Walking New York City Tours

08/31/2026

08/31/2026

On the night of November 4, 1928, Arnold Rothstein, the gambler widely blamed for fixing the 1919 World Series, was shot during a poker game gone bad and staggered out near the service entrance of the Park Central Hotel on Seventh Avenue. He lived two more days in the hospital, and true to the gangster code he lived by, he never told police who pulled the trigger.

Rothstein had lost a jaw dropping 320,000 dollars in a rigged card game that September and refused to pay, which most people who study the case think is exactly what got him killed two months later. His old gambling partner George McManus was tried for the murder and acquitted, and the case has technically stayed open and unsolved for nearly a century. 🎲

The hotel where it happened is still standing today at 870 Seventh Avenue, still operating as the Park Central Hotel, its guests almost certainly unaware they're walking through one of the city's oldest unsolved mysteries. Do you think Rothstein knew who shot him, or did he really take that secret to the grave? 🗽

08/31/2026

08/30/2026

Look down next time you're walking through SoHo or Tribeca and you might spot small circles of purple or amber glass set right into the sidewalk. Those aren't decoration. They're vault lights, and they used to be one of the cleverest tricks in the whole city. 🔦

Before electricity reached every basement, storekeepers needed a way to get daylight down into the coal cellars and storage vaults beneath the sidewalk without cutting a hole straight through the pavement. The answer was thick iron gratings studded with glass prisms, sometimes hundreds of them in a single panel, that bent sunlight downward into the dark space below. Coal deliveries went the same route, sliding straight down a chute through a hinged iron door a few feet away. It was quiet, everyday infrastructure that most New Yorkers walked over without a second thought.

The glass itself turns purple with age because of the manganese once used to keep it clear, a side effect nobody expected but one that makes the surviving lights easy to spot more than a century later. You can still find working vault lights embedded in sidewalks across SoHo, Tribeca, and parts of the Lower East Side today, quiet leftovers from a city that used to run its errands underground. Have you ever noticed one of these without knowing what it was?

08/30/2026

Washington Mews, located a block up from Washington Square Park, is a pleasant escape from the hustle of the city around it. Its cobblestone lane is now home to different language departments and faculty apartments from NYU, but back in the mid-1800s, the area was mostly stables. No. 15 was one of these converted stables, which now houses the NYU Institute for French Studies.

We don’t know the exact year it was built, but our best guesses are between 1850-1853. At that time, most of the houses on the south side of the street had not been built yet and served as gardens for the townhouses lining the park. The north side was where the original stables were built and still stand today.  Washington Mews and No. 15 were landmarked as a part of the Greenwich Village Historic District on April 29th, 1969. Cars are not allowed on the street, but you can walk through it as a pedestrian. Entrances can be found on 5th Avenue or University Place between 8th Street to the north and Washington Square North to the south. If you want to see this in person join me this Thursday evening on my West Village Walking Tour. Tickets available at Landmarksofny.com

08/30/2026

Locals swear this diner has the best cheeseburgers.

08/29/2026

Toilet paper was first commercially sold in sheets right here in the early days. Link in comments to find out more. ⬇️