Jared The NYC Tour Guide® | Custom walking tours of New York City

Jared the NYC Tour Guide Blog

Posted: Oct 24, 2012 | 2:56 PM

October 24th in New York City History - Happy BDay UN, GWB, Kevin Kline, and

1891: Madison Square Garden's first six-day bike race rolls. Racers often fell off their bikes or suffered hallucinations, which attracted a greater audience. Bill Martin won, pedaling over 1,466 miles. His prize: $3000.

1904: Moss Hart, Broadway music theatre director and writer would have celebrated his birthday today . He did in 1961. Kitty Carlisle Hart dishes on him here.

1915: Batman's creator, Bob Kane, who was an alum of Cooper Union and the Art Students League, was born. Batman, inspired by Leonardo DaVinci's inventions, was not armed by super powers, but by wealth, obsession, and invention. The Jewish Museum had a powerful exhibit about Jewish super hero creators.

1931: The George Washington Bridge spanning 90% of a mile across the wide Hudson River, connecting New York City and New Jersey, was dedicated. It carries over 100 million cars per year, and in its day was twice the length of the previous longest bridge in the world, and it is still among the longest and most traveled.

If you would like to drive across, it will cost you $12 into Manhattan or $7.50 on EasyPass.

It towers 600 feet over the water, and its roadway clearance is 200 feet above the water.

It was mostly created by great bridge New York engineer Othmar Ammann, who broke another bridge record at the end of his career with the Verrazano bridge, as well as Cass Gibert of Supreme Court, Minnesota State Capitol, and New York's Woolworth (world's tallest building 1913-1930) and Customs House buildings fame.

Gilbert's design would have encased the towers in granite and concrete stonework with restaurants on top.

Depression era costs forced the bridge to be its engineering steel framework, which inspired Le Corbusier, who described “the most beautiful bridge in the world ... When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh.”

1939: F. Murray Abraham the Broadway actor best known in the 1980s for his role as Salieri, the star of Amadeus, after which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for this role in the lush film about living in Mozart's wake by Columbia Professor Milos Forman. DaPonte, another Columbia Professor was Mozart's librettist.

I love featuring this bridge on foliage tours up the Hudson River to Revolutionary War sights and West Point. It can also be part of an Upper Manhattan Tour or Washington Heights tour.

1945: The United Nations opens.
The UN is far from perfect, but, like democracy, it is the best of the worst alternatives. Tip: if you make a joke while addressing the General Assembly, you will get laughs at six different times, since they are translated.

1949: The United Nations' New York City complex opens, dedicated by President Truman in 26 languages. The property, worth over $8 million, was donated by the Rockefellers, whose international business benefits from international peace. If you see international flags flying at Rockefeller Center, that signifies that the UN General Assembly is in session.

I recommend a 1-hour tour of the UN. It is, sometimes, depressing, but who else addresses childhood hunger, landmines, and water quality. The tour also has beautiful architecture. As usual, it exits through the gift shop. If you want to mail a postcard from there, you will need a United Nations stamp. It is international territory. That is why enemies of the United States are able to meet there.

1947: Broadway favorite Kevin Kline celebrates his birthday.

1960: It is Broadway and Law & Order SVU's B.D. Wong's birthday. You can learn about his impressive career, much of it in NYC here.

1962: James Brown's recorded an electrifying performance for "Live at the Apollo," his self-financed breakthrough album, which spent 66 weeks on Billboard's album chart, selling over a million copies. This album is a pioneer of live music recordings for pop music.
Brown lied in state at the Apollo Theater, which I show folks on my Harlem Tours.

1972: Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodger great and first African American to play major league baseball, and Hall of Famer, died at 53. I love CitiField's Jackie Robinson rotunda,

which makes me want to be a better man: "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."

1976: The New York City Marathon goes Five-Borough. Bill Rodgers won a fourth time in a row in 2:10:10, a local record, besting Frank Shorter. Miki Gorman led the women. In those days, the event did not have enough influence to close Fifth Avenue, so they raced on the FDR Drive. The runners had to climb two flights of stairs to reach it!

My father and mother joined the Marathon team as publicists, getting it local and international press coverage. As a child, I would run, or distribute, press results as they came in. That it is how I used to run (for) the NY Marathon!

1994: Raul Julia, the Broadway actor and humanitarian left us too soon. I saw him perform at Shakespeare in the Park for free. Was he Othello?

