Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everyone and welcome to the New Yorkers, a podcast by New York City Cop. I'm your host, Kelly Kopp, published photographer, New York City tour business owner, content creator, podcaster, and above all else, a New Yorker.
Ladies and gentlemen, the next Brooklyn bound
[00:00:17] Speaker B: train in Mount Hyde.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Stand clear of the closing doors please.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: This is times square.
Transfer is available to the shuttle to grandfather.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: With me today, my friends, I have NYC historian Peter Eigner.
He is the director of the Gotham center for New York City History and the co founder of Echoes of Revolution nyc, a new immersive walking tour experience that uses geolocation to put you in the world of historic New York. But above all else, Peter is a New Yorker. Hey, Peter, how you doing today? Welcome to the show.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: I'm great. It's good to see you again.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: So I want to make sure I'm saying this correctly. It's Peter Eigner. Yeah, Peter Eichner, but doctor. You're also a doctor, Right.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: I had to get a PhD. Maybe not, maybe not the smartest decision I ever made.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Why is that?
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Oh, it's a long, grueling process.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: How long does it take?
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Well, I, my experience was maybe a little longer than the average, but I mean, it takes at least seven years, I think is the kind of the quickest people usually do it, you know, so mine went a little bit slower for a bunch of reasons that know, I think we're justified, but.
But yeah, it's a long time. And then you, you're kind of doing it typically at a time of life where you're watching other people kind of, you know, get married, move up in their careers, buy houses, do all that kind of like stuff. And then you're just kind of like, I'm still, I'm still working on my dissertation.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: That's a, that's pretty impressive though.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: You know, I, I wanted to, I didn't actually expect that I would have a career in academia. I was warned by the guy that I went to when I said I wanted to do it that, you know, there's no jobs in academia. And that was back in the. That was before the crash.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: So it was really something I just kind of wanted to do for myself. I knew I could kind of do it without going into bad debt or anything like that. So it's been a very sort of happy.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: That's still pretty impressive.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: You know, I know we jumped up to you becoming a doctor, Peter Eigner, but tell us when you, you know, where you were born.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: And tell us about you Growing up here in New York City.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: So how were you born here in New York City?
[00:02:55] Speaker B: I was. Yeah.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Okay, cool.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: A Queen's boy.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: Oh, nice. I didn't know that. Yeah.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Ridgewood.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Very cool.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Yep.
Myrtle and Summerfield.
Shout out to Ridgewood and.
Yeah, my. My dad grew up in Ridgewood, too.
They were both my grandparents.
Came over here and they. He was a contractor. He was doing kind of day labor contract stuff. She was, like, doing seamstress stuff.
And then, long story short, they ended up taking over this chocolate shop.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: My dad ended up doing the same thing.
So there was one in Ridgewood, and there was one Forest Hills. The Forest Hills one's still around, actually. It's three years away from its 100th anniversary.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: And they just opened up a kiosk in jfk. So if you see my name on some chocolate boxes in jfk, that's. That's.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Oh, that's pretty cool.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Associated anymore. But that was us for a very long time.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Still pretty cool. Your name is in, you know, New York history right there, too.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: We. Yeah. I mean, we. It was, you know, I don't know, 50 years, 60 years, something like that. And, you know, I mean, you know how hard it is to have a business in the city. So, you know. You know. Yeah, I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm very pleased that it's still around because, you know, I grew up every weekend. I was.
I was in Queens till I was about 10, and then we were out in Long Island. But, you know, every single weekend, every vacation, every summer, I was working in that shop. So I've always kind of. I've always kind of been in the city, and then I've never lived more than two years outside of New York, so.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: That's interesting. That's really interesting. And so you're a child growing up here in Queens. You said from. Since you're historian now, you know, were there glimpses and interest at a young age of history, or are you just a regular child and, you know, doing your thing, causing trouble? Yeah.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: You know, skateboarding, Nintendo, all that.
I think that the genesis of me being a historian was that it was kind of a thing for my dad and my grandfather and, you know, young boy, you want to kind of have your place among the men. And so there was a bit of a sort of, you know, that was the coin at the dinner table.
History and politics and, you know, I'm a political historian, so, you know, in some psychological way that I'm not sure I want to Totally unpack. I'm sure that's kind of how it happened.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Well, this podcast is also. Is about you unpacking all this.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: Oh, great. Okay. Wonderful. Yeah, I'll just. I'll just, you know. Yeah. I just won't listen to it.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: That's. So then you, you know, you grew up in. In Queens. You moved to Long Island. Yeah.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Did you like Long Island? How far? Where were you?
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Oh, I mean, I hated it when I was a teenager, but, I mean, I don't know if that was just because I was a teenager, but it's a beautiful town and. And Glencoe on the North Shore.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Long Island.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: Oh, it's really. Yeah, it's really. It's not far from, you know, from Forest Hills. It's like maybe 40 minutes or something like that near Oyster Bay and all that beautiful on the water. And so, you know, my friends and I were always kind of down at the beaches. They're not the best beaches, but, you know, hanging out at the beaches on the weekends and night and.
Yeah, it's very green and beautiful parks.
It's part of the old Gold Coast. So, you know, Great Gatsby days before, when Long island was basically just farmland, Long island was for centuries like the breadbasket for New York City and for places much further, actually, even beyond the region, very fertile land that, with the rise of petrochemical farming and such, became less important. And so all those.
I mean, it's not just New York, right? Like, the sort of surrounding area outside of most cities was, like, very sort of fertile soil. And that's kind of why those places got placed nice, usually along rivers and.
But then we figure out how to kind of like, turn oil into, like, a, you know, way to infuse the ground with nitrogen. We don't need as much. Anyway, long story short, like, we get massive urbanization. So. Yeah, but, like. But. But in the days of Gatsby in the 20s and 1920s, it's called the Gold coast because all those sort of like, big, golden Gilded Age robber barons
[00:07:17] Speaker A: or captains of ministry had, like, 1890s, I'm guessing.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Limited.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: No, no, you got it right. 1890s to, you know, 1920s, and I love that era. Before and after. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: I mean, no, from what I've seen on TV and everything and movies, I'm sure there's a lot of not so beautiful parts about it.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: I mean, you know, like health care and. Yes, Yeah. I mean, this. This age is Called the second Gilded Age. Right. So there are parallels. It must have been quite something to. To be in Long island at that time.
Again, most of the most. The island is just kind of farmland, and then you've got these big mansions.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Right. That's what I was envisioning.
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is part of the reason why the Long Island Railroad went out there.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Oh, good to know. I didn't know for sure.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also Forest Hills here in the city where I live at the shop.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: I can definitely see that.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: You know, when I think of the Gilded Age, too, I also think of Fifth Avenue. You know, wasn't the Vanderbilt Mansion where Bergdorf's is now? Or am I mistaken?
[00:08:22] Speaker B: I'm not exactly sure on that. But Fifth was like, you know, the. The. You can kind of trace the. Years ago, I did this thing with the. I can't remember the name of it. It's like France's version of NPR.
