All stories about "History"

A wise man once sang Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, a warning simple enough for even me to grasp. This threat of long-term incarceration, a staple of justice and correctional systems for centuries, is still the essential deterrent to criminal behavior. Unfortunately in Berlin, with its twelve years of Nazi dictatorship followed by four more decades of communist authoritarianism, one might end up doing the time -- or worse -- while never having actually "done the crime." Politically and racially motivated confinement, torture, and murder stain the histories of Berlin's prisons, and the process of Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung ("coming to terms with the past") has also involved examining the injustices and atrocities which have occurred within the walls of the big house. While the city now has a normal correctional system for the punishment and rehabilitation of its criminal population, several of Berlin's prisons have been converted into memorials -- remembering those innocents who suffered without cause and warning those who would forget how justice can be perverted by politics.

The original "Public Enemy Number One," mob kingpin Al Capone, may be the most famous criminal of all time. Capone is best known as a Chicago crime boss, but he spent his formative years in Brooklyn before moving on to terrorize the midwest. This map includes all of the most important locations from Capone's childhood and early years as a small time New York gangster. It's a great guide for anyone whose idea of a fun sightseeing trip involves remembering the days when the Brooklyn waterfront was filled with brothels, and complimenting the wrong woman's physical assets in Coney Island could get you slashed. (photo)

Having survived the twin terrors of twentieth-century Budapest, the Nazi occupation and then forty years of communism, the antique buildings and narrow streets of District VII's historic Jewish Quarter are now facing a more modern, but no less destructive, force -- real estate development. Built up in the 19th and 20th centuries as Budapest's Jewish community shared in the economic expansion of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the area contains dozens of beautiful art nouveau structures, many still impressive despite often crumbling facades.

Coming up with a list of fights occurring in this city is an endless task. Just the other night in the Meatpacking district a gel-wearing d-bag exchanged blows with a pair of gym arms stuffed into an AX shirt with a head (also gelled). And about a month ago this man died after throwing down at a Dunkin Donuts in Queens at 3pm. So, to make our job easier, we focused on some of the big beatings, historically speaking. If you have something with more weight than cell-phone throwing celebs or BAC-over-.08% fisticuffs, please do tell. (photo)

Everyone wants to get "off the beaten path" when they come to Paris, or indeed to any city, but "off the beaten path," as a concept, is awfully vague. If the Parisian beaten path leads to the Eiffel Tower and the Mona Lisa, that leaves many, many other paths unbeaten. Short of wandering haphazardly around the city-- which is a great approach for a day or so-- what's the newcomer to Paris to do?

Berlin, 20 May 1928. The years of political upheaval and economic chaos that accompanied the end of WWI and the birth of the Republic are fading into memory. A fragile stability has followed the catastrophic reordering of society, and the city's residents are enjoying a return to more mundane concerns: the daily struggle to put food on the table and the nightly attempt to forget the day's miseries. But not all Berliners clock their hours during the day -- Karl Lehmann for one. A night watchman in Moabit, Lehmann works the graveyard shift, keeping watch over the State Finance Office, which lies between the Lehrter Rail Station and the river Spree -- and in whose vault this evening sits nine million Reichsmarks, a sizable portion of Germany's war reparation payment to France. But Lehmann isn't the only one working in Alt-Moabit 145 tonight. In the darkness others are also busy -- busy slicing through the iron bars of a cellar window, breaking locked doors, slipping down office corridors, and working at opening the vault with the hot flash of cutting torches. Suddenly an alarm is tripped, warning lights flash, an alarm bell cries out! Lehmann hurries to investigate, and two shadows flee into the Berlin night. The police arrive, and the cutting torches and break-in tools are found, but the nine million Reichsmarks are safe. No fingerprints betray the thieves' identities, but then, none are needed. The bold break-in is obviously the handiwork of Berlin's own working class Robin Hoods -- Erich and Franz Sass, the master thieves of Moabit.

Your run-of-the-mill-metropolis has a lot going on beneath its car-clogged streets. Sewer pipes, tunnels for electricity and communication cables, and public transportation systems turn a city's foundation into a Swiss cheese of civil engineering. Berlin adds a few more holes to the cheesy mix, the catastrophes of twentieth century history providing the residents of the city with ample reason to burrow into Brandenburg's soft sands. Today many of these underground extravagances are open to the public, some were converted to museums, others can be toured with the Berlin Underworld Society, whose members are involved in the discovery, exploration, and conservation of these dark treasures. Join with us now as we venture deep into the dark recesses under Berlin.

