Destination city : a gallery of New York's most surprising visitors and residents throughout history /
"A surprising collection of tales of more than two hundred historical people-politicians, scientists, writers, actors, activists, heads of state, exiles, and more-who are not usually associated with New York City but spent formative time there. This book collects the unusual travels of people l...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2025]
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| Summary: | "A surprising collection of tales of more than two hundred historical people-politicians, scientists, writers, actors, activists, heads of state, exiles, and more-who are not usually associated with New York City but spent formative time there. This book collects the unusual travels of people like Davy Crockett, Billy the Kid, and Ho Chi Minh alongside some better-known incidents, like Winston Churchill being hit by a car on Fifth Avenue, Martin Luther King, Jr. being stabbed at a Harlem book signing, and Salvador Dali trashing a window display at Bonwit Teller. From letters, newspaper articles, diaries, and biographies, the book collects stories from the earliest days of New York to today: Frederick Douglass arriving on the docks in southern Manhattan on his escape from slavery, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda as roommates on 63rd street, Lee Harvey Oswald living in the Bronx at age thirteen and getting in trouble for shooting his BB gun at his building's windows, and more. Some of these New York visitors received ticker-tape parades up Broadway; others were less well received, coming to the city before they achieved their fame, like Barack Obama spending his first night in Manhattan sleeping in an alleyway. Some loved the city-Soong Mei Lin would spend the rest of her life here. Others-like Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh-despised it. But all of them were marked in some way by their time in New York, from Marcel Duchamp buying a snow shovel on Columbus Avenue to Amelia Earhart scaling the dome of Low Library or Leon Trotsky living through the Russian Revolution with his family in the Bronx"-- |
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| Item Description: | Includes index. |
| Physical Description: | xvii, 320 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| ISBN: | 9780231216487 0231216483 9780231216470 0231216475 |