On May 15, 1930, sixty men began driving wooden piles into a tidal marsh between Newark and Jersey City, earning thirty-five cents an hour in the second year of the Depression. Beneath them lay…
On the morning of May 15, 1930, a crew of sixty men moved into the Meadowlands of New Jersey carrying wooden piles tipped with steel and a pile-driving rig mounted on a barge, and began building a highway in the air. The ground beneath their feet could not be called ground in any useful sense … Read more
On October 14, 1952, a Chicago enforcer who had collected debts for Al Capone walked into Smalls Paradise in Harlem and disrespected a bartender named Samuel in front of a packed room. The music…
The music stopped mid-bar. Not faded, not finished—it simply died. The drummer’s hand hung in the air, the bassist’s note dissolved into nothing, the horns lowered. Marcus lifted his hands from the piano keys. Two hundred people in the room, and not one of them spoke. Vincent Toriel looked around. “What happened? ” Nobody answered. … Read more
In 1967, a 25-year-old named Tony Sirico stumbled out of a Brooklyn bar with a bullet in him, the result of a robbery he had just attempted. He didn’t call police or go to a hospital. He just…
It is a winter night in Brooklyn, somewhere around 1967. A young man with blood running down his leg stumbles out the back door of a bar on a side street in Bensonhurst. He has just been shot. He is 25 years old. He does not call the police. He does not go to a … Read more
In 1921, Powel Crosley Jr.‘s young son asked for a radio, and the $100 store price stunned him so deeply that he decided he could build a better one for a fraction of the cost. With two…
Powel Crosley Jr. spent a lifetime insisting that ordinary Americans deserved the good things in life at prices they could actually afford. By 1925, he had built one of the great fortunes of the Midwest on exactly that promise: radios for twenty dollars, refrigerators for a hundred, cars for three twenty-five. Yet on a hilltop … Read more
In 1955, Jackie Kennedy bought a white brick house in McLean, Virginia, and painted a nursery for the child she was carrying. She never spent a single night there with a baby. In August 1956, she…
On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy sat in the back of a limousine in Dallas, Texas, wearing a pink wool suit. Six hours later, she stood on an airplane at Andrews Air Force Base in that same suit, refusing to change, as Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office. She had told … Read more
In 1948 Harlem, when a ten-year-old girl named Sarah was found traumatized in an alley after disappearing near her home, her mother did not turn to the police. The officers had taken a report and…
There were rules in the Harlem underworld written in ink, and there were rules written in blood. The rules in ink were simple. Pay your debts. Don’t skim from the top. Don’t talk to the police. They were the laws of business, the structural beams holding up the illegal economy of the neighborhood. But the … Read more
In 1944, Krupp officials traveled to Auschwitz and personally selected 520 young Jewish women, aged 15 to 25, to work in a heavy steel mill in Essen. They were given one meal of soup and bread a…
On a damp March morning in 1945, the guards came for the women. Five hundred and twenty Jewish girls, aged between fifteen and twenty-five, had been marched out of Hitler’s war machine and put to work in a place called rolling mill two, a heavy steel plant owned by the Krupp family in Essen. They … Read more
In May 1913, Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia married Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover in Berlin, ending a fifty-year feud between their families. Her cousins, King George V of Britain and…
On 24 May 1913, the most powerful monarchs of Europe sat in the royal church in Berlin, dressed as uncles, cousins, and brothers, to watch the daughter of the German Kaiser marry the heir of the family that had once been his greatest enemy. King George V of Britain laughed with the Kaiser as though … Read more
In February 1988, Marion Crawford was buried in a quiet corner of Aberdeen, and not one member of the royal family she had served for sixteen years sent a wreath. She had raised Princess Elizabeth…
In February of 1988, in a quiet corner of Aberdeen, a woman named Marion Crawford was buried. For sixteen years she had raised the two little princesses, delayed her own marriage to stay with them, and loved them as her own. Not one member of the family she gave her life to sent a wreath. … Read more
In 1941, Rosemary Kennedy, 23, was taken to a private procedure room and kept awake while a surgeon severed the connections in her brain through her eNaN
Rose Kennedy came home from church on November 22, 1963, sat down to dinner, and ate. Her son had been murdered seven hours earlier in Dallas. A household staff member who had been with the family for eleven years watched from the kitchen and later told a biographer that she had been raised by a … Read more