Columbia Records executive held up an armful of new discs next to an eight-foot tower of old ones and told the press the 78 was finished.
181. June 20, 1990 Nelson Mandela Rides the Canyon of Heroes Four months out of a South African prison, Nelson Mandela stood in a bulletproof box on the back of a truck and let lower Broadway bury him in paper.
182. June 19 June 19, 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Are Executed at Sing Sing A Lower East Side couple went to the electric chair for passing atomic secrets to Moscow, the only Americans ever executed for espionage during the Cold War.
183. June 18, 1873 Susan B. Anthony Refuses to Pay a Cent A federal judge in a quiet Finger Lakes courthouse told the jury how to vote before they'd said a word, fined Susan B. Anthony $100 for casting a ballot, and she looked him in the eye and said she'd never pay it.
184. June 16, 1857 Two Police Departments Go to War on the City Hall Steps For half an hour on a June morning, New York's own cops beat each other bloody over who actually ran the city.
185. June 15 June 15, 1904 The General Slocum Burns in the East River A church picnic boat caught fire within sight of Manhattan, and by the time it grounded on North Brother Island, more than a thousand of the city's own Germans lay dead in the water.
186. June 14, 1994 The Rangers Finally Win the Cup Fifty-four years of waiting ended on Garden ice in one Tuesday-night Game 7, and a city that had stopped believing let itself believe again.
187. June 13, 1927 Four Million New Yorkers Turn Out for Lindbergh A shy airmail pilot from Minnesota rode up Broadway under a blizzard of ticker tape, and the mayor told him the city was his because he'd won it.
188. June 12, 1939 Cooperstown Opens the Baseball Hall of Fame A sleepy dairy town built on a myth about Abner Doubleday got a shrine anyway, and Babe Ruth showed up to bless it while Ty Cobb missed the photo entirely.
189. June 11 June 11, 1897 Rockaway Beach Becomes a Village Two rival landowners' scraps of oceanfront, one named for himself and one for the railroad he let through, merged into a single village that would become Queens' summer playground.
190. June 10 June 10, 1928 Maurice Sendak Is Born in Brooklyn A sickly kid from a cramped Brooklyn apartment full of loud aunts and uncles grew up to draw the monsters that taught generations of children their own rage was nothing to be ashamed of.
191. June 9 June 9, 1973 Secretariat Wins the Belmont by 31 Lengths At Belmont Park on June 9, 1973, Secretariat stopped racing anyone but the clock and finished the length of a football field ahead of the next horse, sealing the first Triple Crown in a quarter century.
192. June 7, 1928 Charles Strouse Is Born on the Upper West Side The kid from West End Avenue grew up to write the music that made Broadway forget its troubles for three hours at a time.
193. June 6 June 6, 1946 Basketball Gets a Big League, at a Midtown Hotel Nineteen hockey-arena men gathered at a hotel by Grand Central, put a price of a thousand dollars a team on pro basketball, and handed the whole thing to a hockey man to run.
194. June 5, 1995 The Williamsburg Bridge Signal Crash A tired motorman ran a red light on the Williamsburg Bridge at rush hour, and the fix that followed still sets the speed limit under every train you ride today.
195. June 4, 1917 Columbia Hands Out the First Pulitzer Prizes Joseph Pulitzer had been dead for six years, but the newspaperman still got the last word: a permanent shrine to his own trade, built out of the fortune he made putting it on trial every day.
196. June 3, 1968 Valerie Solanas Shoots Andy Warhol at the Factory A writer with a grudge and a manifesto walked into Warhol's silver studio, waited for him to hang up the phone, and pulled the trigger three times.
197. June 2, 1941 Lou Gehrig Dies in the Bronx at 37 Two years after he told a packed Yankee Stadium he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth, the disease that ended his career took his life at home in Riverdale.
198. June 1, 1925 The Kid Takes First Base A headache, a .244 batting average, and one lineup shuffle turned into the longest iron-man streak baseball had ever seen.
