As New Yorkers go about their daily business, few realize that a whole other world lies just beneath their feet. Deep underneath New York City is a mysterious world of pipes and passageways. From abandoned train stations to water valves the size of a city bus, discover Gotham’s buried treasures.
Few places in the world possess a history as rich, colorful or dramatic as that of New York City. Scattered throughout the city are unnoticed vestiges from a previous time that mark a path to the city’s illustrious past. Travel back in time to explore what hides inside New York’s oldest bridge, or what secrets lie buried in the city’s oldest cemetery, as we unfold the mysteries of old New York.
It's a city famous for its skyline, but what mysteries lie behind these lofty structures that symbolize New York City's high reaching ambition? We go above and beyond to bring you the most intriguing stories about the city's ubiquitous skyscrapers.
The New York City sewer system is an engineering marvel and a murky source of urban legend. It contains more than 6,000 miles of water mains and pipes, and handles more than a billion gallons of waste each day. Watch as host Kelly Choi solves the mystery of the sewer system.
It wasn't just immigrants that flooded into the City during the nineteenth century, but also yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. Kelly traces the struggle that finally brought the City's first permanent Board of Health to fight the epidemics that had killed thousands of New Yorkers. Plus we meet two medical heroes who saved hundreds of lives: Edward R. Squibb, who started at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the 1840s and perfected the manufacture of ether as an anesthetic, and a living legend of surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center who changed heart and vascular surgery, Dr. Frank Spencer.
In the 20s, when every illegal bar in Manhattan was making payoffs just to stay open, criminal enterprise became Organized Crime. On the surface the best speakeasies, like the 21 Club, glittered with patrons willing to pay as much for a night out as the average American earned in a year. Kelly travels through the 21 Club's secret vault and onto the island of Broad Channel in Queens. There houses built on pilings over the water of Jamaica Bay still stand from the time when speedboats would load illegal booze from the rum ships floating just outside international waters. Plus we make the acquaintance of Arnold Rothstein, the Prohibition-era gangster who met his end at a secret location we'll get to visit.
Kelly takes a virtual trip back in time to see what Manhattan looked like 400 years ago before the tops of hills were scraped off and dumped into the river. Kelly also journeys through underground brooks and streams, and we learn what's really underfoot at South Street Seaport where the skeletons of sunken ships provided the City's earliest landfill. Kelly then explores how landfill changed two centuries later with the engineering marvel that created the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
Kelly ventures to mysterious islands around New York to unearth the secrets that lie hidden in their past. On Hart Island, she meets with experts who enrich our understanding of the site’s rich history: before it became the city’s cemetery for unclaimed bodies, Hart Island was the training ground for African American regiments during the Civil War, as well as a mental asylum and hospital site. We also travel up the Hudson River to an abandoned castle on Bannerman Island, and explore the remains of a lost colony on Ruffle Bar in Jamaica Bay. Kelly also takes a tour of the only privately owned island left in New York City, two and a half acre Rat Island in the Bronx. We take to the water in this episode to the small islands we often see in the distance but can’t set foot on until now.
Before Radio and phonograph there was sheet music and pianos, lots of pianos, with aggressive song pluggers pounding out the next big hit for the music publishers along west 28th Street. They made such a racket, it sounded like a hundred people banging on tin pans, so Tin Pan Alley was born, and with it a new way of selling pop music to America. Kelly walks through the city’s musical past, into gambling halls where thugs and song writers rubbed shoulders, and into the vertical Tin Pan Alley of the next generation, the famous Brill Building at 49th and Broadway where almost every big Rock n Roll hit of the early 1960’s was created. We meet Neil Sedaka, the star who sold 25 million records as a singer and song writer in Brill Building from 1958 to 1963, and we explore the now-empty sound studios where records, television shows and films were mixed. Kelly meets the creators of a successful musical called Murder for Two and learns the basics of writing a good musical at the famous BMI Workshop. Whether it was the best song in a Vaudeville revue, number one in Billboard magazine or a hit Broadway show, New York City is still the heartbeat of American Pop Music.
Kelly Choi joins the Central Park Conservancy's Doug Blonsky for a look at Montayne's Rivulet, one of the park, and city's best secrets.
Why would a church on east 29th Street have stained glass windows showing Broadway actors? Find out as Kelly Choi explores the history of Manhattan’s Church of the Transfiguration. 1 E 29th St, New York, NY 10016
eter Wyckoff moved into his one-room house when New York City was still New Amsterdam. Today his descendants number over 65,000. Visit the place where it all started with Kelly Choi. 5816 Clarendon Road, Brooklyn, NY 11203
On the northern edge of Central Park, there’s a small fort left over from a war that New Yorkers never had to fight. Find out who might have invaded the City with Kelly Choi. Central Park Blockhouse - Manhattan New York, NY 10026
This train terminal is filled with secrets, but there’s one that over 750,000 people pass every day that’s worth ten to twenty million dollars. Let Kelly Choi show you where it is. Grand Central Terminal - 89 East 42nd street, NY 10017
Between Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a group of old houses remain from one of the first free African American communities in America. Kelly Choi visits a cultural jewel from the 1830’s. 1698 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, NY 11213
A tall red brick building on East Fourth Street is the only house in New York City that remains intact from 1832, both inside and out. Kelly Choi discovers a special secret way up in the attic. 29 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003
In front of a quiet Church on Riverside Drive stands the bronze figure of the 12th Century monk who founded Shin Buddhism. But the statue itself survived the world’s first atomic bomb. Kelly Choi explores its story. 331-332 Riverside Drive, NY, NY 10025
Built in 1893, the old Harlem Courthouse still functions as a justice center with an interior from Manhattan’s Gilded Age. Kelly Choi discovers a hidden passageway that leads to the oldest district prison still standing in the City of New York. 170 E 121st Street, New York, NY 10035
Just a few hundred steps from the skyscrapers of Fifth Avenue is a tiny nature preserve few New Yorkers know about. Four million people visit Central Park every year, but almost none of them have seen the secrets of Hallett Sanctuary. Central Park Hallett Sanctuary - East Side 60th Street, NY
A carillon is a set of tuned bells played from a special keyboard high up in a tower. The bell tower of Riverside church is 22 stories high, and when Kelly Choi paid a visit, you could hear the bells ringing ten blocks away! 490 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10027
The tiny cemetery on St. James Place in Manhattan’s Chinatown is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the United States. 18 Jewish veterans of the Revolutionary War are buried here. 57 St. James Place, New York, NY 10038
The tomb of railroad magnate and stock manipulator Jay Gould is one of the best protected of the grand mausoleums of Woodlawn Cemetery. When he died in 1892, Gould had is coffin sealed in lead and made sure his family tomb was safe from intruders. Woodlawn Cemetery - 517 E 233rd St, Bronx, NY 10470