They were doing a thing on 5th. You know, there's several books just on the history of Fifth Avenue. You can kind of trace development of the city and kind of by extension the country because. And this is a thing we kind of often say at the place that I run, the Gotham center, the only academic center in New York City history that, you know, New York is kind of the best lens to understand US History because it's the unofficial capital, the economic headquarters of the country, which means kind of. It's headquarters for everything else kind of downstream. So anyway, so, you know, those. We're talking about, these people who lived on the. On the. On the Gold Coast, Long island, of course, those were like, you know, they're not just local big names. They're like national and international big names. Rockefeller and Savanderbilt.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: You know, and. Yeah, so. So they. They had mansions in the city that the kind of. And as the city sort of expanded from the lower tip of Manhattan where it starts, Fifth Avenue kind of creeps up and. And the sort of. The northern edge of it is always kind of where those mansions are until they start splitting off into places out in Long island or like places like.
Not Groton, but Greenwich and Connecticut and other place. Westchester and such.
So. Yeah. So a lot of those places that have been repurposed for department stores and such were originally mansions. Right. So I work the Gotham center is part of the CUNY graduate school.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Tell people what the Gotham center is. Yeah. What you do. And too.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Right. So I'm the director at the Gotham Center. It's like the only academic center devoted to New York City history. It was started by Mike Wallace, who's
[00:10:10] Speaker A: like, where is it though?
[00:10:11] Speaker B: I'm sorry, it's 35th and 5th.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: And we're literally inside the old B. Altman's building.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Oh, nice.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: The luxury department store, right?
[00:10:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: Beautiful building.
And it's a block away from Penn Station. If people.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: That was kind of thinking that.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Yeah. And the, the organ, the organization just celebrated its 25th year.
It was started by Mike Wallace, who's like the historian of New York City. Mike just finished his trilogy.
Each book's like 1200 pages. It's these kind of master. Nobody will ever do what he did. It's just an insane kind of project and very much kind of of its time. Mike came up. Mike was doing his dissertation in the, in the, in, in the 60s under Richard Hofstadter, who was like, again, kind of like arguably the historian of the United States at the time, very famous man, taught at Columbia. And you know, it's, it's. You probably maybe heard people kind of this phrase about like, you know, history is kind of a bunch of dead white guys. That, that was kind of, that was kind of like in a very literal sense what it was.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: I heard that. Yeah.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Because if you, if you, you know, my, my friends and I who are historians who always kind of marvel at this ourselves, and we look back at like the, the big books of that period, there's like nothing by way of citations. There's like, you know, because.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: So Interesting.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's not just because they're like now with digital tech, we can kind of like access so much more research and all that. It's also that there just weren't as many academics like, you know, before the GI bill. 0.5%.
Right. Half of a percent of the population went to college. And so by extension you didn't really have that many professors and you didn't have that much by way of kind of research.
And it tended to privilege very powerful people and focused on like diplomats and presidents and, and those sorts of things.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: And so they were like just vast swaths of history that like just weren't done.
And then in, in part because folks are getting their PhDs, like part of that sort of post GI bill, they're getting their PhDs as college is expanding and moving towards a service based economy. Right. And everyone kind of needs to get a college degree. So you've got more people not just going to college, but getting PhDs coming, professors becoming historians. And they're doing it in the 60s when you know, it's like this plethora of movements, social movements, and all of a sudden, people want, you know, like, want to know about the history of Native Americans. They want to know about the history of women. They want to know about the history of black Americans. They want to know about the history of, you know. Everything.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: Everything. Yeah.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: And. And so Mike was the editor of a journal that.
That was sort of publishing this new research, and he realized kind of quickly that they were literally kind of rewriting the whole history of the country.
Like, the history that we know is because of this period.
And. But it was really rewriting a lot of what. What that generation kind of thought was the history of the country. And so he had the idea to do a history of the US Originally.
And he jokes, and I don't think that it's really a joke that he was, like, 3,000 pages in. They weren't out of the 1700s yet.
And so he kind of took a couple years, a little depressed, and they kind of figured out, like, well, if I do the history of New York, it's more manageable. And then it kind of works the same way, because, again, like I said, New York is the. It's the economic headquarters. And so all of these kind of national figures, like, if you read our textbooks, right. If you read a kind of standard US History textbook, New York is so privileged. And I'm sure that there are people in the rest of the country that. That feeds into the kind of resentment about New York. But, you know, I would say, you know, like, having grown up here, too, like, I. I don't feel the need to really, like, beat my chest, and I'm gonna probably do this later when I talk about the revolution or whatever, but, like, I. You know, like, it's just. It's not. It's not about, you know, we're better because, you know, there's something in the water culture or something. Yeah, yeah. You know, like, where's the New Yorkers Podcast? So I'm happy to, you know, but, like.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: No, but I'm joking.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: But it's really, you know, like. Because it is. It is. You know, it's like what Rome was back in ancient Rome, or it's what London was in the British Empire. You know, like, you know, I have a question.
[00:14:32] Speaker A: I've never asked anybody who you, you know, obviously, were born here and grew up here in New York City. What is it like for you to leave the city, say, on vacation just anywhere in the country?
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: And.
And, you know, what was it like you leaving this area the first time as a child and then traveling somewhere else and like wow, this is not New York City. Like what was that to you? Because it's the opposite for where they come from, these small towns or any town and they come to any city and they're blown away.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: What's the opposite feeling?
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I have, I have, my brother in law comes from a very small town in Missouri and like he's like, I think kind of physically overwhelmed when he comes here and he's not some, you know, like lives in a shack in the woods.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: He's very well traveled and all that sensory overload coming.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: But it is, you know, it's like kind of sensory overload and you know, in, in part the experiences that like I have the inverse of that where like I go to places and, and now I've kind of aged into a point where like I like actually having like quiet and solitude and.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Kind of stuff. But if I think about like where I would live.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Where would that be?
[00:15:38] Speaker B: I don't know. I mean I, I, I used to answer that question and say. Yeah. I mean it's here.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: You know, but I used to say like it's kind of hard to imagine in the US because you know,
[00:15:56] Speaker A: I
[00:15:56] Speaker B: don't want to ruffle anybody's feathers. But we used to have great cities, right?