199. May 31, 1819 Walt Whitman Is Born on Long Island The poet who would later put the ferry crossing and the crowded sidewalk into American verse started out as a farm kid from West Hills, four years and one move away from becoming a Brooklyn newspaperman.
200. May 29, 2015 One World Observatory Opens Above Ground Zero Fourteen years after the towers fell, you could finally buy a $32 ticket and ride an elevator to the highest view in the city, straight up from the ground where they once stood.
201. May 27 May 27, 1930 The Chrysler Building Opens Its Doors For eleven months, the shiniest building on the skyline belonged to a car salesman's ego, and it was worth every rivet.
202. May 26, 1913 Broadway's Actors Unionize A hundred and twelve actors walked into a hotel on Columbus Avenue and walked out with a union that still runs the New York stage.
203. May 25, 1879 St. Patrick's Cathedral Opens on Fifth Avenue Twenty-one years after Archbishop John Hughes laid the cornerstone in a stretch of Fifth Avenue nobody thought mattered yet, New York's Catholics got their cathedral, built through a war that stopped the whole project cold.
204. May 24, 1883 The Brooklyn Bridge Opens After thirteen years, a designer who died before construction even started, and a chief engineer who ran the last decade of the job from his sickroom, New York could finally walk to Brooklyn without a boat.
205. May 23 May 23, 1911 The Public Library Opens on Fifth Avenue A president showed up, fifteen thousand people packed the marble halls, and two stone lions took up their post on Fifth Avenue for good.
206. May 22 May 22, 1871 The Natural History Museum Opens in an Old Gun Storehouse Before it had dinosaurs, blue whales, or even its own building, New York's American Museum of Natural History opened inside a Central Park fort built to store weapons.
207. May 21, 1959 Gypsy Opens on Broadway Ethel Merman turned into the stage mother to end all stage mothers at the Broadway Theatre, belting out a Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim score critics still argue is the best ever written for a musical.
208. May 20, 1927 Lindbergh Lifts Off From Roosevelt Field A 25 year old airmail pilot gunned a single engine plane down a muddy Long Island runway before dawn, and thirty three and a half hours later he was the most famous man alive.
209. May 19, 1962 Marilyn Monroe Sings Happy Birthday to a President Ten days before his real birthday, John F. Kennedy sat in a packed Madison Square Garden and let a whole city watch Marilyn Monroe practically purr his name.
210. May 18, 1904 Jacob Javits Is Born on the Lower East Side A kid who worked his mother's pushcart on Rivington Street grew up to become the last of a breed: New York's liberal Republican in the U.S. Senate.
211. May 17, 1792 Twenty-Four Brokers Sign the Buttonwood Agreement Outside a tree on Wall Street, a handful of traders burned by a market crash wrote themselves a one page rulebook, and it grew into the New York Stock Exchange.
212. May 16, 1946 Annie Oakley Comes to Broadway Ethel Merman picked up a rifle and a Berlin score at the Imperial Theatre, and New York got a leading lady loud enough to fill it.
213. May 15, 1869 Anthony and Stanton Found the National Woman Suffrage Association Furious that the Constitution might soon promise the vote to Black men and still say nothing about any woman, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton walked out of their own movement and started a new one aimed straight at Washington.
214. May 14 May 14, 1959 Eisenhower Breaks Ground for Lincoln Center A sitting president grabbed a shovel on the Upper West Side to launch an arts campus built over a razed neighborhood most New Yorkers have never heard of.
215. May 13, 1954 The Pajama Game Opens on Broadway A musical about a nickel-and-a-half raise at a pajama factory became the toast of the season, and put a 26-year-old named Bob Fosse on Broadway for the first time.
216. May 12 May 12, 1955 Third Avenue Gets Its Sky Back For seventy-seven years an iron trestle blacked out Third Avenue, and on one May evening in 1955 New Yorkers rode the last train out with drinks in hand and toasted it goodbye.
217. May 11, 1997 Kasparov Loses His Fighting Spirit On the 35th floor of a Seventh Avenue office tower, the greatest chess player alive resigned to a machine after nineteen moves, and the world spent the next twenty years arguing about what had just happened.
