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SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
When you stand at a street corner in Lower Manhattan, it can feel like you're in the middle of a kaleidoscope of constant frantic motion - cars, trucks and city bikes buzzing past, people rushing by, sounds everywhere. But it wasn't all that long ago - just 400 years or so - when most of Manhattan was a pastoral landscape. Streams and brooks crisscrossed the island. Native Americans were the main inhabitants. And at the southern tip, Dutch settlers began to build a small trading post. Those early days and the hundreds of years of history that have come since, they're present on the streets today, if you know where to look.
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DETROW: Hey.
KEITH TAILLON: Good morning.
DETROW: Hey. I'm Scott.
TAILLON: Hi, Scott. I'm Keith.
DETROW: Nice to meet you.
TAILLON: Very nice to meet you.
DETROW: How are you?
TAILLON: I'm doing very well. How are you?
DETROW: Writer, urban historian and tour guide Keith Taillon knows where to look.
TAILLON: This isn't a normal tour. I'm not going to point at the Empire State Building as if you've never seen it before.
DETROW: His new book "Walking New York City: Manhattan History On Foot" takes a deep dive into how the streetscapes of New York took shape over the centuries.
TAILLON: The population really only had one direction to grow, which was northward, toward where we're now standing and toward Greenwich Village.
DETROW: Taillon's book is divided into 12 self-guided walking tours that snake through the history of Manhattan's neighborhoods. I met him on a chilly spring day to stroll through Greenwich Village, an area New Yorkers once considered the outer reaches of the city.
TAILLON: They would come up here during the summer, or what old newspapers refer to as the disease season, to hide out in their rented houses or their country manors in Greenwich. There are echoes of that in more recent years with people fleeing to the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires during COVID. They were doing the same thing 200 years ago, coming to Greenwich during waves of typhoid or yellow fever. It's the same thing, different verse.
DETROW: Disease season.
TAILLON: Disease season, absolutely.
DETROW: Our tour through time leads us from the neighborhood's beginnings - it's a farming outpost, through the gilded age and industrial revolution, to the gay liberation movement of the late 20th century.
TAILLON: But from here, we're going to walk from Astor Place west toward Washington Square and eventually crossing Sixth Avenue into historic Greenwich Village.
DETROW: All right. Let's do it.
TAILLON: Cool. Let's go.
DETROW: Our next stop looks like any other loft building in the current neighborhood, but it has a dark history. It's the site of one of New York City's most gruesome disasters.
TAILLON: So this building - the Asch Building - was built in 1901.
DETROW: It was the site of the Triangle Waist Company, a garment manufacturing factory that made a popular style of women's shirts.
TAILLON: What makes this building and the Triangle Waist Company so famous is what happened on March 25, 1911.
DETROW: When a fire broke out in the factory and spread rapidly through the top three floors of the building.
TAILLON: What the workers of the Triangle Waist Company found almost immediately as the flames washed through their factory were that all the exits were padlocked shut.
DETROW: They were locked inside.
TAILLON: They were locked inside. On the one hand, most obviously, it was to prevent them from taking illicit breaks, smoke breaks, sneaking out to the fire escape or the hallway to chat. But more importantly, and what's less talked about, is the locked doors were likely a way to keep these employees from agitating for union organization, by cutting them off from each other between the eighth, ninth and 10th floors. But what this did was prevent them from being able to escape the fire when it broke out.
DETROW: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claimed 146 lives - many of them young women from immigrant families.
TAILLON: There was a massive outpouring of rage and grief in the immediate aftermath, huge protest marches through the city.
DETROW: It led to a swell of support for unionization and for workplace safety laws. But it took more than a century for a proper memorial to be built. A gleaming black marble belt surrounds the outside of the building, and looking down on it, you can see the names of the victims reflected in its surface. We visit the site just a few days after the anniversary of the fire. Carnations and chalk messages surround the building. Taillon says the fire served as a marker for the end of the Gilded Age, an era remembered for its extreme wealth.
TAILLON: But for the vast majority of New Yorkers, the realities of early 20th century New York was one of destitution, desperation, disease, overcrowding and, in the case of the Triangle Waist Factory, death by fire in their workplace.
DETROW: Taillon guides us around corners and through crosswalks to Washington Square Park, where we sit on a bench to talk and watch the squirrels.
Tell me about how you decided to first take to social media and start putting these tours on social media.
TAILLON: It started in 2012 with a blog. I found...
DETROW: Well, wait, what was your platform of choice in 2012? - important question.
TAILLON: Blogspot.
DETROW: Blogspot. Very...
TAILLON: It was - that's when I invented the name Keith York City...
DETROW: Dot blogspot.com?
TAILLON: ...Keithyorkcity.blogspot.com, which still exists. Every now and then, I get some comments on there from wayward people on the internet. But...
DETROW: (Laughter).
TAILLON: ...It was 2012. I stumbled into a completely unrelated corporate job that had nothing to do with my academic background or interests, which was fine. It paid the rent. But I still had this need to study and write about history.
