On the quiet corner of West 10th Street and Waverly Place, one of New York’s oldest watering holes has been operating since around 1864. It bore the name Julius’ sometime in the 1920s. Even Prohibition, during which the tavern transformed into a bustling speakeasy, had minimal impact on Julius’ operations. On April 21, 1966, three years before the riots at Stonewall occurred a block away, a gay rights milestone gave the West Village bar its status as legend, paving the way for the city’s legitimate LGBTQ establishments.  More →

On September 21, 1845, Rev. William R., Williams preached a sermon entitled “God’s presence in his sanctuary,” welcoming congregants back to their new edifice at 12 Oliver Street—or 3 Henry Street, depending on whom you ask. This was already one of New York City’s first Baptist churches, and it would continue to make history by serving every surrounding immigrant community. It would be the first church in the United States led by a black woman, and it would welcome predominantly black congregants near the heart of a bustling Chinatown, carrying a unique version of the message of hope and inclusion for all who walked through it doors. More →

On Nov. 7, 1919, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, US federal agents and New York City policemen, armed with clubs and blackjacks, raided a Manhattan apartment full of Russian-speaking immigrants at the headquarters of a Russian anarchist association. Inside were a few devoted anarchists belonging to the Union of Russian Workers and more than 200 undereducated Russian immigrants who were more or less clueless of the union’s full intent. “Wanton cruelty” and “brutality” was how the sociaist New York Call described the actions of the authorities during the raid. They arrested the immigrants, bloodied and bruised, jailed them, and tried them for sedition. Six weeks later, the USS Buford, an army transport ship the press jeeringly dubbed “the Soviet ark,” set sail from Ellis Island with 249 people aboard in the first mass deportation in US history.  More →

Eleanor Cooper was determined to keep 243 West 20th Street from turning into an icebox. This almost seemed like a joke, if she thought about it, since the building had been a fire station not six years earlier and for decades and decades before that. The three-story firehouse was decrepit and absolutely freezing, but if she had to shovel coal into the furnace herself she’d do it to keep the Women’s Liberation Center open. More →

Charles Dickens toured Five Points for a day and found only two things he liked about it. One was the pigs. Dickens described the city swine in better terms than he described many of the local slum dwellers. The pigs were gentlemanly, self-reliant and confident, while the people had “coarse and bloated faces” and lived in houses of debauchery. Dickens surmised that the pigs, who lived in those houses too, smugly wondered why their masters walked on two legs instead of four.  More →