Secrets, Lies & Grand Designs

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.

Chelsea / Meatpacking

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.

Wall Street

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.

Chinatown

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.

Brooklyn Bridge

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.

Times Square

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.