Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan's Lost Places of Leisure

What makes David Freeland's book special is the personal/human touch he adds to make these forgotten places truly live again. Anyone who loves the City has looked at a building or spot and wondered "What was that? Who was there? What's the link to the past?" Freeland's research and prose make you see these things, and creates a continuity of urban life, making you, the reader, a part of New York City's vibrant life and history. It's a great, fun read, and I hope there are many sequels.

I'm reading this book now and I'm finding it to be both interesting and an easy read. The author takes you on time machine-like tours of selected social/entertainment scenes in mostly, I seems, 19th Century Manhattan. The historical social scenes revolve around specific structures & sites where at least some physical remnants still exist today. In reading about the histories of specific buildings, the reader ends up learning so much more than the mere architectural "brick & mortar" aspects. We learn about different ethnic and immigrant cultures that thrived and declined at different times and in different neighborhoods. The chapters are organized by neighborhoods, and therefore also by the ethnicities of those neighborhoods. We start out with the German immigrant community in the Bowery area, then we go to Chinatown, then to Jewish immigrant life on Second Avenue and so forth. There's a refreshing amount of heart & soul for what is essentially a history book. What you're left with is the realizeation that if you observe & learn, you can still find traces of previous centuries in everyday places.

If youre interested in the social history of NYC neighborhoods, and want a well-researched, and still very readable account, I recommend this book. It discusses neighborhood evolution in areas like Times Square, Chinatown and Harlem. (The book's title gives a hint of some of the stories it tells). Its also has a great bibliography for those who want to keep on reading - there's no one book about NYC that could possibly tell the whole story. The only negative I have is the poor quality of the photos -- there arent many of them, and in this paperback, theyre far from high quality (web sites like those of the NY Public Library, the Museum of the City of NY, and the NY Historical Society have some great on-line photo collections for those interested in better pictorial histories). All-in-all, a very enjoyable read by a guy who did his homework.