218. May 10, 1775 Ethan Allen Takes Fort Ticonderoga A ragtag militia rowed across Lake Champlain before dawn, walked into a sleeping British fort, and pulled off the first American offensive strike of the Revolution without firing a shot.
219. May 9, 1949 Billy Joel Is Born in the Bronx A refugee's grandson from a Levittown tract house in Hicksville grew up to turn Long Island's quarter-acre lawns, and the broke city thirty miles west of them, into the most familiar songbook in New York.
220. May 8 May 8, 1970 The Hard Hat Riot Four days after Kent State, construction workers on their lunch break turned a Wall Street protest into a three-hour brawl that ended with them storming the steps of City Hall.
221. May 7, 1789 New York Throws the First Inaugural Ball A week after taking the oath at Federal Hall, George Washington showed up alone to a ball on Broadway, danced the minuet with the city's best-dressed strangers, and invented a tradition every president since has been imitating.
222. May 6, 1835 Bennett Launches the New York Herald A Scottish immigrant with $500 and a cellar office decided New York didn't need another party newspaper, it needed one that answered to nobody.
223. May 5, 1891 Carnegie Hall Opens, With Tchaikovsky Sharing the Podium A steel man's music hall on West 57th Street opened its doors with a hymn, a bishop, and a Russian composer nobody in New York had ever seen conduct before.
224. May 3 May 3, 1921 A Racing Column Names the Big Apple Long before tourism boards and t-shirt stands got hold of it, New York's most famous nickname started as racetrack slang, slipped into print by a turf writer who liked the sound of it.
225. May 2, 1957 The Shot That Missed Frank Costello A gunman waited in the marble lobby of a Central Park West apartment house, fired once at the reigning boss of New York's underworld, and only grazed his scalp, but the message still landed.
226. May 1, 1931 The Empire State Building Opens New York topped out the tallest building on earth in the middle of the Great Depression, then couldn't fill it.
227. April 29, 1968 Hair Moves Uptown to Broadway A hippie tribe that had been squatting off-Broadway and then a discothèque finally got a real house, and Broadway let them take their clothes off in it.
228. April 28, 1940 Glenn Miller Turns a Phone Number Into a Hit A hotel wanted more calls to its ballroom, so a bandleader built a hit record out of the switchboard number, and it outlasted the building.
229. April 27, 1686 New York City Gets Its Dongan Charter A colonial governor named Dongan handed New Yorkers their first real city government, wards and all, and the parchment is still sitting in a library on Fifth Avenue.
230. April 26, 1977 Studio 54 Opens Its Doors A dead CBS broadcast studio on West 54th Street became the hardest door in America overnight, and New York spent three years fighting to get past the rope.
231. April 25 April 25, 1901 New York Makes You Paint Your Own Initials on Your Car Nine years before the state ever printed a plate, New York just ordered car owners to letter their own initials on the back and sort out the details themselves.
232. April 24, 1913 The Woolworth Building Opens by Remote Control Frank Woolworth built the tallest tower on earth out of nickel-and-dime profits, then had the president of the United States turn on the lights from four hundred miles away.
233. April 23, 1896 The Vitascope Lights Up Herald Square A crowd at a Broadway music hall watched a wall come alive with ocean waves, and the movies were born a few blocks from where the Empire State Building now stands.
234. April 22, 1964 The World's Fair Opens in Queens Robert Moses built a 700,000 pound steel globe, got Lyndon Johnson to Queens to dedicate it, and promised the world peace through understanding while most of the world's actual governments stayed home.
235. April 21, 1977 Annie Opens at the Alvin Theatre A thirteen-year-old belted out a song about tomorrow, and a shoestring musical about a comic-strip orphan became the toughest ticket on Broadway.
236. April 20, 1777 New York Adopts Its First Constitution With British troops occupying the city and the war going badly, a traveling convention finished the state's founding charter in a Kingston courthouse and went home the same night.
237. April 19, 1989 The Central Park Jogger Case A brutal attack in the park set off a citywide panic that convicted five teenagers who never did it, and it took a confession from the actual attacker, thirteen years later, to prove it.
