Tue, Oct 22, 2013
In the mid 1800s New York was a dangerous, chaotic city teaming with newly arrived immigrants. Ruthless crooks and brutal criminal gangs ruled the lawless streets. Kelly maps the emergence of the police force that took on these cutthroat thieves and mobsters. Along the way, she highlights the work of some of New York's greatest detectives. She begins with the famous cases of Chief Inspector Thomas Byrnes -- a man who invented America's modern detective bureau. Then Kelly focuses on Manhattan's Little Italy in 1900 and one of the NYPD's greatest heroes, Captain Joe Petrosino, the police officer who stood up to the criminal gangs who terrorized their fellow immigrants under the name of The Black Hand. Finally, we hear how New York City detectives solved the murder of top mobster Paul Castellano and brought John Gotti to justice.
Tue, Oct 29, 2013
New Yorkers have passed by a wide open space for 65 years riding the J train past Essex Street on the lower East side, wondering what that acre of underground space might have been. Kelly clears up the mystery by visiting New York City's most futuristic park site, the Lowline. Planned for the old Essex Street Trolley Terminal, Kelly walks through a dark labyrinth worthy of Indiana Jones and talks to the folks who figured out how to channel sunlight from the street into a subway tunnel to grow plants and trees. In fact, some of the oldest tunnels underneath New York City predate the subways; they're the tunnels that supplied 1840's Manhattan with its first outside water supply. Kelly travels a forgotten pathway that goes from Westchester all the way to 42nd street, deep inside the Old Croton Aqueduct. Constructed by an army of Irish workmen, the Aqueduct was the engineering equivalent of today's space missions, a tunnel 41 miles long, dropping exactly 13 inches for every mile into the city. The tunnels still exist under Manhattan today, including the New York Public Library and Central Park, where Kelly descends into a Victorian version of Mission Control.
Tue, Nov 5, 2013
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.
Tue, Nov 5, 2013
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.