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: And we, we have, there's a lot of great cities out there besides New York. But like the thing about New York that's really distinct still. It's like, it's like, it's, it's urban in a way that I don't think those other places are like my experience of going to other place, other cities in this country is always just kind of like how kind of suburban it is. How like non really walkable they are.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: And I mean 100 agree with you though.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: You know, I go home to Florida.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: And it's just, it's just not, you know, I lived in Orlando for 20 some years and I love it. Don't get me wrong.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: It's my second heart.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: After New York now or with New York and, but it's just not the same. It's just not that walking, like to walk, you can walk anywhere in this city. I don't care where it is. Any borough, you know, farther out of the boroughs, you can walk. That's what we do. You know. It's not, no other city really does that.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: This is a little bit beyond my, my ken to kind of like explain. But like sociologists would, you know, tell you a lot about just how the, the stoop life and that walkability of the city. The things like mass transit, which, which we used to have a lot of. Right. Like I was talking, you know, gesturing at that period of mass suburbanization after World War II. And like, you know, during that period, people don't know this, but like, you know, 300 cities dismantled their mass transit systems, you know, and we became this utterly car dependent culture, you know.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: You said 300 cities.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: 300 cities, yeah.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Yeah. That's really interesting. I'd like to read more about that.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: There's. There's a great book by a great historian, historian named Nick Bloom called House. I think it's called How States Shape Post War America. And there's a chapter in there on transportation where I'm pulling that citation up. But there's a lot of, you know, mass suburbanization was, was, you know, people totally take it for granted. I talk about it actually in the, in the Moynihan book we were talking earlier about. I wrote a biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and that was actually his kind of first, first big issue and one that he actually tried continually to make an impact with. But you know, he said, and I'll quote him and say, and because he's totally right, that, you know, historians will. And they, and they do, historians will judge the highway act, which was this thing that Heisen Eisenhower passed that made it very cheap for states to kind of start laying down highways everywhere as the single most revolutionary thing that changed particularly sit. The. The. The nature of urban life in the United States. But life in general, economic, political, social life in this country was, was more transformed by the highway act than anything any other piece of legislation makes sense.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: I did not know this though.
What was against, when I go back to Orlando too, are my parents in southwest Florida.
It's. There's really no public transportation at all to get around, so to speak. You know, even from city to city, it's challenging. Like here, Northeast Corridor, whatever. We can go wherever we want, you know. But you said real quick, you're writing a book.
Can you tell us about it real quick? You finished it?
[00:18:54] Speaker B: I finished it. It's coming out in March, March 17, I believe.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: 20, 20.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: 2027.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: Yep. Tell us about it.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: So it'll be with Simon Schuster. It's a biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It'll be the first real biography of Moynihan.
And for anyone who doesn't know who Moynihan is, you know, Moynihan was this, you know, just kind of this extraordinary figure in American political life. He was the only person to serve at a high cabinet level, four different presidents in a row or I think, period.
He then went on to serve four terms in the Senate.
He's the person who Hillary Clinton got a seat from.
He was the senator for New York.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: I did not know that.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: In addition, and this was a very big part of his career across this period, he was known as, like, the intellectual of the Senate, of Congress, of. And, you know, arguably of D.C. yeah. You know, taught at Harvard. The joke was that he published more books than any sort of Senate. Most senators had read, you know, 20. 20. Some. 20 books, more or less. And, you know, half of which he kind of scoffed. He's just scotched off, like, in a few weeks time while he was on recess from. From the Congress.
And, you know, he is kind of this Forrest Gump like figure in the sense that, like, you know, Gump is kind of always somehow at the center of, like, these major events in American history.
So his life is really kind of the history of the country. He grows up here in the city in the Depression.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: I was going to ask you when he was born.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. He's born 27. And so when this book comes out, it'll be. He'll have been 100 years old. That's why they picked the date. Oh, w. Interesting.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: So I'd actually finished this book some time ago, but timings. Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:38] Speaker A: So.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: And he has a kind of a quite famous story because his. His. His.
His father's an alcoholic and a gambler and leaves bans the family kind of at the height of the Depression. And, you know, I don't need to kind of explain that, that it's hard for a woman in the 1930s to make it right, particularly if she's got three kids.
And so it really kind of scarred him in multiple ways.
And it's quite important for the thing that he's probably most famous for is he writes this report, 1955. It's called the Moynihan Report, probably the most widely cited government study of the 20th century, and certainly not without controversy.
I think people will be very surprised by what I found and what I'll. I'll say about what Moynihan's intentions and desires for the report.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: We gotta have you back on the podcast to talk about your book.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: Happy to, but go ahead. Yeah, yeah. But Moynihan really kind of just ranged across domestic and foreign policy in this extraordinary career. It's not just the length that's. But it's the breadth and the depth of it. You know, like, he was this kind of rare figure, you know, when he kind of retired. It's not actually necessarily something that becomes newsworthy. Right. But when he retired, it was kind of very newsworthy. People were like, well, you know, how many Moynihans? And we're going to really kind of like, notice this absence.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: Because he really is. And this was said when he died. I don't know if I said this already, but, you know, he. When he died, several people said, you know, he really was kind of the last figure you can imagine in American politics. Who was the kind of person that the Founding Fathers imagined would run the country. These kind of philosopher statesmen, people like Hamilton, Madison, John Adams, you know, these kind of very like, you know, semi philosopher type, you know, really kind of intellectual, you know, not just kind of theorists, but practitioners of government and politics, you know, and.
Yeah, so he had a very extraordinary life. And, you know, it was a massive project. The book is.
It's like 1500 footnotes, and it's 150,000 words without the footnotes.
Not exactly sure how many pages that is, but it's a big book and. And. But it's a huge life. And he, you know, his, his. His. My primary database was his collection at the Library of Congress. I went to like a dozen archives. But he has the largest single person collection at the library. His correspondence alone, it's 10,000 letters.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: Geez.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: Yeah. If you stacked it up against the Washington monuments, like three Washington monuments, you know, so it's like more than Jefferson and those guys. It's like.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: How long did it take you to write the book?
[00:23:30] Speaker B: You know, a little over a decade. I wasn't always working on it, but. A little over a decade. Yeah.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Interesting. Can't wait for it to drop, as they say nowadays. Right.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: As the kids say. Yeah.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: I love it. That's really. God, that's just really interesting. I can't wait to read it and have. And talk about it more. And now let's talk about the reason you're here today. Sure. Too.
We're talking about the Revolutionary War, which people don't realize how much action was in New York City. So tell us all about it and the app as well.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, New York was. It's. When you think of the revolution, you think of Boston.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: Boston, Boston Tea Party, you know, you know, whatever TV shows US Revolutionary War.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Is Boston Great cities, obviously important in the history of this country of this period.
But we argue, and I'll back this up a thousand ways, that New York really is the. The city at the heart of the American Revolution. It's really at the center of action from beginning to end in this period.
And so we created a.
There are lots of reasons why New York gets left out of that history. We can talk about that later.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: But yeah, I do want to hear that.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: We wanted to kind of use the 200, 250th anniversary, which is happening July 4, as a way to kind of recenter New York in the narrative. And people at the time understood it was central, but for various reasons, it's been placed.
And so we created a freedom trail because that's actually one of the reasons why Boston has kind of imprinted in our. In our minds. You know, when Boston created their trail in the 50s, they got as much as.
Better to say as little tourism as we do around the revolution. And then within, I think 15, 20 years, they had. They had grown it tenfold or more.
And, you know, we're. We've tried to do the same thing we created. This began first as a digital exhibition. Now it's a free app that you can download this minute called and why.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Why is it important that it's free for to you?