238. April 18, 1923 The House That Ruth Built Opens The Yankees had never had a stadium of their own, so they built the biggest one in baseball and Babe Ruth broke it in with a home run on the first pitch he saw.
239. April 17 April 17, 1524 A Florentine Sails Into New York Harbor Five hundred years before anyone paid rent here, a ship flying French colors nosed through the Narrows and found people already waiting on the shore.
240. April 16, 2009 The New Yankee Stadium Opens With a Loss The Yankees spent $2.3 billion on a new house across the street from the old one and got beaten in it on opening day.
241. April 15, 1947 Jackie Robinson Takes the Field at Ebbets A 28-year-old rookie trotted out to first base in Brooklyn, and baseball's unwritten color line, unbroken since 1884, was gone before the ninth inning.
242. April 14, 1894 The Kinetoscope Parlor Opens on Broadway For a quarter you could bend down, peer into a wooden cabinet, and watch a strongman flex for twenty seconds. New York had never seen anything like it, and neither had anyone else.
243. April 13 April 13, 1870 New York Gets Its Met A circle of homesick American art lovers in Paris decided their country needed a great museum, and four years later New York's legislature made it real.
244. April 11, 1970 New York Legalizes Abortion, No Questions About Where You're From Three years before Roe v. Wade, a one-vote scramble in Albany made New York the place in America where any woman could get a legal abortion, no residency card required.
245. April 10, 1866 Henry Bergh Founds the ASPCA A shipbuilder's son who'd watched horses get beaten in St. Petersburg and London came home to New York and gave the city's animals their first real advocate in a courtroom.
246. April 9, 1913 Ebbets Field Opens, and Brooklyn Loses the Opener Brooklyn spent two years and a small fortune building a concrete-and-steel cathedral for its ballclub, then dropped the very first regular-season game there 1 to 0.
247. April 8 April 8, 1904 Longacre Square Becomes Times Square The New York Times built a tower on a horse-trading crossroads, got the mayor to rename the block after itself, and by New Year's Eve had lit up Midtown to celebrate.
248. April 7, 1927 New York Watches the First Long-Distance Television A roomful of Manhattan reporters looked into a small black box and watched a Cabinet secretary's face arrive, live, from two hundred miles away.
249. April 6 April 6, 1869 Albany Charters the American Museum of Natural History A naturalist with a big idea and eighteen well-connected New Yorkers talked the state into chartering a museum before the city had built it a single room to stand in.
250. April 5, 1913 Ebbets Field Opens in Flatbush A ballpark built on a garbage dump called Pigtown drew a crowd twice the size anyone expected, and Brooklyn spent the next 44 years falling in love with it.
251. April 4 April 4, 1973 The Twin Towers Get Their Ribbon In the rain, with a rail strike keeping half the VIPs away, Nelson Rockefeller cut the ribbon on the tallest building on Earth, and the critics started sharpening their pencils the very next morning.
252. April 3, 1783 Washington Irving Is Born, and Later Names the City Gotham The boy born on William Street the same week New York learned the war was over grew up to hand the city the nickname it never let go of.
253. April 1 April 1, 1789 Congress Finally Gets a Quorum After a month of empty chairs and mounting embarrassment, two late arrivals walked into a room on Wall Street and quietly got the federal government moving.
254. March 31, 1943 Oklahoma! Opens at the St. James No chorus line, no big opening number, just a woman churning butter and a cowboy singing offstage, and Broadway was never quite the same after that night at the St. James.
255. March 30, 1909 The Queensboro Bridge Opens A double-decked cantilever finally gave Queens a direct steel handshake with Manhattan, no ferry required.
256. March 29, 1848 The Day Niagara Falls Ran Dry An ice jam upstate on Lake Erie choked the Niagara River, and for a day and a half the world's most famous waterfall went quiet enough to walk across.
257. March 28, 1958 Harlem Buries the Father of the Blues W. C. Handy died in a Harlem hospital that had fought its own battle over integration, and the neighborhood he'd put into song turned out by the tens of thousands to send him off.