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Posted: Oct 22, 2012 | 6:49 PM

October 23rd in New York City's History

1869: John W. Heisman, football coach great for decades, authority on athletics, and a director of the Downtown Athletic Club, which renamed its amateur football trophy to the Heisman award, was born on this date. He died at 66 in 1936. Here is his New York Times obituary.

1878: NYC's first phone directory is published with 300 listings on one page. The listings were presented like the Yellow Pages, based on services offered, but there are no phone numbers. That is because 0perators connected the calls. Before wiring was regulated and then put under the sidewalks, New York's canyons were filled with poles and wires overhead.

1884: The first official World Series pits the Mets against Providence at the Polo Grounds. The Grays beat the Mets 6-0. Providence will go on to win the series on the 25th, despite their star pitcher Charley 'Old Hoss' Radbourne playing three full games three days in a row.
He was 60-12 in the regular season. Baseball grueled its pitchers those days.

1886: Al Jolson, known for decades as "The World's Greatest Entertainer," was born in Russia. His live performances, singing, dancing, acting, and comedy made his career. The song “Swanee” was his signature song. In 1927, when the film industry was based in NYC, he ushered in the talking motion picture era starring in The Jazz Singer. Jolson's reputation suffered because his film performances weren't as strong as his live ones. Also, he performed in black face minstrel shows, which was mainstream, even among black performers, but which became unacceptable in the 1960s. He died in 1950.

1905: New York City's official Staten Island Ferry opens, competing with various unregulated ferries. Today, the ferry carries around 20 million rides each year, about 60,000 daily, with several ships, some holding around six thousand.

1906: Gertrude Ederly, America's most famous woman swimmer, born in New York. Her parade on Broadway's Canyon of Heroes memorializes her record breaking swim across the English Channel, the first woman to do so.

1915: Over 25,000 women march on Fifth Avenue for the right to vote.

In many of these parades, women wearing white symbolized that black men could vote but not the wives of white men.

1925: Johnny Carson, the great comedian and host of the Tonight Show, which was in New York City for his first ten years on the show, was born in Corning, Iowa.

1940: It is Pelé's birthday. The great Brazilian Soccer player Pele could well be one of the most successful players in sports history, earning the most of any. He was in his first World Cup match at 17. Ten years later Nigeria's civil war ceased so that Nigerians could watch Pelé and his team play. Most agree that Pelé is the best soccer player of all time.

1948: The United Nations General Assembly meets in New York City for the first time in Flushing Meadows, Queens.

1952: At the height of McCarthyist Red Scare, the New York City Board of Education dismissed eight teachers for Communism allegations. 1500 protested outside.

1954: NYU's Tisch School of the Arts' Ang Lee, the film director, was born.

1983: The New York Marathon's dramatic finish saw it's first non-American take the Rudin Cup with New Zealand's Rod Dixon sprinting at the end to a 2:08:59 twenty-six mile run, less than a minute from the World Record, an amazing feat on a brutal but beloved course. He overtook Geoff Smith who staggered the last few yards across the finish line.
I was there that day and watched the medics care for Smith even, especially, as Dixon was feted.

1995: Bob Watson named the Yankees' General Manager. Within a year he will be the first black GM to win a World Series. Nonetheless, George Steinbrenner lets him go about a year later.

2003: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, widow of the Chinese nationalist leader, died in New York at age 105. All around the NYC area there are high end Chinese restaurants whose menus state that their chef was Madame Chiang Kai-shek's personal chef. She must have had at least four chefs.

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Posted: Oct 22, 2012 | 1:48 AM

October 22nd in New York City's History - Revolution realigns, Indoor and outdoor spectacles, 'our' Shah arrives for treatment

1776: The British squeeze George Washington's main forces from Manhattan to White Plains. A small garrison remained at Fort Washington at the top of Manhattan island.

1883: The original Metropolitan Opera House opened at Broadway and 39th Street with a performance of Faust for 3000. The venue is designed to showcase the Gilded Age's nouveau riche, who were shut out of the Academy of Music. The acoustics and sight-lines left something to be desired.
The Opera's enormous sets later were to be stored in NJ, tying up tunnel traffic before the operas.
The Met's current Lincoln Center home is gigantic enough to house the operas' sets without massive traffic jams. Lincoln Center continues as an extravagantly luxurious showcase for the wealthy. This is ironic, considering that it was built on the slum clearance of San Juan Hill. The condemned streets were used as the Maestro of Lincoln Center's set for West Side Story. You can see a picture of this at the bottom of this page.