On the show of our main man and sometime Gridskipper contributor Leonard Lopate, two professors, Suzanne Wasserman from the Gotham Center and Neil Smith, discuss whether New York is becoming "just another town" through its unstoppable march toward gentrification. The short answer is YES! Shit yes. Niel Smith relates this anecdote:

One of my favorite cases as a building that is now a condo in the lower east side and condon in the lower east side that is also a coop. But before that it was a gas station and then it was a art gallery called the Gas Station Gallery. Then, after various iterations, it was bought by an Israeli developer with international backing and a Bangladeshi architect. it became a place where people from wall street could live and still feel like they're being edgy and living in a place where the gas station was.

The Suburbanization of New York [WNYC]
Suburbanization of New York [Amazon]

[Photo: Trevor Little]

Previously: Get Your Clinton On, Sleeping with the Feces in New York, NYC Hottest Bartenders

Walking through Washington Square Park, one is more likely to notice the menagerie of NYU students, the B-list actors and their dogs and the annoying buskers but not too too long ago, Washington Square Park and environs were the stuff of revolutionary history. The Opposition New York map helps you to remember those good ol' days of radical opposition. 23-29 Washington Place, for example, where NYU's Science building stands, was, in 1911, the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, a disaster that set in motion major labor reforms. The map also features more contemporary loci of resistance like Bluestockings Bookstore in the LES and The Muste Building, which I've always wondered about on Lafayette and Bleecker.

Radical New York

Previously: Some Secrets Are Best Left Undivulged and Undigested, Nude York City: A Guide to the City's Bodies of Work, Bohos in Paradise

It feels like forever since that last tabloid-worthy slaying in New York. A dead beauty hasn't beckoned from the pages of the Post in almost a year. Well, since crime is so tame these days [Damn you, Bloomberg!] , we want to reminisce about the more infamous and grisly murders the city has seen in the last couple hundred years. We've got prostitutes, strippers, mobsters, and assassins who were axed, strangled, gunned down, and stabbed, respectively. Some of these murders just made good headline fodder but some, like the slaying of Kitty Genovese, spawned entire sociological movements. Ah murder, perfect reading for a Monday morning.

Nicole DuFresne, (corner of Rivington and Clinton Streets): Aspiring actress Nicole DuFresne was shot and killed in early 2005 on the corner of Rivington and Clinton Streets on the Lower East Side. A group of teenagers confronted the tipsy DuFresne with her friends after 3am on a Wednesday night. When one teenager, Rudy Fleming pointed a gun at her and demanded her purse she exclaimed "What are you going to do, shoot me?" And so Fleming allegedly did shoot her, and he is now serving life in prison.

Catherine Genovese, (82-70 Austin St., Kew Gardens, NY): Commonly known as Kitty Genovese, Catherine was murdered in front of her apartment building in Kew Gardens in the middle of the night. Though many people witnessed the murder from their apartment windows, no one alerted the authorities or did anything to stop the attacker. Studies of her murder called what happened the "bystander effect" or the "Genovese syndrome." See our recent post.

The Neanderthal Museum in Dusseldorf is having a "sexhibition" so bring the Cialis, grab the kids (no, not there) and head on over. The exhibit opens Feb. 3rd and runs until May 20th. It features a Venus, a penis and a keenness to explore erotica rarely found in Dussledorf. According to the Spiegel, the exhibit "pays tribute to 100 glorious millennia of making out and doin' it." Ah, a journalist after my own heart. The museum is founded on the site where a Neanderrthal man was found in 1856 and there's a lot A LOT of old penis things including the world's oldest condom (unused). You know, Germans have always been weird about sex but recently, children's books have been addressing (or undressing) the topic with considerable and oft hilarious candor. Hopefully, this exhibit will make things a little less bizarre. Judging from this guy, who greets you at the exhibit, maybe we shouldn't get our hopes up.

Neanderthal Museum [Official site]
New Exhibition Pays Tribute to 100,000 Years of Sex [Spiegel]

Previously: Smintair: A Pipe Dream?, Smokes on A Plane

Most marriages should never have happened. Kfed and Britney, Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson, My mom and dad. So when these ill-advised couplings are called off before they even happen, it is cause for rejoicing. According to recently released secret documents, in the 1950's French Prime Minster Guy Mollet approached English PM Anthony Eden to suggest a merger between the two nations. From a report by the BBC, British PM dictated the following after receiving Mollet's suggestion: The PM told him on the telephone that he thought in the light of his talks with the French:

* "That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth
* "That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty
* "That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis"

When France and Britain Nearly Married [BBC]

Previously: Marriage, Hobos and Love on the Gowanus Canal, Uschi Lang, I Love You, Abhishekwarya: Bollywood's TomKat

Lilliputia was a Utopian city of midgets that prospered within the confines of Coney Island's Dreamland before the whole amusement park burned down in 1911. From what we've researched this place makes Dogtown seem like Pleasantville. Witness.

