A Hot Topic

I am not going to say that the New York Times is copying my blog posts with “The New York of the Past Is Still Visible Today. You Just Have to Look.” People have been mining New York’s past for fiction, weird history, straight history…stories for a very long time. There’s a good argument to be made that the publication of A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty in 1809 marked the beginning of people consciously treating the city’s history as a fable. It was written by Washington Irving under the pen-name Diedrich Knickerbocker, and Irving was a fiction writer. There is some actual history in the book, but if you don’t already know the history of NYC you might have a very hard time telling fact from Irving’s satire and tall tales.

The Times article focuses on several pieces of the built environment that are worthy of historical note: the fence around Bowling Green, the path of Broadway, a very old tree in Washington Square, the African Burial Ground, a very old house containing a good bar, and a very old bar turned into City Hall. I’ve blogged about two of the six, walk by one of the others a few times every week, and have drunk a fair amount of beer in another.

There are far more relics than that short list, each with its own story. In some cases, there are a dozen stories for a given building or a single park bench. I’m pretty sure that I can keep writing about these topics without competing with the Times.