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New York

“I will leave this house only if I am dead,” the prominent New York doctor told his ex-wife, who was seeking half the value of their Manhattan townhouse in a divorce.

The World Trade Center attack wasn’t the first time New York was brutally assaulted — 225 years before, George Washington watched the city burn from his headquarters in northern Manhattan after painful military defeats.

Editor's note: Karin Abarbanel is the author of several nonfiction books. She grew up in Washington Heights just a few blocks from the Morris-Jumel Mansion.

This quiet Hudson River city became the "cradle of New York State."

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Forty years ago, a few rich kids hatched a nutty idea that became an event that rocked the nation, then morphed into a movement whose legacy lives on.

A bold dream to connect the Hudson to the Great Lakes by canal created a transportation revolution.

 

It was a disaster from the beginning.

It was a very bad year for Andy Richardson.

How lucky to have Central Park as your back yard

It has been the received wisdom of the suburban age that kids grow up better in the country, where there is access to fresh air, trees, wildlife (although not too much of it, please), and other good things.

It started as Claverack Landing in 1662, developed into a gambling and fleshpot retreat, and is now a haven of historic homes.

The woman whose great-grandfather introduced pastrami to the New World explores an American institution that is as hard to define as it is easy to recognize.

All along its 360-mile route, towns to which the canal gave birth are looking to its powerful ghost for economic revival.

As Hillary Clinton campaigns for a New York Senate seat, she’d do well to study the career of another effective outsider.

New Yorkers knew they were in for a long, hot summer this year when Hillary Rodham Clinton made an early political foray into their state and was greeted by demonstrators whom the state GOP had urged to dress up as blackflies. One of Mrs.

A century and a half ago, two young girls started hearing noises they said came from beyond the grave, and then embarked on a lifetime career that began a national obsession with spiritualism that has lasted to this day.

“I looked down at my foot,” Joseph Merrill said, “and saw a white substance the size of a golf ball. As I watched, that golf ball expanded and took features: arms and a head. It was a woman. She passed through me and through my friend Harry.

Beautiful scenery abounds in the southern tier of New York’s Finger Lakes, but so does rich history, all of it intimately tied to the land.

 

A walk with my great-grandfather through the last foreign country in New York City

A faded industrial town in upstate New York is home to one of the world’s greatest concert halls.

Troy, New York has always had its sleeves rolled up to its biceps. Lying along the Hudson River and part of a metropolitan area that includes both Albany, the state capital, and Schenectady, the city marks the Erie Canal’s eastern terminus.

Charles Saxon's cartoons are a definitive record of upper-class suburban life in the 1960s and ’70s.

 

THE FIRST ANNUAL AMERICAN HERITAGE GREAT AMERICAN PLACE AWARD

Photographs by Robert Benson  

At the height of the American avant-garde movement, Fairfield Porter’s realistic paintings defied the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism and risked rejection by the art world. But today, his true stature is becoming apparent: He may just be the best we have.

   

The imperium of modern television advertising was born in desperate improvisation.

 

Amid a hundred mountains and a thousand lakes, a fascinating institution tells the story of America’s engagement with its Eastern wilderness.

   

All across America, there are restaurants that serve up the spirit and conviviality of eras long past.

Mr. Henry Erkins had a flash of inspiration in 1908. He could see every detail of it in his mind.

ROBERT MOSES built small with the same imperial vigor as he built big, and, at his behest, the art of making scale-model cities reached its peak. The result still survives, and, although few New Yorkers know about it, they can see their whole town, right down to their own houses or apartment buildings, perfectly reproduced.

THERE ARE FEW REMINDERS THAT TWO WORLD’S FAIRS were held in New York’s Flushing Meadow.

A HALF-CENTRY AGO, Harry Dubin bought his son a camera, and, together, they made a remarkable series of photographs of a city full of blue-collar workers.

WILL ROGERS MAY NEVER HAVE MET A MAN HE DIDN’T like, but Harry Dubin evidently never met one he didn’t like to be.

At a time when driving from Manhattan to Yonkers was a supreme challenge, a half-dozen cars pointed their radiators west and set out from Times Square for Paris.

AS OF FEBRUARY 1908, ONLY NINE people had ever driven across the United States, and no car had ever driven across Alaska. No car had driven across Japan.

What you owe your car ... Ending the tyranny of the horse is only the beginning of it.

THE AUTOMOBILE IS NOT AN AMERICAN invention. But an industry capable of manufacturing automobiles in vast numbers at prices the common man can afford most certainly is. And it is this invention that changed the world.

A turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts village draws a new generation of pilgrims.

The village of East Aurora, in New York, eighteen miles southeast of Buffalo, has everything we look for in a small town—a wide main street, Victorian houses on well-tended lawns, a classic five-and-ten-cent store, an Art Deco movie theater, a diner where, when you order a BLT

HISTORY’S MOST PHOTOGENIC LABOR dispute lasted 30 days, spread to eight cities, closed 37 plays, and finally won performers some respect.

 

HOW A NATION BORN OUT OF A TAX REVOLT has, and especially hasn’t, solved the problems of taxing its citizens

A BOLD NEW KIND OF COLLEGE COURSE BRINGS the student directly to the past, non-stop, overnight, in squalor and glory, for weeks on end.

   

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