Well, so.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: So I. I work at. So the Gotham center is sponsored by cuny, which is New York City's public institute.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: And so everything we do is, you know, the tagline for CUNY at the graduate school is knowledge for the public good. So. So, you know, our job is to. Is to just kind of like promote the history, the knowledge of the history of the city and, you know, be like, you know, it's your tax dollars at work. You know, all of our stuff is free and it's all very high quality. And, you know, it exists accessible to everyone. It's for the benefit of your life. You know, I love it. And so.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:26:13] Speaker B: And so we created this. We created this. It's a wet. It was a website. There's like 75, 000 words of text up there, but then there's also like this audio. So you can do like 75 minutes of like a walk through lower Manhattan. So it's the same length as Boston.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Oh, well, where is it from? Where to where?
[00:26:29] Speaker B: It starts down at Bowling Green and then ends at. We kind of take people on a bit of a swirl and take them back to Francis Tavern. We wanted to kind of think about, like, places where they can stop and rest and have Meals and such.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Oh, that's nice. And how long did you say it takes?
[00:26:44] Speaker B: 75 minutes of audio. So the whole walk, you know, if you're doing it kind of briskly, especially we kind of. It is like a, you know, person would do it kind of on their own. You can do it however you want.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: And you can do it from home. So you don't actually have to do this version in person, but.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: Go ahead.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: Yeah, but. And, and. And part of the reason why we also kind of had a bit of a swirl instead of kind of a more of a straight line was we were. You know, it's a forward chronological story, so it's a big, complicated story. We don't want to confuse people. The whole point of it is to be entertaining.
And so we're trying to educate and inform, but, like, our top priority is to make this stuff accessible. And so I just thought it was. It was my decision. And I. I felt like it was important to kind of like, just have a forward chronological march so that you could kind of just. You could absorb it easier if you're kind of jumping from this period to that period. I think it just gets real confusing real fast. So unlike a bunch of other tours, unlike the Boston Trail, like, we. It's the. The story kind of moves forward from Bowling Green to Francis Tavern. It. You move from the beginning of the. Of the. What historians call the imperial crisis, the lead up to the war to the revolution, to Washington's inauguration.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: Wow.
Do you mind telling people what Francis Tavern is?
[00:28:00] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: So Francis Tavern is like one of our, like, revolutionary gems.
So there's not much at all that survives from the. From the. From this period. And that's part of the reason why New York is absent in the popular imagination around the revolution.
And process has undergone it.
Lots of revisions too. But that is the tavern where, you know, Washington, when he came back into the city, he loses the city, famously, at the start of the war. The first major battle of the war is here in New York. He loses.
That's another reason why New York kind of gets displaced in the story, because it's kind of seen as, like, this embarrassing defeat. He's badly outnumbered. He's going up against this massive army. He's got this new, poorly trained army, you know, like, of course he lost.
And it actually, like what we argue, and again, I'll back this up all day long is that the conventional wisdom on that is wrong. Like, it seems like a victory for the Brits, but actually, like, it turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory. And it's very, very important. It's a very, very important way to understand the revolution. That I think is a lot more in line with what.
What historians would argue. Right. Because they really lose the battle kind of for logistical reasons and because they lose hearts and minds. Because for the Brits, the revolution is like Vietnam. You know, it's this counterinsurgency. They can't tell who's on their side and who's not. So they kind of immediately alienate the people who are on their side by not letting. Not bring them back into power in New York.
And I know you want to talk about France. I'm going to go back and talk about.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: No, it's fine. I'm fascinated what you're saying right now. Yeah. So I'm thinking about these questions.
[00:29:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: As you speak.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, um. So another reason why New York gets displaced from the story was this notion that it's a Tory town. Right. I. E. That it's. That there's too many loyalists here. So unlike Boston, Philadelphia, which do have. Which are. Which have less. Far less loyalists, and I would argue for that reason are far less representative of the story, New York is a lot more divided. Manhattan itself, which is New York proper at the time, which is just really the lower. It's like everything below City hall park, it's very, very small. Also significant. We'll be talking about that later.
It's a solid. It's more or less a solidly rebel city. Everything outside, though today is New York City, the outer boroughs and the wider metropolitan region, more or less solidly loyalist. Which is part of the reason why the Brits actually just kind of like walk, waltz right in and. And trounce the Americans and Washington's army in that battle.
But by the end of this period of seven years of military occupation under the British, which for everybody that's living outside of Manhattan is like this period of just like. I mean, these are the. These are the least known years of New York City's history.
The history of New York City is probably. Is. You know, it rivals the history, the. What's been written about World War II, which means that it's just about one of the biggest literatures out there in terms of, like, research.
But this is the least known period of New York City's history by far, I would say.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: I agree.
[00:31:08] Speaker B: And. And it is. Part of the reason is that I think it's the darkest New York City history.
So New Yorkers have to live under occupation and the city before this big battle, four in every five New Yorkers leave Manhattan, and the population then jumps tenfold within five years.
And that's after the city has lost a fifth of its housing to this massive fire, which may or may not have been set by George Washington after they lose the city. And the thing about Washington, just to address that, before Twitter goes crazy, Washington asked the Continental Congress twice if he can burn down the city if he loses it. Because the thing was, both sides of the conflict, the Brits and the rebels around Washington, they both saw in John Adams word, New York was the key to the whole continent.
And why was it such? Because New York, and this is a big factor, actually, in why New York becomes New York. It lies at the mouth of the Hudson. And in the age when rivers were highways, right, that was very important.
The Hudson has 350 miles up to Canada, which means it gives you more access to North America than any other port south of Halifax. And this is still the end of the Little Ice Age. So Halifax is often frozen.
So for the Brits, the idea is if we control New York, we'll control the Hudson, and we can divide north and south. Divide and conquer. This is the way the British built their empire. It's the way everybody kind of builds their empire. So we'll. We'll control this. We'll divide and conquer. That turns out not to be the case for them. But that's why the mat. The first major battle of the war and the largest battle of the war and the most important battle of the war, because it almost comes to an end at several times, several points in this battle that takes place over several months at the end of 76 here in New York City, when. When all of the surrounding area becomes like a literal battlefield. There are several points in which it could have all been over just a few, you know, months after the Declaration of Independence is. Is issued.
So, and the reason, you know, that it's the. It's the biggest. The Brits send 3,32,000 people on 421 vessels into New York's harbor in the summer of 76.
To give you a sense of the scale of that in terms of proportion then and now, the population of New York City was 25,000.
So it, you know, in the famous. The most famous quote from this period is it looked like all of London was afloat.
And that's why people flee, because they're expecting that the British might just bomb this thing to bits, right? And that if they lose it, they might be the ones to Burn it down.
But there's only one book on this question of the, of the fire just came out. It was one of our advisors, Benjamin Karp, who teaches at CUNY graduate schools, great historian.
You know, Ben would say we, we don't have a smoking gun, we never will.
But the evidence suggests that it was lit by rebels. Now that could have been an order that came down from Washington. There's this kind of famous letter where he says to his cousin later on, like, you know, something along the lines of kind of like, well, we really got lucky with that fire, huh? You know, but it could have easily also just been some member, low level member of the rebel. Because, because by that point, you know, and this is another reason why New York is important. I think you get a really vivid sense of what causes the revolution.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: So,
[00:34:47] Speaker B: you know, stop me when I'm, when I'm going on too much. But no, New York, New York is, we, we, we, we, we fixate on, you know, Massachusetts and Virginia have long kind of dominated colonial history and art and the public understanding of the colonial period.
