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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now Sam Roberts with A History of New York in 101 Objects. That's the new book from the Times urban affairs correspondent. We will do the hyper-condensed radio version with 10 of those objects that we have posted the images of in a slideshow on our site. If you would like to follow along and see things from a very early New York guidebook to the sewing machine used in the heyday of the Garment District to a very familiar political button, if you were around in the '80s, go to wnyc.org and click on Brian Lehrer Show, you'll see the slideshow of 10 images from New York history right there and you can follow along. Hello, Sam Roberts. Welcome back to WNYC.

Sam Roberts: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian: Before we jump into object number one, what were you after here? Why tell a history of the city 101 objects?

Sam: Well, I was inspired by the British Museum and BBC series A History of the World in 100 Objects and realized that you couldn't do New York in merely 100, it would take at least 101. WNYC itself did 10 objects and then I did 50 for the Times, and I decided to turn this into a book and the hardest thing was not finding 101 objects, it was widowing them down to 101.

Brian: All that, and listeners you can participate. You can reflect on the objects Sam will be talking about and you can nominate an object in case Sam ever writes a volume two.

Sam: Easy. We set up an email address, objectsofnyc@gmail.com.

Brian: Is there a larger collection that you're displaying online?

Sam: We're going to have a website. There's an exhibit going on at the New York Historical Society and maybe they'll be a volume two.

Brian: All right. Listeners, what object do you think is vital to telling the story of New York? 212-433 WNYC. Then let's start at the very beginning of the book with object number one, which is actually a view from Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip of Manhattan. We're looking at a rock formation and you call the object Fordham gneiss, G-N-E-I-S-S, gneiss. Why start your book with a rock formation?

Sam: It's a good question. One of the criterion for the objects to be included in this book was not too much bigger than a breadbox. Which is why I left out the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building. This rock is a pretty big breadbox, I admit but it's just about the oldest natural object in New York. It dates about 1.2 billion years and that seemed like a good starting point for anything in a book of 101 objects.

Brian: As you explain, the various kinds of rock in different parts of the city have done so much to determine what gets built there. For people who wonder why there are no skyscrapers in Upper Manhattan but they're concentrated in Midtown and the financial district, the answer really is geology. Isn't it?

Sam: That's true. Nowadays, you could build a skyscraper just about anywhere, but certainly, with the earlier technology in the 19th century, the early 20th century, it was much more practical to build Downtown and Midtown.

Brian: You also mentioned tunnels in connection with this rock. The weird but true fact that landlords on the land beneath their property all the way down to the center of the Earth, why bring that up?

Sam: Well, because it's one of those New York curiosities that I always wondered about. How far down does it go? Particularly, I was interested when you talk about subways and water tunnels and things like that, what is the role of eminent domain in terms of taking control of that property when you have government powers? Apparently, landlords do own the property just about at the center of the earth but the government can take control of it for public purposes.

Brian: Object number two was fascinating. I had never seen this before. You call it a guide book and the page you display in the book dates all the way back to 1670. Again, listeners, you can see this on our site at wnyc.org, click on Brian Lehrer Show 10 images or 10-image slideshow taken from Sam Robert's new book A History of New York in 101 Objects. This brief description of New York formerly called New Netherlands, what is this?

Sam: Brian, I particularly like this because it was written by Daniel Denton, an Englishman. He also not only wrote a guidebook about New York for Europeans, but he was also a pioneer opportunist which is in the New York tradition. What he didn't tell the people for whom he was writing the guidebook was that he was a real estate speculator and what he wanted to do was sell land in what became New York. He wanted them to move over here, leave England, leave other parts of Europe and buy land in what was then New Netherlands.

Brian: It's so interesting that for people who are not on our site viewing the images, I'm going to read this whole page that you printed here from this book published in 1670.

A brief description of New York, formerly called New Netherlands, with the places thereunto adjoyning. That's adjoyning with a Y. Together with the matter of its situation, fertility of the soyle, S-O-Y-L-E, healthfulness of the climate and the commodities thence produced. Also, some directions and advice to such as shall go thither; an account of what commodities they shall take with them, the profit and pleasure that may accrew which, by the way, A-C-C-R-E-W accrew to them thereby. Likewise, a brief relation of the customs of the Indians there. By Daniel Denton.

Sam: He said basically don't worry about the Indians. No problem especially with the English in charge.

Brian: Yes, because the first city of New York Chamber of Commerce might have been pushing Daniel Denton to do such a thing.

Sam: I think so, especially since he owned some of the land.

Brian: By the way, why does this say "New York formerly called New Netherlands"? I thought it was New Amsterdam.

Sam: He meant the greater New York area. It went beyond actually the city limits.

Brian: Next image in Sam Roberts' A History of New York in 101 Objects and if you're just joining us again, you can follow along with the slideshow at wnyc.org. Click on find the Brian Lehrer Show. Next object, number 15, Burial Beads. Now, for those not looking, these look like little multicolored Cheerios. What are these beads?

Sam: They are beads with which a African-American woman was buried in what is now known as the African Burial Ground. It was a cemetery for blacks that was then beyond the city limits, north of City Hall. It was rediscovered when the government was building a new federal office building a decade or two ago. It's now part of the National Park Service site. What it reminded us was how important the Black population was to New York City in the 18th, 19th century. About a quarter of the city's population was Black.

