Happy birthday, Biggie! Christopher Wallace a/k/a Notorious B.I.G was born on May 21, 1972 and raised in Bed-Stuy. Today Notorious B.I.G is remembered as one of the greatest rappers of all-time, after a mercurial rise to the top, an incredibly short career, and a dramatic assassination that sent shockwaves through the country. Wallace started dealing…
This site often brings you tales of activism and dissent, but New Yorkers aren’t always as rebellious as they should be. On May 20, 1970, more than 100,000 of them marched through lower Manhattan to show their support for the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. Nor was this the first outpouring of Vietnam warmongering from New Yorkers. On May 13,…
On May 17, 1792, two dozen New Yorkers met under a tree to talk about Revolutionary War debt. That little conversation spawned the behemoth we have all come to fear and loathe, yet depend on for tax revenue and retirement stability: the New York Stock Exchange. After suffering the indignity of British occupation during the…
It can be easy to forget, in our hurry to get places, that taxi drivers have it pretty tough. Between the rise of Uber, Lyft, and their imitators, and the introduction of the green outer-borough taxis a few years ago, life has never been so convenient for taxi passengers. For drivers, on the other hand,…
For the second time in a week I am dedicating Today in NYC History to the team of my youth, the New York Knickerbockers. The franchise was going through one of its frequent dreary spells when it hit the lottery jackpot on May 12, 1985, winning the rights to draft Georgetown star Patrick Ewing. During…
New Yorkers, today is your day. Make something happen. For centuries, May 11 has been a bat-call for big moments in New York City history. In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant a/k/a Peg Leg Pete, arrived in New Amsterdam to take charge as the new governor of the wayward Dutch West India Company town. Garbage ran through…
Fans of the woeful New York Knickerbockers haven’t had a lot to cheer for in recent years, or ever. But on May 8, 1970, an electric Madison Square Garden crowd saw the Knicks crush the Los Angeles Lakers to bring home their first NBA championship. Coached by New York native Red Holzman, the Knicks resembled the…
On a dreary winter night in Pittsburgh, 1885, a dispirited father wrote the Pittsburgh Dispatch asking what to do with his five unmarried daughters. The paper responded with an editorial explaining that women were only good for housework, and that America must have sunk pretty low if a father didn’t have time to find suitable…
Equal parts magical, frightening, odd and successful, the 1939 World’s Fair offered tourists from all over the world the possibility of a peaceful, technocratic future, just as World War II began. It opened to great fanfare in Flushing-Coronoa Park, Queens, 76 years ago today. The idea for the 1939 World’s Fair was cooked up by…
On April 28, 1883, a Hungarian immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer paid $386,000 to purchase the New York World from robber baron Jay Gould. Not one to waste time, Pulitzer immediately shook up the moribund newspaper and turned it into the most powerful media operation in the United States, dominating the New York and American press…
janos.nyc 