258. March 27, 1884 Boston and New York Learn to Talk For ninety minutes on a March afternoon, two cities 235 miles apart proved a phone call didn't have to stay local.
259. March 26 March 26, 1830 The Book of Mormon Goes on Sale in Palmyra For a dollar seventy-five, a farm town in the Finger Lakes put the founding scripture of a new American religion on a bookstore shelf.
260. March 23 March 23, 1857 The Elevator That Wouldn't Fall A crockery shop on Broadway installed a steam-powered box that could carry customers upstairs, and, more to the point, would catch itself if the rope ever let go.
261. March 21 March 21, 1947 The Collyer Brothers Are Found Dead in Their Own Junk Police dug for five hours through a Harlem brownstone packed with newspapers and homemade booby traps before they found the first Collyer brother, and eighteen more days before they found the second, ten feet away.
262. March 19, 1935 The Harlem Riot of 1935 A shoplifting rumor at a nickel-and-dime store on 125th Street turned into three deaths, $2 million in wreckage, and what one historian calls the first modern race riot.
263. March 17, 1762 New York's First St. Patrick's Day Feast Two and a half centuries before a million people lined Fifth Avenue, New York's first St. Patrick's Day was a newspaper notice inviting any gentleman who cared to walk out to a house near Mount Pleasant for dinner.
264. March 16, 1827 Freedom's Journal Prints Its First Issue Two free Black New Yorkers decided the city's papers had spoken about them long enough, so they started printing one of their own.
265. March 15, 1956 "My Fair Lady" Opens at the Mark Hellinger A Covent Garden flower girl learned to talk like a duchess on West 51st Street, and Broadway didn't get a seat back for six years.
266. March 14 March 14, 1972 The Godfather Premieres in Times Square A snowbound Broadway crowd watched a three-hour mob picture shot on the city's own streets turn into the movie that rewrote what a New York gangster story could be.
267. March 13, 1906 Susan B. Anthony Dies in Rochester The woman who got herself arrested for voting died in her own bed on Madison Street, fourteen years before the amendment she spent her life demanding became law.
268. March 12, 1888 The Great Blizzard Buries New York A freak March storm dumped two feet of snow, froze the elevated trains solid, and killed a former U.S. Senator who thought he could just walk home.
269. March 11, 1959 A Raisin in the Sun Opens on Broadway A 28-year-old playwright put a Black family's fight over a $10,000 insurance check on a Broadway stage, and the color line behind the curtain broke along with the one in front of it.
270. March 10, 1913 Harriet Tubman Dies at Her Own Home in Auburn The woman who ran to freedom nineteen times over died old, free, and surrounded by the people she'd spent sixty years trying to save.
271. March 9, 1959 Barbie Debuts at the Toy Fair A three-dollar doll with a grown woman's figure landed on a Midtown showroom floor, and the men running the toy industry had no idea what to make of her.
272. March 8, 1971 The Fight of the Century Comes to the Garden Two undefeated heavyweight champions, one ring, and a Monday night at the Garden that stopped the whole city cold.
273. March 7 March 7, 1917 The First Jazz Record Goes on Sale Five New Orleans transplants cut a barnyard-noise novelty tune in a Manhattan office building, and by accident put jazz on a disc for the whole country to buy.
274. March 6 March 6, 1970 The Townhouse That Blew Itself Up A group of young radicals wiring a bomb for an army dance in New Jersey ended up leveling their own hideout on a quiet Village block instead.
275. March 5, 1824 The Bookkeeper Who Became 'Ives' of Currier and Ives A superintendent's son with no formal art training was born in New York City today, and he'd go on to decide what an entire century of Americans hung over their mantels.
276. March 4 March 4, 1789 The First Congress Gavels In at Federal Hall The brand-new United States government was supposed to open for business on Wall Street this morning, except almost nobody showed up.
277. March 3, 1923 Time Magazine Prints Its First Issue Two Yale Daily News alumni bet that a busy country would pay fifteen cents to have the whole week boiled down for them, and got it right for a hundred years running.