Meanwhile, about a half mile to the south:

1883: The National Horse Show, the world's first indoor equestrian event, premiers at Madison Square Garden.

1887: John Reed, the radical writer of Ten Days That Shook the World, which gloried the Soviet Revolution, was born. The United States gave him a one-way ticket to the USSR, and kept his passport here for our safekeeping. He would die in 1920. His life inspired the film Reds.

We see where he lived

on my Greenwich Village Tour and my Literary New York Tour.

1903: Curly Howard, the most popular of the three stooges, the one with the shaven head, originally Jerome Lester Horwitz was born in Brooklyn. "N'yuk- n'yuk-n'yuk!" and "Wooo-wooo-wooo!" are his best known catch phrases. He died in 1952.

1910: Belmont Park hosts the first international aerial tournament for airplanes, including races and Ralph Johnstone's altitude record of nearly 2 miles high.

1938: Christopher Lloyd, who played Jim on "Taxi,"

and the professor in the "Back to the Future" movies, was born.

1939: Ebbet's Field hosts the first televised Football Game - Brooklyn's (Football) Dodgers beat the Philadelphia Eagles 23-14. The live crowd of around 13,000 exceeded the viewing audience.

1939: Tony Roberts, New York based Actor, born. He is a regular on Broadway, and I saw him hailing a cab there. He was in many Woody Allen films. Here he is as Alfie Singer's best friend in the beginning of Oscar-winning Annie Hall.

1952: Actor Jeff Goldblum born this date.

'I forgot my mantra.'

1962: Mayor Robert Wagner establishes the nation's highest minimum wage rate: $1.50/per hour.

1967: Mendacious Comedian Carlos Mencia born.

1979: President Carter reluctantly allowed the deposed Shah of Iran to travel to New York for medical treatment.
Carter was in a difficult position. The Shah was a brutal dictator, which countered Carter's human rights policies. Iranian revolutionaries had already invaded the US Embassy before and the situation continued to be volatile.
On the other hand, powerful forces lined up behind the Shah, since he was our brutal oil dictator, and our other ones were nervous that the US couldn't be trusted to back them if needed.
Days later, the Iranians seized dozens of American hostages for over a year, costing Carter's re-election.
Robert Parry asserts that some of the people who pressured Carter to take in the Shah, also pressured the Iranians to keep the hostages longer so as to deny Carter the so-called "October Surprise," ensuring his election defeat, and providing Reagan with a victory before taking office. In addition, some of those negotiating behind the scenes with Iran to delay the release of hostages were profiting and developing the networks that evolved into the Iran-Contra conspiracy.

1992: Baseball Hall of Fame Broadcaster Red Barber died at 84 in Florida. He announced for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1939-53, and then the Yankees 1954-66.

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Posted: Oct 20, 2012 | 9:31 PM

October 21st in NYC History - Electric Light Whitey Wright's Guggenheim Bebop Jazz Poet improvisers

1845: In four innings New York beats Brooklyn 24-4 in Hoboken's Elysian Fields. Afterwards they have dinner. How do we know? This game was the first documented article and boxscore of a baseball game, appearing in The New York Morning News

1879: Thomas Edison invented the electric light at his Menlo Park, N.J. laboratory.

1910: The New York Giants beat the New York Highlanders (Yankees) 6-3, winning the World Series 4-1-2.

1917, Dizzy Gillespie, the American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader, was born. He was a kind and generous man with an easy laugh who did a great deal for New York City. I saw him perform at the North Cove Marina at the World Financial Center and at the Delacourte Theater. He died in 1993.

1924: Joyce Randolph, Actress made famous in "The Honeymooners"), born.

1927: Groundbreaking begins for the George Washington Bridge in New York and New Jersey. It will open to traffic four years later.

1928: Astoria's pride, Baseball Hall of Famer "Whitey" Ford born. A great pitcher who spent his entire 16-year career with the New York Yankees.

1942: Judy Sheindlin, "Judge Judy" born. We see where she went to Law School on Downtown and World Trade Center tours.

1956: NY Giants football moved from its Polo Grounds home to Yankee Stadium, beating Pittsburgh 38-10 at their first home game there.