300 midget from the traveling circuses and freak shows of the whole continent were offered a permanent experimental society within the park. As the city only needed to be half size of an ordinary city it was possible to build this utopian cardboard city on a small budget. It was complete with its own parliament, a beach with midget lifeguards, a midget theatre, stables with small ponies, and a complete midget fire department responding every hour to put out imaginary fires.

Midget Orgies, Nymphomania and Where Are They Now After The Jump!

Recently, Time Out New York announced the #1 most livable block in New York: South Portland Avenue between DeKalb and Lafayette Avenues in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. There are trees, a plethora of stoops to hang on, residents of all ethnicities, and Fort Greene Park. Fine. Great. Maybe I'll move there. But why's the neighborhood called Fort Greene, anyway? Certainly not because of the above-mentioned abundance of greenery? Turns out there was a Revolutionary War general, a Rhode Island native, named Nathaniel Greene who oversaw the construction of Fort Putnam (later named Fort Greene) which was instrumental in the Battle of Brooklyn and helped secure George Washington's retreat over the East River. Baron Johan DeKalb, a German, along with his friend the Marquis de Lafayette were also war heroes given their street-name dues in Fort Greene. Portland Avenue is named for London's Portland Place and was laid out in 1773 by a pair of Scottish brothers. You could know all this, and more very cool nitty gritty history about your own Brooklyn neighborhood--and all of them if you're feeling encyclopedic--with the aid of Brooklyn by Name, authored by Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss (Park Slope dwellers) and published by NYU Press in 2006. Pick it up, it's surprisingly hard to put down.

The Most Liveable Block in NY [TimeOut]
Brooklyn By Name

[Text: Jennifer Acker Photo: Time Out NY]

Previously: In Bocca Lupo, Offering the Myrtle Branch, Flea Bitten Hipsters in Williamsburg, Eating Out in Cobble HIll, These Gay Bars Are Tops

To celebrate LA's 225th birthday, historians Stuart Timmons and Lillian Faderman have written Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians, a book of 225 places of historical importance to the LA LGBT community. LA, along with SF and NYC, was a center for the Gay Pride movement and in many ways predated NY in fighting for gay rights. One of the reasons was the LAPD's aggressive anti-gay tactics. Here now are some of the more dramatic backdrops for the feud between LA's gays and the LAPD.

Black Cat Bar: 3909 Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake, was the site of a New Year's Eve, 1966 police raid. The patrons fought back and set off demonstrations, predating and foreshadowing the Stonewall Riots in New York. Now the bar is called Le Barcito.

The Dover Hotel: Located on 555 S Main Street, Harold's Bar at the Dover Hotel was one of the first gay bars in America, dating from 1930. In 1970, a group of gay men had rented out the hotel and it was during one of their parties that the LAPD entered the premises. Finding Howard Efflin there naked, 5 officers beat him. He died in the squad car after being dragged from the building. His death sparked massive protests from the "emerging gay community."

Mark IV Bathouse: On April 10, 1976, 107 members of the LAPD raided this Melrose Avenue bathhouse to arrest 40 men (after detaining 80) for violating an 1899 California law against slavery. The men were participating in a mock slave auction as a fund-raising benefit for gay organizations.

Historic Sights in Gay LA [InLA Magazine]
Gay LA [Amazon]
Memoirs of Gay Rights in LA
Bathouse Raids

Previously: These Gay Bars Are Tops, Mapping+Shopping=Shmapping, Native LA, The Clown is Dead, I Am Disgusted

Vegas's Palomino Strip Club is the only strip club allowed to combine booze and full nudity. The club, old enough to be grandfathered in before the Puritanical legislation barring baring all and boozing it up, was also mired in two homicides. The first, in 2000 involved Jack Perry, the then-owner's son, who shot an employee he thought was attempting to buy the venue. The second, in 2005, involved the then-owner's son Luis Hidalgo III and his sister who paid to have rubbed out another former employee. To cover his legal fees, Hidalgo Jr sold the club to his lawyer, Domenic Gentile. Shady murderous roots notwithstanding, as long as you don't work there, Palomino is still a must stop. Weigh your chances: murder v. booze-and-nudity. I'll choose the latter til my dying day.

Palomino Strip Club [LA TImes]

[Photo: Robert Scott Hooper]

Previously: Playboy Club Reopens in Vegas, Pic of the Day: Pole Dancer, The Wynn's Parlor Suite Gets YouTubed, Hotels on MySpace, Las Vegas Strip's Steak or Las Vegas Strip Steaks, Vegas Alibi Generator, Las Vegas iPod Vending Machine, Red Square, Hamburger Las Vegas Style

USA Today recently ran a piece bemoaning the extinction of various hotel amenities in the wake of a wifi hi-tech nice bed overhaul of the nation's hotels. According to a survey cited in the article by the American Hotel & Lodging Association, US hotels have spent $9 billion dollars upgrading. Here's a list of the bygone amenities.