278. March 2, 1933 King Kong Climbs the Empire State Building In the worst week of the Depression, fifty thousand New Yorkers lined up in one day to watch a giant ape swat biplanes off the tallest building in the world.
279. March 1 March 1, 1979 Sweeney Todd Carves Up Broadway A Victorian penny dreadful about a murderous barber walked into the Uris Theatre and walked out an opera, with Angela Lansbury grinding the bodies into meat pies eight blocks from Times Square.
280. February 29, 1860 Herman Hollerith Is Born in Buffalo, Leap Day Baby Who Built the Punch Card A German immigrant's son from Buffalo grew up to build the machine that let the government count 63 million Americans without waiting eight years to see the results, and his little company eventually became IBM.
281. February 28 February 28, 1940 The First Basketball Game on Television NBC's experimental station pointed a camera at Madison Square Garden for a college doubleheader, and almost nobody in New York owned a set to watch it on.
282. February 27, 1860 Lincoln Makes His Case at Cooper Union A gawky Illinois lawyer in a stiff new suit walked into a Manhattan lecture hall and talked his way toward the presidency.
283. February 26 February 26, 1993 A Van Bomb Rips Open the World Trade Center Six people never made it home from the basement of the North Tower, in an attack meant to bring both towers down at once.
284. February 25, 1644 New Amsterdam Grants 'Half-Freedom' Eleven Black men who had served the Dutch West India Company for nearly two decades won their freedom on paper, then found out how many strings the company had tied to it.
285. February 24, 1980 Miracle on Ice Finishes the Job Two days after the upset for the ages, the U.S. hockey team still had to beat Finland for the gold, and for one period at Lake Placid it looked like they might blow it.
286. February 23 February 23, 1997 A Gunman Opens Fire on the Empire State Building's Observation Deck On a February evening, New York's most photographed view became a crime scene, and a young Danish musician never got the trip home he expected.
287. February 22, 1980 Do You Believe in Miracles A roster of college kids from Minnesota and Boston beat the best hockey team on the planet in a rink in the Adirondacks, and turned one Olympic game into the loudest sentence in American sports broadcasting.
288. February 21, 1965 Malcolm X Is Assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom A Sunday afternoon speech in Washington Heights ended in gunfire, and the wrongful convictions that followed took more than fifty years to undo.
289. February 20, 1872 The Met Opens Its Doors A railroad man's private art collection, crammed into a rented Fifth Avenue mansion, was the start of what's now one of the great museums on Earth.
290. February 19, 1963 The Feminine Mystique Hits Shelves A Smith College grad turned Rockland County housewife walked into a Manhattan publisher's office with a survey of unhappy suburban wives and came out with the book that cracked open the 1950s American dream.
291. February 18 February 18, 1848 Louis Comfort Tiffany Is Born on Murray Hill The jeweler's son who couldn't stand plain glass grew up to trap sunlight in windows and lamps that New York museums and churches still glow with today.
292. February 17, 1913 The Armory Show Shocks New York A drill hall on Lexington Avenue filled up with Cubists and Fauves, and New York found out it had opinions about modern art.
293. February 16, 1970 Frazier Drops Ellis, Takes the Crown At the Garden, Smokin' Joe put Jimmy Ellis on the canvas twice in four minutes and walked out of the ring as the closest thing boxing had to a real heavyweight champion.
294. February 15, 1845 Elihu Root Is Born in Oneida County A country lawyer from a Hamilton College professor's house grew up to run the War Department and the State Department, then won a Nobel Prize for trying to get nations to sue each other instead of shoot.
295. February 14, 1924 CTR Becomes IBM A tabulator-and-time-clock outfit out of Endicott traded its clunky hyphenated name for one big enough to grow into.
296. February 13, 1914 The Day Songwriters Started Getting Paid A few dozen Tin Pan Alley composers and one copyright lawyer met at a Times Square hotel and decided every restaurant orchestra and cabaret band owed them a cut.
297. February 12, 1909 The Call That Founded the NAACP On Lincoln's 100th birthday, a handful of New Yorkers signed a public letter asking the country to make good on the Emancipation Proclamation, and out of it came the nation's oldest civil rights organization.
