Destination City

A Gallery of New York's Most Surprising Visitors and Residents Throughout History

Robert Pigott (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

264 Seiten

2025
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-21648-7 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. April 2025)
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Leon Trotsky was living in The Bronx with his common-law wife and two children when the Russian Revolution broke out. President Woodrow Wilson and his successor, Warren G. Harding, had little in common—except both came to New York City to indulge in extramarital affairs. Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart were roommates for two years in the 1930s, sharing a Manhattan apartment dubbed “Casa Gangrene.” Simone de Beauvoir smoked her first joint at the Plaza Hotel in 1947. While living in Brighton Beach, Woody Guthrie wrote a song about his bigoted landlord, “Old Man Trump”—Donald’s father. The thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald was a menace to his Bronx neighbors, once firing a BB gun at their windows. Greta Garbo had a fear of dentists’ offices and found a practitioner who would examine her at a bench on Central Park West. Barack Obama spent his first night in Manhattan “curled up in an alley-way” on West 109th Street.

Telling these tales and many others, Destination City presents the surprising stories of historical figures who are not usually associated with New York City but spent key parts of their lives there. Vignettes recount incidents in the lives of hundreds of notable people—writers, artists, actors, scientists, activists, politicians, revolutionaries, and more. Some were greeted with ticker-tape parades; others came to the city penniless. Some fell in love with the city; others despised it. But all were marked in some way by their time in New York. Robert Pigott’s writing captures the fabric of a bygone city, bringing to life the colorful world these figures inhabited. Charming and wry, this book is for all readers interested in an unconventional angle on New York City past and present.

Robert Pigott is the general counsel of a New York City nonprofit that develops affordable housing. He is a former section chief and bureau chief of the New York Attorney General’s Charities Bureau as well as the author of New York’s Legal Landmarks, a historical guidebook. A lifelong New Yorker, Pigott lives in Manhattan.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. And Never Looked Back
2. Extending the Grand Tour
3. College Days
4. Roommates
5. Tying the Knot
6. “Fun City”
7. My New York Years
8. On the People’s Business
9. The Obligatory Book Tour Stop
10. On the Road to Freedom
11. A Wider Audience
12. Not a Fan (Perhaps with Good Reason)
13. Just Passing Through
14. Out-of-Network
15. Before Remote Working
16. Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line
17. Chouette New York
18. Ticker-Tape Parades
19. State Visits
20. Exiles, Refugees, and Wartime Visitors
21. Eastward Ho
22. The Kennedys of the Bronx
23. A Good Place to Retire
24. Crossing the Bar
25. A Gaping Hole in an Otherwise Full Life: Nary a Trip to Gotham
Appendix: The Cutting-Room Floor
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	1.4.2025
Zusatzinfo	68 b&w photographs
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Regional- / Landesgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	0-231-21648-3 / 0231216483
ISBN-13	978-0-231-21648-7 / 9780231216487
Zustand	Neuware