Wake Up Calls From An Actual Person
Vibrating beds
Brass room keys
Sanitizer bands around toilet seats
Postcards and stationery
Four-inch-thick foam mattresses
Windows that open
Logo towels
Wall-mounted hair dryers
Shoehorns

We'd like to add our own list of hotel amenities that are still going strong:
Bed bugs
Overpriced minibars
Hyperchlorinated pools
Syringes
Gideon Bibles
That awkward pause when the bellboy is awaiting his tip.
Blood, Sweat and Semen Covered Bedspreads
Phillipe Starck

As Hotels Upgrade, Some Items Are Left Behind [USA Today]

Previously: Sleek Viennese, Which Came First: The Hotel or the Restaurant?, Team Party Crash: Soho Grand Turns 10, Harrah For New Orleans, Urban Hotel in Madrid

New York has seen so much death and so much film it's wondrous strange no one has attempted to meld the two. In our Shot in NYC series, we check out movie scenes and murder scenes and when the two are one. Last week, we visited W. 23rd street, where both the steamroom scene in The Godfather and "Mad Dog" Coll were shot. Today we visit Seventh Avenue near Central Park South. Murder first, movie later.

On November 4th, 1928, Arnold Rothstein, the man who had fixed the 1919 World Series, was having cheesecake, on presumes, at Lindy's on Broadway when he got a call to go to the Park Central Hotel on 870 Seventh Avenue between 55th and 56th street. When he arrived to Room 349 Rothstein was shot in the stomach by an unknown assailant. His body was found in the service corridor.Though Rothstein lived for two more days, he never named his killer.

A few doors down down and 56 years later at 854 7th Avenue at the still-standing Carnegie Deli, a group of comedians including "Broadway" Danny Rose played by Woody Allen himself gather to reiminisce over the great Lou Canova in the aptyl titled Broadway Danny Rose. Seventh Avenue though has made cameos in many Wood Allen movies including 1986's Hannah and Her Sisters. 7th Ave and 58th Street is one of the stops on Carrie Fisher and Dianne West's architectural tours.

Arnold Rothstein
Park Central Hotel
Carnegie Deli
Broadway Danny Rose

Previously: Shot in NYC: 23rd Street, The Curious Shoppers Guide To New York, Cheap Thrills: Economy Candy, Bottle Rocket Wine and Spirits, Bicoastal Cheesery, Kiki De Montparnasse, N Boutique, Ushci Lang, I Love You, Maison Unique, 5th Avenue Apple, 5 Nice Smelling Places in this Stinkhole City

The Chicago Tribune turned its auto da fe-like reportage onto Chicago itself with an fascinating article on debunking local legends and myths. The article explores the origins of the Chicago accent (Germans, Eastern Europeans), the Chicago hotdog (Germans, Eastern Europeans), the legend of Mrs. O'Leary (sexism and xenophobia) and of the city's own nickname (Chicagoans are known for their bluster.) It even takes on the $64,000 question where Oprah lives (Water Tower Place) and what is that chocolate smell wafting over the city (Blommer Chocolate Co.600 W. Kinsie St.). Though one of the "experts" believes in ghosts and another's qualifications consist of being a "greeter," the article is required reading for city nerds.

True Chicago [Redeye]

Previously: Chicago's Bulgarian at the Gates, Dwelling On Chicago, Chicago's Post Office Of The Dead, Architecture Days, Wordl's Most Impressive Skylines, Ride Pimped, James Hotel, Windy City Wine Map, Fabulizing Travel Agent Next on Oprah's Shit List, No Sleep 'Till St. Louis

23rd street may look calm now, what with Tekserve and Patsy's Pizzeria but the street has seen its fair share of fame and violence. In a new feature called Shot in NYC, we'll pair a murder and a scene (and some times a murder scene) that takes place near or exactly in the same location.

Our first installment finds us on the corner of 23rrd Steet near Eigth Avenue. It's February 28th at 12:45 in the morning. Gangster Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll is gunned down by members of Dutch Schultz's gang. Earlier Coll has accidentally killed a 5 year-old boy on East 107th street in an attempt on Schultz's life. Coll had wanted to take over Schultz's uptown beer business. The building is now a condo.

Another mob scene took place on 23rd Street at what used to be the McBurney YMCA at 215 W. 23rd (the inspiration for the VIllage People's YMCA). This is where the famous steamroom scene in the Godfather was filmed. Sadly, the new occupant, yuppie gym David Barton, completely renovated and no one knows exactly where the steamroom was. Yuppies.

Previously: The Curious Shoppers Guide To New York, Cheap Thrills: Economy Candy, Bottle Rocket Wine and Spirits, Bicoastal Cheesery, Kiki De Montparnasse, N Boutique, Ushci Lang, I Love You, Maison Unique, 5th Avenue Apple, 5 Nice Smelling Places in this Stinkhole City