298. February 11 February 11, 1968 The Garden Rises Over the Wreckage of Penn Station New York tore down one of its grandest buildings to put up a windowless arena for hockey pucks and Bob Hope's jokes, and the city has been arguing about that trade ever since.
299. February 10 February 10, 1897 The Ball That Embarrassed the Gilded Age The Martins spent a fortune on a costume ball meant to help the economy, and instead handed New York proof of exactly how out of touch the rich had gotten.
300. February 9, 1964 The Beatles Take Studio 50 Four guys from Liverpool played a CBS soundstage on Broadway and pretty much rewired what America wanted out of a Sunday night.
301. February 8 February 8, 1690 The Night the Snowmen Stood Guard A French and Native raiding party found Schenectady's north gate watched by nothing but two guards' snowmen and burned the town to the ground before dawn.
302. February 7, 1964 The Beatles Land at Kennedy Airport Four mop-topped Liverpudlians stepped off Pan Am Flight 101 into a screaming crowd of 4,000, and New York hasn't stopped talking about it since.
303. February 6 February 6, 1820 The Elizabeth Sails for West Africa A ship frozen in New York Harbor for a month finally sailed with 86 free Black New Yorkers and Philadelphians aboard, bound for a colony none of them had seen.
304. February 5, 1922 Reader's Digest Starts in a Basement Two newlyweds with a magazine full of other people's articles and a basement under a Village speakeasy built one of the biggest magazines on the planet.
305. February 4, 1932 A Village of 4,000 Lands the Winter Olympics Lake Placid had fewer people than a midtown office tower, and somehow it out-hustled bigger rivals to bring the Winter Games to American snow for the first time.
306. February 3, 1894 Norman Rockwell Is Born in Harlem The man who'd spend fifty years painting America's idea of itself started out a city kid on St. Nicholas Avenue, not the small-town boy his covers made everyone imagine.
307. February 2, 1653 New Amsterdam Becomes a City Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged autocrat who hated sharing power, signed the paper that turned a fur-trading outpost into a real city with its own government.
308. February 1, 1957 The Inmates Who Ran Into the Wreckage on Rikers Island A Miami-bound flight went down on Rikers Island about a minute after leaving LaGuardia, and the men locked up there ran toward the fire instead of away from it.
309. January 31, 1752 The Man Who Wrote 'We the People' Was Born in the Bronx Gouverneur Morris grew up on a family estate on the Harlem River, then went to Philadelphia and rewrote a young country's opening line.
310. January 30, 1882 FDR Is Born at Hyde Park The baby born in a Hudson Valley mansion this morning would grow up to run New York from the governor's office, then run the country for longer than the Constitution now allows anyone to.
311. January 29, 1845 The Raven Makes Poe Famous A poem Edgar Allan Poe had already sold for nine dollars ran as a favor in a New York newspaper, and by the next morning he was the most talked-about writer in the city.
312. January 27, 1991 Wide Right The Giants beat the Bills by a single point in Tampa when Scott Norwood's last-second field goal drifted just outside the upright, and New York got its second Lombardi Trophy on a kick that missed.
313. January 26 January 26, 1934 The Apollo Reopens for Harlem A burlesque house on 125th Street shed its old name and its old audience, and reopened as the stage where Black New York would headline instead of just watch from the balcony.
314. January 25, 1915 Bell Calls Watson, Coast to Coast Thirty-nine years after his first phone call, Alexander Graham Bell picked up a receiver on Dey Street and repeated the same five words to a man 3,400 miles away.
315. January 24, 1975 The Fraunces Tavern Bombing A bomb hidden in an attache case turned a lunch hour in the Financial District into New York's deadliest terrorist attack to that point, at the same tavern where George Washington once said goodbye to his officers.
316. January 23 January 23, 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell Becomes America's First Woman Doctor The all-male class at a medical college in the Finger Lakes voted her in as a joke, then had to watch her graduate at the top of it.
