Parks in New York City
3 parks to discover with Bad Historian in New York City.
Central Park
An 843-acre rectangle of nature that took 20 years and 20,000 workers to make look 'natural.' They moved more earth than digging the Panama Canal.
City Hall Park
City Hall Park. Open ground, benches, a fountain, City Hall set back behind the trees. This has been public land longer than the United States has existed, and for most of that time it was not remotely a park.
Columbus Park
Take in the park for a second. Old men bent over chessboards, a ring of onlookers giving unsolicited advice on every move. The clack of mahjong tiles. Somebody playing a two-stringed fiddle.
New York City Audio Experiences
Visit these parks and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Bodies, Bohemians & Basement Bars
Eight stops through Greenwich Village — where twenty thousand bodies lie under a dog park, a nineteen-year-old kid rewrote American music in a horse stable, and a drag queen kicked a cop and changed the world. Walk the crooked streets the grid forgot and figure out which stories are real.
Central Park Is a Lie
Every blade of grass was faked, and there are twenty thousand bodies underneath it. Walk south-to-north through eight of the most photographed spots in Central Park and discover the obsessive who designed it, the community that was erased to build it, and the loaded cannon that sat on display for a hundred and thirty years before anyone checked.
Death Avenue to the High Line
How a railroad that killed five hundred people became a park that grows wildflowers. Walk the High Line from the Meatpacking District to Hudson Yards and discover the cowboys who rode through Manhattan for ninety years, the cookie factory that became a tech campus, and the twenty-five-billion-dollar development that qualified for poverty-area tax breaks by drawing a map through Central Park.
Hamilton Invented the Money
The penniless immigrant clerk who built America's Treasury, banks, customs service and Coast Guard — then published ninety-five pages about his own affair to prove he wasn't a thief. Ten blocks of Lower Manhattan, from the wharf where he stole British cannons to the churchyard where he's buried. His enemy's bank still owns the pistols.
Secrets, Lies & Grand Designs
The buildings that lied to your face. Walk two and a half miles from the Flatiron to the Waldorf and discover the unhinged decisions behind New York's most iconic stretch of real estate — a secret spire raised in ninety minutes, a librarian who burned her own diaries, and a hotel built entirely out of spite.
The Bloody Angle and the Golden Buddha
New York's oldest Chinatown, where almost nothing is what it pretends to be: a golden Buddha inside a former porn theater, a lane so crooked it worked as a murder weapon, a crime boss with a real sheriff's badge, and America's favorite Chinese food — mostly invented right here.
The Family Business
How three Roeblings gave their bodies to a bridge. Walk two miles from City Hall to Brooklyn Heights and hear the story of the father who died, the son who was paralyzed, and the wife who finished the job — with no degree, no title, and no recognition for over a century.
The Hit Factory
Eight blocks of Broadway where American entertainment was manufactured. A Ziegfeld palace Disney found with mushrooms growing in the third row, a fourteen-million-pound theater lifted thirty feet into the air rather than demolished, a skyscraper built as a memorial to a dead teenager that became the most famous address in pop music, and the room where fifty thousand people wrote in for seven hundred and twenty-eight seats. Ten stops from West Forty-Second Street to Rockefeller Plaza.
Hear the stories behind these places
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