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“You Have To Give A Sense Of What People Wanted”

Martin Scorsese has drawn on his own youth and his feelings about the past—and has rebuilt 1860s New York—to make a movie about the fight for American democracy. Here he tells why it is both so hard and so necessary to get history on film.

Kevin Baker
November/December 2001

I spoke with Martin Scorsese in early September about his forthcoming movie Gangs of New York. The setting was the Park Avenue offices of his Cappa production company, where he was still hard at work, editing and finishing his film. The offices were spacious and well appointed, with shelves full of bound volumes of movie magazines and framed movie posters hanging on almost every wall.Read more »

The Tenement Museum

On Manhattan’s Lower East Side you can visit a haunting re-creation of a life that was at once harder and better than we remember

Dara Horn
April 2000

For many immigrants, moving to a new country is in ways like becoming a child again. Like children, they have few connections outside of their immediate families; some cannot speak the language well and are assumed to be ignorant and mute; they may have few skills or few ways to apply those skills. And like children, they feel strongly the pain of loneliness. The vast majority of American immigrant families, whether they came here in 1790 or 1990, have known this loneliness, but their descendants don’t know what that feels like.

 
 
 
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“The Supreme Laboratory Of The American Experiment”

One of America’s greatest documentary filmmakers takes on America’s greatest city: Ric Burns discusses his new PBS series, New York

November 1999

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The Riot That Remade A City

How a mass killing 150 years ago made today’s New York a better place

Kevin Baker
November 1999

The children are back at Columbine High School now— if they can still truly be called children after the terrible violence perpetrated upon them. We can only hope that the murder of twelve of their classmates was a random moment of madness. We can only hope, that is, for in the time since the killings in Littleton, Colorado, we have proved ourselves unable to address whether or not they reflect any greater, underlying problems in American society and, if so, what we should do about them. Read more »

Gods Of Pennsylvania Station

A trackside album of celebrities from the days when the world went by train

Lorraine B. Diehl
August/September 1986

A person used to enter New York City “like a god,” said the art critic Vincent Scully, but “one scuttles in now like a rat.” Read more »

Dirty-faced David & The Twin Goliaths

One of the country’ more bizzarre labor disputes pitted a crowed of outraged newsboys against two powerful opponents—Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolf Hearst

David Nasaw
April/may 1985

Joseph Pulitzer, nearly blind, suffering from bouts of depression, and so sensitive to sound he exploded when the silverware was rattled, managed his newspapers in absentia for the last twenty years of his life.Read more »

Avery

A gathering of little-known drawings from Columbia
University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library illuminates two centuries of American building

April/May 1984

ONE OF THE WORLD’S most renowned architectural institutions is named for a virtually unknown architect who died at age thirty-eight, too young to have made more than a promising start in his own career. In 1890, the year of Henry Ogden Avery’s death, his parents founded the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York City and donated two thousand books from their son’s professional library as well as the drawings from his brief career. Read more »

Lullaby Of Tin Pan Alley

The ceaseless clatter of cheap pianos from a mid-Manhattan side street was once music to all America

Ben Yagoda
October/november 1983

ONE DAY IN 1922 a young would-be composer named Richard Rodgers paid a call on Max Dreyfus, head of the publishing firm of T. B. Harms and dean of Tin Pan Alley. Rodgers had been there before; three years earlier, Max’s brother Louis had shown him the door, saying, “Keep going to high school and come back some other time.” This time, however, Max himself granted him an audience. “This ascetic-looking titan of the music business sat with eyes half-closed as I played my songs,” wrote Rodgers in his autobiography.Read more »

Mr. McClure And Willa

They could hardly have been more temperamentally incompatible, but the Midwestern writer Willa Cather and the crusading editor S. S. McClure enjoyed a splendid working relationship for six years and a lifetime of mutual respect

Phyllis C. Robinson
August/september 1983

Willa Cather did not publish her first novel until she was almost forty. Then the cool, rich prose of such novels as My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, One of Ours (which won a Pulitzer Prize), A Lost Lady , and Lucy Gayheart established her reputation as one of America’s foremost literary figures. Read more »

Baseball’s Greatest Song

… illuminated by the hand-tinted slides that helped make it a hit

John W. Ripley
June/july 1983

ONE NIGHT in 1888, from the stage of a Broadway theater, the actor DeWolf Hopper recited for the first time a poem about a ballplayer, known only as the Mighty Casey, who struck out. Though Hopper had added the epic to his show as a one-time performance honoring the presence of the baseball great “Cap” Anson, the ovation that followed should have warned him he would be stuck with Casey for the rest of his life. Read more »