317. January 22 January 22, 1970 The Jumbo Jet Lands at JFK A plane so big it needed a spiral staircase to its own lounge finally left the ground, six hours late, out of Kennedy Airport.
318. January 21, 1908 The Day City Hall Tried to Ban Women From Smoking One Bowery alderman decided ladies smoking in restaurants was bad for their souls, the Board of Aldermen agreed unanimously, and a Manhattan woman named Katie Mulcahey lit a match the very next night to prove them wrong.
319. January 20, 1896 George Burns Is Born on the Lower East Side A coal picker's kid from a Rivington Street tenement grows up to spend nearly a century onstage, on the radio, and in the movies, and picks up an Oscar along the way at 80.
320. January 19, 1920 The ACLU Is Founded in New York A group of wartime dissenters who had just watched the government jail conscientious objectors and deport radicals decided free speech needed a permanent, full-time defender, and started one.
321. January 18, 1964 New York Meets the Twin Towers Nine years before the ribbon cutting, the Port Authority rolled out an eight-foot model and let Lower Manhattan see the two square giants that would take over its skyline.
322. January 16, 1938 Benny Goodman Brings Swing to Carnegie Hall For one night the King of Swing took his clarinet into the house built for Tchaikovsky, and the crowd would not stop calling for encores.
323. January 15, 1861 Brooklyn Gets Its Academy of Music A Brooklyn Heights concert hall opened its doors promising culture without drama, literally, and became the borough's proudest address for the next four decades.
324. January 14, 1952 Morning TV Is Born on 49th Street NBC parked a live newsroom behind a plate-glass storefront window in Midtown and bet that New Yorkers would let television into the house before the coffee was even poured.
325. January 13, 1874 The Tompkins Square Riot Thousands of jobless New Yorkers showed up in the East Village to demand work, and mounted police answered with clubs.
326. January 12, 1969 Joe Namath Guarantees, Then Delivers Three days before Super Bowl III, a Jets quarterback made a promise nobody believed, then beat the best team in football to keep it.
327. January 11, 1842 William James Is Born at the Astor House The man who would give American psychology its name, and its first course, started out as a guest in his own father's rented rooms at Broadway's fanciest hotel.
328. January 10, 2000 AOL Buys Time Warner for $182 Billion The internet company bought the media company, called it a merger of equals, and it went down as the worst deal in corporate history.
329. January 9, 1912 The 'Fireproof' Tower Burns Down On the coldest morning of the winter, the building insurance men swore couldn't burn went up anyway, and the firefighters' own hoses froze solid trying to stop it.
330. January 8 January 8, 1790 Washington Delivers the First State of the Union New York was still the nation's capital, so the first presidential report card to Congress happened a few blocks from where Wall Street sits today, and Washington kept the whole thing under 1,100 words.
331. January 7, 1800 Millard Fillmore Is Born in a Cayuga County Log Cabin A future president arrived in a one-room log cabin in the Finger Lakes woods, in a family too poor to keep him in school past childhood.
332. January 6, 1919 Theodore Roosevelt Dies at Sagamore Hill The most restless man ever to hold the presidency went quietly for once, in his sleep, in the house on the Long Island bluffs he loved more than the White House.
333. January 5 January 5, 1905 The Audubon Societies Become One, in New York A scattered handful of bird-lovers' clubs, worn down by watching hat-makers shoot egrets to extinction, incorporated in New York as one outfit that's still running the fight today.
334. January 4 January 4, 1903 Coney Island Electrocutes Topsy the Elephant A Luna Park elephant that killed a man who burned her trunk with a cigar was put to death in front of paying customers, and a camera that happened to belong to Thomas Edison's company ended up owning the story forever.
335. January 3, 1973 Steinbrenner's Group Buys the Yankees From CBS A shipbuilder from Cleveland tells reporters he'll be an absentee owner, then spends the next three decades proving that was the last honest thing anyone heard him say.
336. January 2, 1870 Work Begins on the Brooklyn Bridge The man who designed it never lived to see a single stone go in the water, and it still took his son's crew thirteen years, an outbreak of the bends, and one very sharp engineer's wife to finish the job.