The Guggenheim Museum:

1959: Frank Lloyd Wright's unique building, the Guggenheim Museum opens on 5th Avenue's Museum Mile. It took over ten years to build, relying on new technologies involving reinforced concrete. It has undergone at least two major renovations in 50 years. Thousands of people lined up to see the spectacle, home to a great modern art collection.

From the beginning there has been a tension between the art of the architecture and the art it contains and displays. In my opinion, the playful building overshadows the art, making concrete, literally, the Beaux Arts tradition of architecture being the primary art.

Experiencing the art on a slant in a spiral suggests that the museum is a machine for processing the architecture and the art, that we are ball bearings traveling along a slot.

The building is also biomorphic in the midst of Manhattan's rigorous grid and boxy beige buildings.

It attracts nearly 1 million visitors annually to it quarter mile track among 500,000 square feet (50,000 meters2), approximately 5 Walmarts.

Jack Kerouac:

1969: Writer Jack Kerouac died at 47 years old. Pretty much debauched, bitter and ill from alcohol, the great Beat poet and author launched a nation of empty-feeling youth on a search for thrills and the now, yet felt passed by by the hippies that he inspired and did not like. His friends Alan Ginsberg, and his inspiration for 1957's On the Road, Neal Cassady, made that transition of eras, becoming avatars of the hippies. Kerouac, of French Canadian ancestry, came to Columbia from Massachusetts on a football scholarship to be a Quarterback. In college he befriended Ginsberg and Carr, and they fell in with the Times Square drifters, drug addicts and hustlers that inspired their work based on spontaneity, real life experiences, intensity, including those on the peripheries of society. He loved the bebop Jazz expressions and improvisations that inspired his poetry, and he sought enlightenment and peace from Buddhism. Still, he could not shake what shook him.

1960: John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon's fourth and final presidential debate was televised from New York City.

1976: Willis Reed's number 19 is the first Knick's number retired in the rafters of Madison Square Garden.

1988: Deposed Philippine Dictators President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, the shoe queen, are indicted in New York for fraud and racketeering.

1980: The odious TV personality Kim Kardashian was born to OJ Simpson's lawyer.

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Posted: Oct 20, 2012 | 6:14 PM

October 20th in New York City's History - Happy Birthday, New-York City! Origin of the 'Big Apple,' and more great stuff!

1664: Choosing surrendering over dying, the former Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam Council takes an oath of allegiance to their new English rulers in renamed New-York City. In exchange, they kept their property, local customs and religions, rule of law, and international trade -- unique to the British Colonies of the East Coast. This transformation to English rule would not be complete for a few decades as locals switched sides for a generation, and Dutch New Yorkers, Knickerbockers, ostentatiously held onto their culture for over a hundred years.

1859: John Dewey, the greatest American philosopher of his day, was born. He championed learning by doing and was a proponent of democracy. "Control of government must be redeemed from the special interests which have usurped it and restored to the people." He authored 1000 published works and was a professor at Teachers College of Columbia University. He died in 1952. He had an amazing life, which was chronicled in this New York Times obituary.

1874: Charles Edward Ives, avant-garde composer, who gained international renown, before American, was born. In 1954, he died New York City.

1899: The USA keeps the America's Cup. The New York Yacht Club's Columbia sweeps the Shamrocks 3:38.09 to 3:44.43 in New York Harbor. I love their building on 44th Street. It reminds me of ships and the sea.

1920: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence published, later winning her the Pulitzer Prize. It chronicles the Victorian era of old New York society.

1923: Kentucky Derby winner Zev, jockeyed by Earle Sande, decisively defeats Papyrus, the Epsom Derby winner, at Belmont Park. Zev garners $80,000 and a $5000 gold cup. The horse probably got a big apple. That metonymy is the origin of New York City being known as the Big Apple. It was later picked up by Jazz musicians, echoing New York City as the big prize or the big pay day, since we are the largest market in the USA.

1931: Baseball Hall of Famer and NY Yankees great Mickey Mantle was born in Oklahoma.

1932: The NY Giants' 8-time All-Pro, Hall of Famer, star defensive tackle Roosevelt Brown, Jr. is born in Virginia. Rosey played for the Giants from 1956-63. Later he coached and scouted for years for the Giants.

1947: McCarthey's House Un-American Activities Committee opened hearings into alleged Communist influence in the motion picture industry, ruining writers' lives for having youthful idealism.

1953: Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez born. He was key in the Mets' 1986 World Series victory. There were some funny Seinfeld moments with Hernandez in the 1990s.