New York was, was not, it was not the biggest port of the ports. He was, it was the second biggest by the time we get around to the revolution.
And it only outstrips Boston as a second biggest, I think by like 1740, 1750. So that's already very late in the colonial period.
However, already by 1730, King George II, Papa George to the George that we fight in the war, is calling New York, like, exceedingly necessary to our kingdom. It's closer to the West Indies, which is the most profitable part of the empire, than Boston. So it, so it gradually outstrips it. It's also at the mouth of the Hudson, which again, they see as continentally strategic, particularly when the French are in North America and the French are their big rivals.
So, and what's most, what's sort of significant about, I think the New York lens, it gives you really a vivid sense of what the revolution is for the colonial colonials at large.
I said before that it's, you know, it's very divided. It's divided and that's, that's makes it more representative.
Historians estimate that only 40% of the population supported the revolution.
Another 40% were neutral and 20% were loyal, which is slightly different from what the founders thought. Like John Adams famously says, like it was a third or third or third.
So it's been called increasingly since the 70s. And it's more or less the dominant narrative now that the revolution is America's first civil war. And it really is a civil war. Like, the Loyalists fight in, you know, 500 plus of like 700 plus battles and skirmishes. Right. So it's literally neighbor on neighbor violence.
And that's just the uniformed guys. Right. There's like. There's also just like neighbor on neighbor, like informal violence.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:49] Speaker B: You get a vivid sense of that here in New York because the. The Brits lose, the Brits reconquer New York. But Washington is like, near obsessed with, like, reclaiming it because in part, because he thinks it is really kind of really strategically important.
And so he keeps a very large contingent outside of the city. And those two armies are constantly sort of taking that perimeter around Manhattan as like their sort of raiding ground. And they're forced to. Because in Manhattan you're literally cut off from the continent.
And so the. They're. If only for like one resource alone. There's lots of resources that they're in need of, but this population jumps tenfold. There's a third of the battles and the revolution happened in New York. Two thirds happen in New York and New Jersey.
And New York's the only place that the British manage to hold on to consistently.
It's their headquarters. But it's also really the only place that they managed to hold onto for a long time.
So most of the refugees come here.
They often come penniless.
They're often living in Canvastown, which is the ruins of that big fire.
The city basically becomes this open air refugee camp. And it remains that way even during the period, like when Washington's inaugurated and the Brits are gone. We have all this kind of imagery where it's all kind of the city's glittering and it's kind of this proud moment of the founding. You know, if you move the camera just slightly off kilter, you'd see, like Canvas Town. You'd see this really notorious. Like this, like, half, you know, it looks like.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: I'd like to see renderings of that and everything.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And there. And there are none from this period. Like, all we have are these descriptions for contemporaries who just describe it as like, the most awful place on earth. Right.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: So can. This might be a dumb question.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: No.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: Can you paint a picture of how much New York as a city it is today compared to then is developed, if that makes sense.
[00:38:45] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: So you know how. What was it like back then? Like, you know what I mean?
[00:38:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So when. To give you a sense of numbers, when the. When the city burns down, I said it's a fifth.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:38:55] Speaker B: It's 900 buildings.
So, you know, you have 25, 000 people living below City hall park, and they're really kind of cheek by jowl. It's pretty dense.
And what's more important, this is also, like, I think, a key part of the story we focus on. I think I didn't say this before, but this is important to say as foregrounding. We focus on Boston, Philadelphia.
You know, from a numerical point of view, that doesn't make any sense because if you added up all those cities, you'd literally get like a percentage of the total population of the colonies.
But it does make sense to focus on those places because they're the ones that are most integrated into the British economy, this kind of global imperial economy.
They're the colonial outposts, right, for an empire. And so they're like, they function as these kind of way stations for goods that are moving across this empire. Right. It's the beginning, the very kind of beginnings of globalization, in a sense.
And so when Parliament passes these laws, it passes these laws that, you know, short version of the story is within a century or so, the, the Brits create what historians called the first global. The first British empire, which is their first global empire. And you know, they rack up an amazing amount of debt doing that. They, their, their, their debt doubles 14 times in the 1700s alone.
They were paying 3/4 of their budget went just to the interest and military costs.
And they were. And the Brits were also like, arguably the most heavily taxed people on earth.
They were paying six times what the average colonial was paying.
And so part. So the question is like, you know, for the historian, the basic question is always, why does the thing happen when it does? So why all of a sudden did the British like, wake up one day and decide to like, pass all these laws and like, you know, why were the colonies all pissed off about it?
Well, the idea was we've got this massive debt, we've got some sense of security now because we've like, we've really kind of crushed our main rival, the French. We've driven them out of North America, the largest part of the British Empire by far.
And we, we want to kind of economize a bit and liquidate that debt and kind of get lean and mean and, you know, like, you know, for the long term. So they pass all these laws, the sum of which basically just create a depression in all these port cities.
The reason we focus on the port cities is because those people are thrown out of work, there's massive poverty. That's created during this 12 year period. Right. Roughly. It's like a third of the population is in poverty by the end of that 12 year period. It's like 1930s scale depression.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: No burrows though, right?
[00:41:33] Speaker B: There's, there's no burrows. No, no, no. But like, you know, this is, you know, it's not just Manhattan. It's like the surrounding area was part of that economy too. The farmers upriver and the Hudson, Right, are out in Long Island. They're also part of that economy too.
So sometimes people are neutral or loyal because they're not really affected by these laws. But, you know, 40 is, you know, it doesn't seem like a lot to us now because we kind of get this notion that everybody was on board for the revolution, but it is a big number and that's because a lot of people were tied into that economy.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: It's fascinating now, there's so much to
[00:42:08] Speaker B: say about that history.
I mean, but I would encourage people to, you know, what we did was again, our job is to like, educate, but like, it's not to just like, you know, be the, you know, like Ben Stein. Like, you know, and then in 1927, you know, so like, you know, we, we, we, we design something that we think is, it's informative. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's very informative.
[00:42:35] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:35] Speaker B: Like I said, There's 75,000 words of text online, but it's a choose your own adventure thing.
[00:42:40] Speaker A: So I can't wait. Like, I cannot wait.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: You just, you just kind of, you know, you learn as much as you want to. And again, you don't have to kind of like do the official tour. You can just kind of drop in, in places and do what's interesting to you.
[00:42:51] Speaker A: Can you explain how it works? You know, what you're doing?
[00:42:54] Speaker B: So the existing app, the New York City Revolutionary Trail, like, it's kind of like the grandpa app. Like, it's just audio and there's some video and there's image and text. The new one that we're coming out with, we call our Pokemon Go version. Yeah, it's literally kind of, in a
[00:43:08] Speaker A: way, our kind of Pokemon Amazing.
[00:43:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we used Niantic. The folks that Pokemon Go use, there's kind of visual spatial technology that allows you that app that's coming out in June next month.