DETROW: He eventually migrated from Blogspot to Instagram, where he began to build a loyal following.
And take me to 2020 because, I think, like many people in a lot of things, this really changes for you, takes on a new dimension for you in 2020, when - to go back to what we were talking about before - disease season arrives again...
TAILLON: (Laughter).
DETROW: ...And New York City is a very frightening place to be.
TAILLON: Yeah. So in 2020, when the pandemic began, I had been at my corporate job for about a decade and almost immediately got furloughed and eventually laid off. But with no job for the first time in my adult life and this deep sense of foreboding that was pervasive in the city in 2020, I decided to fill my now-empty days by walking every street in Manhattan.
DETROW: Taillon walked nearly a thousand miles of those empty streets from The Battery in Lower Manhattan to its northern outpost of Marble Hill. As he narrated it all post by post, his online audience grew...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Congratulations on the book.
TAILLON: Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate that.
DETROW: ...So much so that he gets recognized on our walk. During the pandemic, people started asking if he would lead walking tours.
TAILLON: So now we're walking through Washington Square toward the arch on the north side of the park. The arch is the most notable landmark in the park.
DETROW: We continue our tour, and as we walk, Taillon points out that most beloved brownstones aren't actually made from brownstone.
TAILLON: This is actually a repair job, where the original brownstone had to be shaved down to its core, covered in cement.
DETROW: He explains why the Erie Canal was crucial to making New York City the place it is today.
TAILLON: Specifically meant to help funnel the nation's economy down through New York.
DETROW: And he shows us where the Weather Underground accidentally blew up their secret bomb-making lab in 1970...
TAILLON: And they were assembling bombs in the basement of the house. One of the bombs went off prematurely.
DETROW: ...All as we wind our way to another well-known site in Greenwich Village.
So now we're at a pretty famous historical landmark in Greenwich Village that I think a lot of people are familiar with the name, if not the specific history, and that is The Stonewall Inn.
TAILLON: Yeah, The Stonewall here, across the street, started out as two buildings.
DETROW: The Stonewall Inn, like other gay bars in the 1960s, was owned by the mob. The Genovese crime family paid off local cops to allow them to operate a gay bar at a time when many aspects of queer life were still illegal.
TAILLON: Cops, in exchange, would raid the bars once a month or so in exchange for allowing the bar to continue operating. So the mob family would make a massive profit off of this captive audience that they knew they'd have because they weren't welcome anywhere else.
DETROW: During one of those routine raids in June 1969, something surprising happened. The patrons fought back against the police. They threw rocks and bottles. And eventually, the police had to barricade themselves inside The Stonewall Inn.
TAILLON: It was - for all intents and purposes - the first time that the queer community of Greenwich Village pushed back in a physical, real way against the authorities.
DETROW: The Stonewall riots, as they're known now, marked a major shift in the queer liberation movement. We are standing next to the tiny sliver of a national monument in a brick plaza across the street from The Stonewall Inn. The park is covered in stickers and flags showing solidarity with transgender people.
So this is part of the National Park Service. This is a federal plaque here. It still says LGBTQ, but you've seen on the website, at least initially...
TAILLON: Yeah.
DETROW: ...The same erasing that's happening elsewhere is happening...
TAILLON: In some places on the website, they've removed the T and the Q. Physically, they have not yet come to remove it from the signage here. I think there would be a lot of pushback against that.
DETROW: Taillon says it is not the first time trans people have been erased from Stonewall's history. He points out that trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were a key part of the queer liberation movement following Stonewall but that their contributions and involvement were swept under the rug for many years.
TAILLON: Their story - the arc of their involvement in the story is proof positive that you can only keep those things suppressed for so long.
DETROW: As our tour comes to a close, we make our way back to Washington Square Park.
TAILLON: And we're standing in the shadow of what is thought to be the oldest tree still standing in Manhattan, estimated to be at least 300 years old, likely older.
DETROW: It is a towering English elm, stretching seven or eight stories into the sky, with a huge, craggy trunk. We asked Taillon to read the passage about the tree - nicknamed Elma (ph) - from his book.
TAILLON: (Reading) It may have been a sapling when the British took New Amsterdam from the Dutch. It would have been a century old when George Washington was inaugurated as the nation's first president on Wall Street. It turned 200 just after the Civil War and 300 sometime in our or our parents' lifetimes. It is undoubtedly one of the oldest trees in the city, as most of its contemporaries fell long ago.
DETROW: Just the idea that this tree behind us, that we're looking at right now, that's still living, would have been a century old at the beginning of the founding of this country.
TAILLON: Right. And it's a living thing that has overseen the entire growth and evolution of not just Greenwich Village, but of the entire city and the evolution of the United States as a nation. When this was planted, most of what we see around us would have still been open farmland. And so it's just amazing that, in its own way, this tree has borne witness to quite literally everything we've talked about, everything that is to be talked about in New York City's history. This tree has been here through all of that every year, hopefully in perpetuity, continuing to leaf out.
DETROW: Keith Taillon is the author of "Walking New York City." His book is out on April 15.
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