1964: 31st president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, died at 90 in New York City. As conservative as Hoover was in government, he personally was a charitable man who was an active volunteer and humanitarian.

1968: JFK's widow Jacqueline Kennedy married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis on a Greek island, becoming Jackie O.

Onassis' Olympic Tower, across from Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis' church St Patrick's Cathedral, is a good place to find a restroom, and, sometimes, a Hellenic Museum.

2000: Triple agent, Ali Mohamed, who was a member of Al Qaeda and the US Special Forces' anti-terrorism units, pleaded guilty in
New York Federal Court of the Southern District for helping with planning the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa that killed over 200.

2010: Brooklyn and Manhattan's Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse and several other magazines, died.

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Posted: Oct 19, 2012 | 12:15 AM

October 19th in New York City's History - Bulls and Bears, oh my! edition. Stamp Act Congress. Dr Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849. Football rules. Mike Tyson returns.

1885: Charles E. Merrill, the banker who made Merrill Lynch the top stock brokerage firm in the United States, was born. He died in 1956.

To answer the tourists' questions and the assertions that the Wall Street Bull is a copy of the Merrill Lynch logo: No. Both bulls refer to a "bull market" in which most investors profit because the markets go up.

Gambling and stock investing go way back in NYC. Back when gambling was a blood sport, Bulls and Bears were pitted against each other in death matches for bets. Bulls fight up, goring the bears. Bears fight down, crouching to break the bulls' backs.

Some people profit from Bear Markets because they use other peoples' money to speculate, betting that stocks would fall in value.

1987: The Dow becomes the down with the stockmarket losing over 500 points, nearly one quarter of its value.

But by 1989 two great things happened. The stock market returned to boom level while a giant bronze Charging Bull appeared in front of the New York Stock Exchange like a Christmas present under the tree.

In 1987, Arturo DiModica sculpted this raging and smiling symbol of capitalism's dynamism to cheer up the stock market which was already doing fine. The has been entertaining tourists since.

In 2009 Merrill Lynch ceased being an independent firm, a casualty of the financial crisis.

In 2011, Wall Street largely recovered from the lows of 2008 and 2009, but most people hadn't, so Occupy Wall Street put a ballerina dancing on the Bull. Ever since then, Charging Bull is under constant police guard against ballerinas.

2006: For the first time, The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 12,000.

1765: The Stamp Act Congress convened in New York's City Hall, later Federal Hall, conveying that taxation without representation is tyranny.

A lot happened there, the Peter Zenger trial 30 years before, establishing freedom of the press. In 1789, the first capitol was there where the Bill of Rights was presented to the United States of America and the world. In 1810, Santa Claus was presented to
New York City to galvanize support for the coming War of 1812. In 2010, this is where my Santa Claus' Bi-Centennial Birthday Tour premiered, and continues to start.

1849: Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from medical school in New York State, to great controversy, because she was the first American woman to do so. She then had her own private practice in New York City. Subsequently she opened the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children in 1853. She and her sister Dr. Emily Blackwell founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children in 1857. The following decade, Elizabeth Blackwell started the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary which advocated that sanitary conditions are important to health.

1873: Four of the five pioneering football colleges establish intercollegiate athletic rules; Columbia, Rutgers, Yale, and University of Pennsylvania met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Harvard held out for its own rules, which were later merged with these earlier ones. For many years, college football was football, well before there were professionals.

I wonder what football would have been like without these rules, considering that even in the early 20th Century college football had a fatality nearly every week of the season.

1945: John Lithgow born. I have to research if he has a New York connection. I am assuming so.

1977: The Concorde supersonic jet makes its first voyage to New York City from France in less than four hours. I loved seeing the Concorde. The closest I got to it was stepping on board at the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum.

1998: Brooklyn's Mike Tyson gets his boxing license back after biting Evander Holyfield's ear in a boxing match.

2008: Brooklyn and CUNY's Colin Powell, a bi-partisan Republican who was President George W. Bush's Secretary of State endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for President.

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Posted: Oct 18, 2012 | 12:17 AM

October 18ths in NYC History - Old Timey Sports, Affairs of State, and TeleComm. And some Justice.

1831 Thomas Hunter, founder of Hunter College, the first women's school in 1870 (renamed in his honor in 1914) was born in Ireland. When he immigrated here he was a destitute refugee.