You have to be downtown man, in downtown Manhattan to use it. Right. It's, it's visually and it's free. It's free also.
[00:43:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: And the idea is it's a More gamified, interactive, immersive version. So we teamed up with the folks that, that created the Assassin's Creed.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: Right. That's fantastic.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: They spent millions of dollars, hired top notch historians, literally digitally recreated. This is by far the most extensive, like, you know, rendering. We have the Colonial city. So if you want to actually look and see like what the city felt like and what it looked like, like, this is the thing. And so we use that in the app to create augmented reality sort of scenes. And then there are these sort of interactive elements where we basically try to, you know, you know, we trick, we trick kids into learning history. Right. But we also, you know, it's, it's a way to kind of like again adults, you know, just kind of make it a little bit more kind of entertaining and such.
So for example, like you can stand at the harbor and you can like, you know, shoot cannon at the ships that are trying to go up.
[00:44:24] Speaker A: Amazing. I love it.
[00:44:25] Speaker B: You can pull down the statue of King George and Bowling Green. You can be a spy. And like there's like a door that pops up around Zuccotti park and you like go in and all of a sudden there's, you're in a house and you rifle around looking for spots.
[00:44:36] Speaker A: So the app is actually in the actual spots that these events actually happen. Yeah, exactly. Which I think is incredible. Genius. Yeah. And how'd you guys come up with it? Just in general.
[00:44:46] Speaker B: So we were thinking about, you know, the Gotham center has been around for a long time and we had, we've had, you know, we've, we've. Our programming's reached tens of thousands of people. But you know, we do, we're the only center devoted to New York City. And like I said before, if there's any sort of area of history that has mass appeal, it's New York City history.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: Right, Right. Agreed.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: My relatives in Denmark by books on the history of New York. Right. Like, they're probably not buying books on the history of, of Chicago. No offense to Chicago. Yeah, I would buy that book. But yeah, you know, this is kind of our like, foray into like more mass market audiences.
So I'm pleased to say that like between the apps and this big exhibition that we just did at the museum, the City of New York, that's based on that same work advertising that we're doing because we got sponsorship from the Downtown alliance, we're going to reach millions of people with this project and we're hoping that this will just kind of lead to more of the same.
[00:45:38] Speaker A: So you've Changed the game. No pun intended.
You know, I mean, as anybody else, I'm sure other people have said that.
[00:45:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, like our. If, if, if my job is to, is to educate, but also like, reach the.
As many people as possible. If my job is to like, you know, make all those taxes that we all hate paying like, you know, seem worthwhile in some way, then, yeah, like
[00:46:04] Speaker A: you've, you've modernized the tour business.
You know, you go ahead. What? We're going to say something.
[00:46:10] Speaker B: Well, we thought about, we thought about that too. Like, it was kind of good. You know, we, we think this is kind of where tourism is going to, going to go. Right? So part of this is just kind of like we want to kind of make this point about New York's importance and all that.
But I think also part of it is like, I think this is where tourism is inevitably going to go. Right. We're in this, you know, phone based, visual based culture now, and there have been a bunch of companies that have tried to kind of crack the nut on this. And, you know, I think we could easily do this for every kind of subject.
[00:46:44] Speaker A: I agree.
[00:46:44] Speaker B: And there's, and there's, you know, and like, you know, it's literally kind of like throw a dart at the wall. Like, if it's dance, you're interested in our art or architecture, you know, arts and letters, business and finance, tech and
[00:46:56] Speaker A: science, it's like anything.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: They're, they're just like, New York is just like, just ripe with all these amazing stories and so all that stuff could be turned into, you know, right now it's just kind of sitting there as a book, just kind of like lying dormant and it has a limited audience as a book. But all that stuff could, could kind of be re. Like repurposed into podcasts, into walking tours.
[00:47:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:47:19] Speaker B: All kinds of like really engaging, informative stuff, you know.
[00:47:24] Speaker A: You know, I read something too that was interesting so said, you know, instead of reading a plaque on a building, now you get to actually see what happened at that building with this app, which I think is, yeah, incredible.
[00:47:41] Speaker B: I mean, when there was all that stuff going on about the monuments, I was like, well, you know, like, why not just kind of put up a QR code?
[00:47:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:47] Speaker B: You know, and then you can just kind of have like, you know, like, you get all the history on, like, why that thing went up. You know, like, people are like, the Columbus statue was like a big flashpoint. Still kind of a big.
[00:47:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:47:57] Speaker B: You know, like, there's a lot more to say and the reality is, like, what gets onto those plaques is, like, a tiny bit right. Often wrong.
[00:48:05] Speaker A: Right, right. You know, you know, my. My limited history knowledge, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna ask you a few questions. If I'm correct, you can tell me if I'm correct or incorrect.
The Federal hall is where the Bill of Rights were written.
[00:48:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: Oh, that's correct.
[00:48:19] Speaker B: Well, okay, so Federal hall was the first.
[00:48:22] Speaker A: Right there. Wall Street.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: It's where Washington gets inaugurated.
It's also where the. The. And this is again, to the centrality of New York. New York is the capital. The first capital for five years.
[00:48:35] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:48:36] Speaker B: It's where the ratification of the Constitution happens. New York also is a central player in that story because the state is initially opposed.
And probably people know about the Federalist papers that Alexander Hamilton came.
I think people kind of get taught that in school, as if it's like, kind of just like this general work of political theory. It's a series of op EDS that are published in New York's papers to try to convince New Yorkers who are opposed Constitution to vote for it. And now it does pass by a narrow margin, but with one major concession. The anti Federalists, as they're known, say we need to have a bill of Rights. And there are other sites who kind of like, you know, put forward these kind of proposals. The most robust was New York's right. And the majority of that went into the actual US Bill of Rights. So that's New York's part of the story.
The other thing is, like, this is, like, the least known. Hamilton now is famous. Right. He was kind of unknown years ago. The thing that people still don't know, though, is that, like, the first major debate that the country had after independence wasn't the Constitution. It was reintegration.
So 60,000 people, 60,000 loyalists have to flee, often because they've had all their property taken from them, or in some cases, because they're marked for execution. Because when the war actually happens, loyalists who are generally not all that different from rebels in the period leading up to when independence becomes a question, everything really changes. And there's like a radicalization that happens, and you get this kind of real polarization, and it gets really bad once people are actually, like, bringing out their muskets and, like, you know, going at each other.
So New York is like the headquarters of like. Like, these people are too extreme for the British, and those people leave after the war. But what people don't know is that if 60,000 left, 450,000 stayed. That's a sixth of the population. One in every six members of the founding generation did not want to found this country.
[00:50:28] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:50:28] Speaker B: And those people actually end up being some of the most important supporters of the Constitution, which passes rather narrowly majority. The most extensive study was done by a guy at Harvard named Michael Clareman.
It's called the Founders Coup.
Americans, most Americans probably wanted something in between the original Constitution and the, and the actual Constitution.
