Jeff Kisseloff brings together 137 New Yorkers who witnessed daily life in Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II. Dividing the city into ten neighborhoods and devoting a chapter and about a dozen voices to each, Kisseloff offers a brief introduction, then lets the eyewitnesses speak for themselves. We hear a survivor's account of the harrowing Triangle Shirtwaist fire as well as tales of the sweatshops, the settlement houses, and the immigrants from around the world who poured into the Lower East Side at the turn of the century. There are vignettes of John Reed, Louise Bryant, Eugene O'Neill, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. We read of the bloody beginnings of the seamen's union and, down the street from the docks, visit with Thomas Wolfe and Edgar Lee Masters in the Hotel Chelsea. In Harlem, the Savoy and the Cotton Club were in their heyday, as were Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and Adam Clayton Powell.
Kisseloff offers a brief historical introduction to each of the ten neighborhoods and provides rare photographs of the people and places. From the pushcarts of the Lower East Side to the farms on Manhattan's northern expanse, from the Schirmers and the Steinways on the West Side to the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the rest of the social register across the park, these eyewitnesses to another age engage us in a unique conversation between an all-but-bygone time and our own.