1842: NYU Professor Samuel Morse lays New York City's first telegraph cable between the Battery and Governor's Island, the longest used military base in the US. Even so, the was shortly cut by a ship's anchor.

1851: Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick.

We walk his streets on Greenwich Village Tours, Highline and Meatpacking District Tours, Downtown Tours, Wall Street Tours, and South Street Seaport tours.

1862: James Creighton, the first professional baseball player, the pitcher for the Brooklyn Excelsiors in the early 1860s, died at 21.

1867: Alaska joins the United States from Russia thanks to New York's William Seward, the greatest Secretary of State in US history, not just because of that, but he kept France and England out of the Civil War. Seward was also Governor and Senator.

1891: The six-day bike race begins inside Madison Square Garden. The winner peddled over 1466 miles (equivalent to somewhere in Nebraska), winning the $2000 prize before thousands. This event would last fifty years, until WW2.

1892: Long distance telephone service between Chicago and New York began.

1898: US takes control over Puerto Rico from the declining Spanish Empire. After World War 2, a huge migration of US territory Puerto Ricans seeking industrial work led them to settle in New York City in time for its de-industrialization.

In 1975, Puerto Rican nationalist terrorists will bomb the Fraunces Tavern, killing six.

There are many Puerto Ricans in New York City. I celebrate their connection with poetry and community gardening, as well as keeping Jewish culinary culture alive in my East Village Community Gardens Tour, my Lower East Side Tours, and my Lower East Side Jewish Tours.

1900: Brooklyn wins the National League Pennant championship away against Pittsburgh 6-1, dominating the series 3-1, best of five.

1919: William Waldorf Astor, Business and Political leader, and grandson of John Jacob Astor, died.

1925: The New York Giants play their first home football game at the Polo Grounds. They lost to the Philadelphia Yellow Jackets 14-0. The Giants would play there until 1957 after which they moved to San Francisco.

1931: Edison, the man who lit the Great White Way, lit the first indoor and outdoor electric Christmas trees, and lit department store windows, who used motion picture technology to titillate and entertain the Broadway Theater District masses at the turn of the century, died. He also founded the first municipal power company, Edison Electric, which lives on as ConEd, the source of the steam coming from the streets. He also founded what would become General Electric.

1961: Jazz great and Lincoln Center treasure Wynton Marsalis celebrates his birthday today.

1961: West Side Story, the musical film starring Natalie Wood and Rita Moreno about gang life and death and love in San Juan Hill, premieres in New York City. Impoverished San Juan Hill was demolished to make way for wealthy Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, whose tickets were mostly unaffordable to the former residents. The Maestro, Leonard Bernstein used the condemned neighborhood as the set for the film.

1968: John Lennon and Yoko Ono arrested for drug possession in London by a zealot. 7 ounces of hashish. John plead guilty to prevent Yoko's deportation. The relevance to New York City: Senator Jesse Helms and President Richard Nixon would later use this to attempt Lennon's deportation from the USA when they lived in NYC.

1977: Mr. October, Reggie Jackson leads the Yankees to the World Series with three homers against the L.A. Dodgers 8-4 at Yankee Stadium. He did well in the rest of the series as well. This ended a Yankees World Series drought since 1962.

2001: The African Embassies Bombers of 1998 were convicted in New York. This was supposed to happen on 9/11/01, but the WTC attacks closed Downtown for weeks, delaying the proceedings.

Coincidence? Probably, but Al Quaeda is aware of their trials, and they try to stage distractions for jail breaks.

A few years before, their comrades stabbed a guard there in the eye to attempt the same thing. The guard was damaged but unbowed. He attended their trial, walking in on his own.

Al Qaeda jail breaks don't happen at the Federal Courthouse, but they do happen in South Asia and the Middle East.

I don't get to discuss these details much, but they are covered in my unique World Trade Center Deep History Tour.

2007: Yankees manager Joe Torre rejects the team's offer for a new one-year contract, following his leading them to winning four world series in 11 years. Maybe they should have offered him a better contract?

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Posted: Oct 17, 2012 | 11:26 PM
by Jared Goldstein

A client writes to his parent company about my work

"[Jared] is a local provider who has a passion for the destination, the skills and knowledge to provide local "insider" experience, and is dedicated ...Jared Goldstein, one of our standout NYC ... leaders, has all those qualities."

Wow. Thank you! (If this was yahoo chat, I'd insert a blushing smiley face.)

This is from an international company that I provide walking tours for.