And you know, the founders are fascinating characters and great men in their way, but they're, they're, they're human beings like us. And, and they were politicians. And so the, the ratification had all the same trickery that we're familiar with today.
But the, the big question for reintegration was what do we do with all these people who, you know, we were literally like at each other's throats with now that the war is over. And initially most of the states pass really severe laws where they strip them of property, they stripped them of civil rights, they couldn't vote, they couldn't have old office.
And Hamilton becomes the most wealthy and prominent lawyer on Wall street because he defends a lot of the well to do loyalists making the argument that one, there's a depression after the war as well as before, because not only did you have the depression before the war, and then the war itself is devastating. Britain cuts off America from its empire. And so, you know, people are struggling. And so his argument is like, you know, we could use every dollar we could, we could get.
The other thing was, you know, during the war there's all these battles everywhere and we have this kind of sanitized view of the war, but it really staggered contemporary imaginations in terms of the scale of the violence.
And there was a lot of side switching, as you find in every kind of story like this, for other countries.
And so Hamilton's argument was like, well, it would be a nightmare for the justice system to try to figure out like who was like a genuine traitor and who wasn't. And also we're like a country now and we're a rather disunited. We called ourselves the United States, but we're rather disunited, right?
I mean, the colonies, the colonies barely knew anything about each other before this period. One of the things that actually kind of happens through this whole period is like you, you get to the creation of a nation, people even just kind of thinking in terms of being a nation right beforehand. It's like, I'm a Connecticut, I'm a New Yorker, I'm a Georgian, that's the way they thought they didn't see themselves as part of the United States. That was an abstraction.
So, you know, he argues for repealing these laws and New York, which had the most stringent laws, repeals his laws. The rest of the states follow suit. The loyalists are, are allowed to. They get their property back, they're allowed to vote, they're allowed to hold office.
We have people who sign, who are like involved with the actual like genuine founding of the country, who are loyalists. And a lot of those people, they.
[00:53:26] Speaker A: The.
[00:53:26] Speaker B: The.
This was not an. This was not some grand conspiracy. Like by no way could it could ever been a conspiracy because the timing just doesn't work. But like, but one of the consequences of the reintroduction of the loyalists was that the loyalists actually like give the federalists probably the critical edge they needed to pass the Constitution.
[00:53:43] Speaker A: Wow.
So fascinating.
[00:53:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:46] Speaker A: And one last thing.
[00:53:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:47] Speaker A: Because I know we have to get going, we have to wrap it up, but I'm just going to talk to you for hours. Yeah.
Is it true that George Washington did his farewell address at Francis tavern?
[00:53:56] Speaker B: He did, yeah.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:58] Speaker B: The Francis has like all kinds of legacy. So it's a farewell address.
It also serves as like, like a treasury and a state department and it has kind of like several sort of executive office functions during that period when it's the first capital.
The thing that we actually focus on is like the least known story but has become bigger as part of their permanent exhibition now.
[00:54:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:20] Speaker B: The British who brought most of the slaves to America as a divide and conquer strategy at the beginning of the war, offer freedom to people who escape rebel slave owners. Right. And also any indentured servants.
And the whole notion was, you know, divide and conquer.
What that meant was that this is. Means that the revolution like did more to destabilize slavery than any other sort of event in U. S. History.
And most of them come to New York. Actually 20,000 people flee slavery and 10,000 of them come to New York because again, it's the stronghold. And those people are like really critical actors. Like they're key to like the. They're literally like guarding the gates like the Negro 4 quote unquote up at Kingsbridge, which is the only connection that connects the mainland America to the New York City.
[00:55:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:08] Speaker B: It's guarded by an all black regiment.
There are all black people. And on both sides of this conflict, like, like Washington's army is saved when he escapes from Brooklyn Heights. It's like, like the most dramatic example of like where it could have all been over Just a few weeks after the Declaration, he's saved by this group of sailors, which included enslaved black men, I think also probably a couple of free black men and Native Americans.
They, they are these like really skilled deep sea fishermen that like get them across and they, and they save the Washington's army a few times, but yeah, so, so, and the Birch Trials. So it. So, so they do this thing and then at the end of the war when they're negotiating the peace, literally all these people who are hired by the slave owners come to New York City streets and are literally just ripping people off the streets to bring them back to slavery. And they're petitioning to the British and saying, hey, look, can, like, can you help us out? And the British actually made good. And this is like truly an historic first. Right. Like when Haiti has its revolution, they overthrow slavery, they have to pay debt to the French. They paid debt to the French until the 1950s.
Right. For the privilege of being free.
So the fact that the Brits actually did right by the, by the enslaved people. And, and they, they, they, they granted freedom to over 3, 000 of them at Francis Tavern, this thing called the Birch Trials. And then they, they give them land up in Canada where they still celebrate like Loyalist Day and such.
And yeah, so it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's quite heartening story that people don't know at all.
[00:56:42] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:56:43] Speaker B: It's the biggest emancipation until the Civil War.
[00:56:45] Speaker A: I want to get one more little sneak in. One more question. Yeah. I have so many questions for you.
[00:56:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:56:51] Speaker A: Down at, well, where the bowl is on Wall street, it's something like elect something day. What is that?
[00:56:58] Speaker B: Evacuation Day.
[00:56:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:56:59] Speaker B: So, so if the war begins in New York City, you know, and if we had more time, I could talk about how. Because even earlier than that. But it ends in New York City formally too, and not just with the inauguration, but the last evacuation of British from North America happens in New York City. So tens of thousands, like leave, and the vast majority of them leave from New York because again, it's the only stronghold that day, Evacuation Day. Washington comes from north, from northern Manhattan, marches down. It's this big kind of coordinated thing. Both, both sides are really, you know, going to detail on how it all kind of work out. The British sail off that day. Evacuation Day becomes a holiday in New York that's celebrated up until World War I. Wow. And it is said to have been even a bigger holiday than July 4th here.
[00:57:47] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:57:47] Speaker B: And it only ends because In World War I, the Brits in the US create the quote, unquote, special relationship. And so, you know, among other things, that, that's like, why we, for example, like, don't know that the vast majority of people who fought and died for this country's creation are buried here in New York City, because the vast majority of people who died, who died for independence died as POWs in British captivity. So they were held here in the city, and they died in Brooklyn Navy Yard.
So actually, this is the graveyard for the American Revolution. Another reason why New York really should be the center of the story.
[00:58:24] Speaker A: Wow. Whoa. Geez. Yeah.
Yeah. We need you. Have you on again.
[00:58:31] Speaker B: Happy to.
[00:58:31] Speaker A: I'm not kidding. I'm learning so much and everybody else is too, so thank you. Yeah.
[00:58:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:36] Speaker A: Really. Peter, couple quick fire questions and we'll let you go.
You ready? Yeah. Favorite hidden NYC historical spot.
[00:58:45] Speaker B: Oh, well, I mean, so on this point about the prison ships, if you go behind NYPD headquarters, right, you'll see you'll get one of the. The few actual, like, vintage pieces we have from this period. Nobody goes to this. To this thing. And there's a subway station right there, so it's kind of amazing to just kind of watch it. It's right across the street from City Hall Park.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. And people are.