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Posted: Oct 17, 2012 | 4:27 AM
by Jared Goldstein

A lovely letter about my tour of the Lower East Side and the World Trade Center Memorial to my Tour Director Client

Hi [Jared's Tour Operator Client]:

Just wanted to let you know what a great time our group had on Sunday in New York's Lower East Side.

Jared Goldstein was the perfect tour guide for our Congregation. He possessed a wealth of knowledge on New York history.

Our group ranged in age from 15-85 and Jared was able to brilliantly present facts, history, pop culture and humor that engaged all of us.

I've taken other tours and this is not an easy task.

Jared was a good communicator and worked very calmly under pressure. He developed a quick and friendly rapport with our bus driver.

Together they navigated New York's busy congested streets often making sudden route changes without taking away from our site seeing.

He also calmed down and redirected a congregant who got lost at the 9/11 Exhibit.

Our group was very lucky to have discovered [ Jared's Tour Operator Client's ]Tours and Jared Goldstein.

Thanks for a fun-filled truly memorable day!

Kind Regards,

A...... G......

Cultural & Educational Trip Planner
Congregation .............

(Suburban Philadelphia), PA

I had so much fun with them.

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Posted: Oct 17, 2012 | 2:39 AM

October 17th New York City History - Lots of Yankees and Mets - Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra go from Yankees to Mets taking mirthful wisdom with them. Little Augie, the last Lower East Side gang captain.

1683: The Colony of New York's first legislature is elected, as has already happened in neighboring colonies.

1859: Impressionist Painter Frederick Childe Hassam born. He died in 1935.

1915: A Brooklyn Heights writer, Arthur Miller born.

1919: The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was created. Later they became the anchor tenant for Radio City, with 30 Rock being the RCA building.

Radio City was soon to be renamed Rockefeller Center.

RCA'a subsidiary NBC is still an anchor of Rockefeller Center.

General Electric, which kind of founded RCA, took over RCA and NBC, and the RCA Building now is labeled GE.

RCA's leader, David Sarnoff, realized the connection between technology and mass media, and the connection between entertainment creating demand for technology.

1927: Little Augie, the last Lower East Side Gang Captains, gunned down while talking with his body guard Legs Diamond in front of 103 Norfolk St. In better days (for him), Little Augie led a Jewish gang of toughs who edged out the Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits and the Gophers.

1930: Happy Birthday, Jimmy Breslin, author and columnist. I am honored, after being mortified 20 years ago, to have been chronicled by Breslin in a Newsday column. I am trying to dig it up.

1948: Margot Kidder, star of 1979's Superman as Lois Lane, born. I love pointing out her penthouse apartment on tours of Central Park.

1960: Charles Van Doren, the young and attractive Columbia University professor and quiz-show wiz was arrested for lying about his cheating on the popular TV show Twenty One. It was an era of embarrassments for Columbia.

1960: The Yankees let their Manager Casey Stengel go at age 71 after leading them to seven World Series and ten pennants in twelve years. The Yankees won the following two years.

Stengel remarked that he had been fired for turning 70, and that he would "never make that mistake again."

A couple of years later, he will manage the new New York Mets which enjoyed some awful seasons with his sayings, such as:

"I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before."
"I got one that can throw but can't catch, one that can catch but can't throw, and one who can hit but can't do either."
'Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?'

Stengel is the only person to have played for or managed all four of New York City's modern baseball teams.

1960: New York City is awarded a National League expansion team. In 1962 that team was the New York Mets.

1963: Saturday Night Live's Norm Macdonald born.

1964: Yankees fire Yogi Berra after managing one season. His team won the Pennant and went to the seventh game of the World Series against St. Louis which won. The Yankees hired their Manager instead.

The Yankees would not win the World Series again until 1977.

Berra went on to coach the New York Mets for eight seasons, including their 1969 improbable World Series win, and managing them through their improbable 1973 Pennant. "It ain't over until it's over."

1966: The greatest loss of firefighters in NYC history until the 9/11/01 attacks on the World Trade Center: Twelve firefighters died when the floor of a building 23rd Street and Broadway collapsed during a fire.

1975: Albert Shanker and the NYC Teacher's Union helps save the city from bankruptcy by investing $150 million in municipal bonds from their retirement fund.

1978: Catfish Hunter leads the Yankees to win the World Series 6-2. They beat the Dodgers 7-2 in Los Angeles. The Yankees were the first team to win the series after losing the first two games.

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