[00:59:05] Speaker B: People just kind of milling constantly around it. But if you go, like, towards the. Where the trees are behind that building, you'll see this window with bars on it, and you see a little plaque. Go up to that. It'll say the Sugar House Prison window. So Most of the POWs were in these ships in Brooklyn Navy Yard, but a few of them, but initially they had. They're overrun with POWs, so they start filling. The POWs get put into sugar houses. They get put into the. The churches of, like, rebel people. They put, like, everywhere they can. They stuff these. These POWs. And so there was a sugar house that was owned by Robert Livingston that was right by Trinity Church, and they took that window and they put it there.
[00:59:45] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:59:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:59:46] Speaker A: Well, you just gave me an idea to make an Instagram post about that too.
Most underrated NYC historical figure.
[00:59:56] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:59:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:59] Speaker B: If. If Michael Michion was here, he would say Andrew Green.
And there's. There's a lot of good reason to agree with him.
I don't know. Most underrated New York City figure.
[01:00:13] Speaker A: It's a hard question.
[01:00:14] Speaker B: It is a hard question.
I mean, you know, I've sort of thought, like, if we, like, if you did, like, A sort of galaxy of like famous New Yorkers, like in these books come out every once in a while. Like notable New Yorkers.
[01:00:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:24] Speaker B: It would just kind of be like everybody.
[01:00:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:27] Speaker B: So it's really hard to kind of say like, who's really underrated as a, as a New York City founding figure.
[01:00:32] Speaker A: I mean, we don't know if you can't have an answer. I mean, your historian with, you know, all these amazing people that you know about. So. Yeah, it's a. I mean, I can
[01:00:43] Speaker B: give you a revolution one if you want.
[01:00:44] Speaker A: Sure.
[01:00:46] Speaker B: So, you know, the most important character in New York during the American Revolutionary period is this guy named Isaac Sears. There's no book on this guy. There's no, you know, biography. There's a little squib on the encyclopedia if you look it up.
Sears is the Sam Adams of New York. He is the guy behind every major street action in the city. Right.
He is the most radical figure in the city. He is, he's, he's, he's the guy who's like encouraging the guys in Boston to like do things like the Tea Party before, like they're even talking about it. Right. Or like the Continental Congress. He's a really sort of charismatic, evocative figure. And so I would say Isaac Sears because among other things, the revolution is critical to the founding of New York as like the true kind of capital of the United States. Right. It's the unofficial capital capital. The capital moves to the D.C. who cares? It doesn't matter. Like the, the real capital is New York. Right. Like, I'll beat my chest there. Like, you know, so, so insofar is like there was one person who kind of made that happen who really doesn't get the credit to. New York's like a burgeon says this place. Isaac Sears.
[01:01:57] Speaker A: Nice. Describe NYC in one word.
[01:02:01] Speaker B: Endless.
[01:02:02] Speaker A: Nice.
Perfect. Peter, you're awesome. Peter, thanks for doing this with us today.
This is fascinating. I mean, we could do this for hours. No kidding. I would love to just sit here and listen to you teach us all about New York City. But I have one more question.
[01:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:20] Speaker A: So before we let you go, we here at the New Yorkers podcast want to know what it means to you, Peter Eigner, Dr. Peter Eigner, to be a New Yorker.
[01:02:38] Speaker B: I think it.
I don't know if this is a weird answer, but I, I think never a weird. I think it's kind of like to be street wise.
So you know, people, for example, like, so people ask me all the time about like it's Everyone. The Gotham Center. What's with this thing? Gotham? Why is New York called Gotham?
It's actually a town in England, goes back to medieval England, I think it's in Nottingham.
And there were stories written about it and the whole idea was like, literally it's called Goat Town. The whole notion was that people, they were kind of simpletons. But there's another version of the story that got told and was retold many times where they pretended to be simpletons and they're kind of tricksters. Right now that kind of makes it seem negative. But to me, like the thing that's kind of just like true New York is that, you know, like there's, there's like a street wiseness here that like maybe doesn't. You don't get anywhere else. Like, so people, you know, I had a friend who grew up in California and they said like, you know, everyone kind of that does that kind of like, bless your heart, kind of Southern like Great Lakes thing too. And, and, and you know, but like they're not necessarily going to stop on the side of the road to help you. Whereas in New York it's like, you know, like they help you to get out of the way on the subway. But I think they do stop to like help you out. And so I feel like there's like, you know, the thing about New York is it's like we're like you, it's easy to mistake us, but like this great heart here and like real intelligence that, that, you know, it's kind of, kind of a, you know, a street based intelligence more than.
I don't know if I was articulated all that.
[01:04:26] Speaker A: No, that was real. I was just thinking how nicely said that is.
[01:04:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that, I think that, you know, that that's kind of to me is, is New Yorkness. Like it's, it's like grounded, you know, that the. I think it's something about just the experience of all of us kind of being forced together in this place. So we're forced. You're, you're, you're kind of denied being. Being in a bubble a bit, you know.
[01:04:48] Speaker A: Right.
[01:04:48] Speaker B: And that creates a bit of sense of that common culture and togetherness. Even though of course, like, you know, look, we're all crammed into this, you know, we all want our damn space and you know, like we get on each other's nerves. But.
Yeah, so that's kind of New Yorkness to me.
[01:05:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Nicely said, my friend.
[01:05:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[01:05:07] Speaker A: Well, thanks, Peter. You are awesome.
[01:05:09] Speaker B: Appreciate it,
[01:05:12] Speaker A: Peter. Thank you. For joining us today for this week's episode of the New Yorkers Podcast. Why don't you let everyone know where they can find you on social media and let them know when they will be able to try out Echoes of Revolution.
[01:05:23] Speaker B: Yes. So you can find us at gothamcenter.org or nycrevolutionarytrail.org where you'll learn about the Echoes of Revolution app.
And all of our social media channels are on there.
[01:05:35] Speaker A: Nice. Nice.
Once again, I'm your host Kelly Kopp, also known as New York City Cop across all my social media.
[01:05:42] Speaker B: Please like and subscribe to the New Yorkers Podcast and you can follow the New Yorkers on social media at the New Yorkers Podcast.
[01:05:49] Speaker A: You can leave a rating or a comment to let us know how you are enjoying the show. My friends, we read through all of your comments and DMs so please, we would love to hear from you. Thank you Sue Rothwell and I've known sue for a long time too. I've designed some tours with her. She's amazing as well. Everyone's amazing. And Courtney7654 and Kenmore11211 for your kind words on the last episode. If you want to be featured at the end of an episode, leave a rating on Apple Podcast or a comment on Spotify or YouTube.
[01:06:19] Speaker B: And thank you WTF Media Studios, Industry City and All Day NYC for your comments on Instagram.
[01:06:25] Speaker A: Have a lovely day everybody and we'll see you next time.
[01:06:27] Speaker B: Goodbye.
[01:06:30] Speaker A: This is the last stop on this train everyone. Please leave the train. Thank you for riding with MTA New York City Transit.