New York was one of the biggest slaveholding centers of what became the United States slave labor, was vital to New York. There was a wide cross-section of people from laborers to people who were fairly well-to-do freed slaves in what became New York, at the time.

Brian: That's an important reminder for people who haven't studied the city's history closely. That New York was not the South but slavery did definitely happen here too.

Sam: Absolutely, slaves were mistreated. There were slave rebellions. Slaves were discriminated against by law and it wasn't till 1799 that a law was actually passed that gave the slaves rights and freedom. That law didn't take effect till about 1827.

Brian: I wonder what it was like to have a hybrid city like that. We think about slavery in the South and the plantation system where all the Blacks were slaves, but in New York, there were plenty of free Blacks and there were plenty of slaves at a certain time in history.

Sam: Absolutely. There are a number of items in the book. I tried not to make this book politically erect, but there are a number of items of the book that I tried to let people look at history in different ways. I started out doing the book, of course, thinking I knew everything there was about New York. One of the joys of doing it-

Brian: Most people, by the way, when they say, "Sam Roberts," the next words out of their mouths are, "He knows everything about New York."

Sam: The joy of doing what I do for a living is that I keep learning things. I learned a lot doing this book and I learned things about the Civil War and the draft riots and other things that are reflected in the objects in this book. Of course, Blacks were mistreated all along the way. The draft riots, and there's one object in the book that reflects that in 1863, was the culmination of that.

Brian: I remember when that burial ground was discovered. It was only in the 1990s. That's so recent.

Sam: Absolutely. The fact is that much of the land we live on and walk on, particularly in Manhattan, used to be burial grounds.

Brian: Listeners, any questions or other objects to nominate for representing the history of New York as Sam Robert's done it in his new book A History of New York in 101 Objects, 212-433 WNYC 433-9692, and follow along with our slideshow of the 10 that we've called from the book at wnyc.org. Click on Brian Lehrer Show. Next object, number 23 is a sewing machine. It's a Singer sewing machine that has its manufacturer date written right on it, "1849". Why this sewing machine?

Sam: It is a generic object. It is a sewing machine, not the sewing machine. Again, this list is my list. It is not the definitive list of 101 objects. It's a sewing machine my grandfather might have used, frankly, in the Garment Center. It reflected the biggest industry at one time in New York. Again, something generated largely by the Civil War. Clothes that were made for slaves, uniforms that were made both for the North and to some extent for the South.

At one point, New York was generating about 40% of the men's clothing and 70% of the women's clothing purchased in the United States when it went from tailor-made to off the rack clothing. New York was very, very much the center of that in the 19th century.

Brian: That's an incredible stat, those two stats that I didn't know until I was reading that part of the book, 70% of women's clothing purchased in the entire United States, 40% of all the men's clothing around 1910 being made in New York. Why here all the way at one corner of the country? This could have been done anywhere, right?

Sam: It was cheap labor. It was good labor. It was immigrant labor. One of the consequences of that, the spin-offs if you will, was the organization of the labor movement in New York. Not only the labor movement organized labor per se but the political ramifications of the labor movement, a left-leaning labor movement, and a very democratic left-leaning state.

Brian: The labor movement succeeded to some degree and the garment industry moved to Nicaragua?

Sam: Just about. That's right.

Brian: I have an ancestral connection to that one, I guess you do too from what you said because my grandfather, my father's father, was one of those immigrants, came through Ellis Island, made his living commuting every day from the South Bronx to the Garment District, of course, that was in this century, not at the time that the image depicts, sitting at one of those sewing machines and then going home at night. The stats that you have there are huge, not only for how much we exported to the rest of the country in terms of clothing but how big the garment industry was. It was the city's top employment sector for a good long time.

Sam: Absolutely true.

Brian: A History of New York in 101 objects. Next item, number 37 represents mass production in a different way. It's a brass doorknob from a New York City public school.

Sam: I love that. I remember that at P. S. 219 in Brooklyn, frankly. It showed that people cared about public schools. Now probably, I hate to admit some political boss made these brass doorknobs and got a cut from the board of education budget.

Brian: You're speculating? Or that's known history?

Sam: I wish I could prove it. They were beautiful and they showed a certain respect for public education. People just remember them. They are symbolic of the city's commitment which began actually with Black kids in the late 18th century, then with the public school system, then with the Catholic church emulating the Protestant system in public education in the 19th century. Now, the funny thing is, you can't have those doorknobs now. You can only find them probably on eBay because the Americans with Disabilities Act prevents you from using those. You've got to use the lever-type doorknobs. They are no longer acceptable.

Brian: You use the doorknob as a way to riff on public education as you just did. You do that in the book. I do wonder about the doorknob itself. It's really a little Art Deco gem. One former teacher that I know who shall remain nameless, snatched one of these on his or her way out the door years ago because it just looks so cool and installed it in his or her home. Do you know if they were mass-produced? Were the same in hundreds of school buildings? Because that's the impression that I get.

Sam: I believe they were indeed. When I was looking for an object that defined public education, I could have picked anything. Again, the criteria for picking them was something transformative or something emblematic of a transformation, wanted something that existed. Didn't want a human being which ruled out-- it cut among others who a number of people suggested as emblematic of New York. What was so fascinating was how many people suggested items of food for the book. All sorts of things. I included some but couldn't possibly include all.

Brian: Which brings us to item number 50, right smack in the middle or is in the middle as you can get of 101. I guess 51 is right in the middle of 101. Number 50, The Automat: The Origin of Fast Food. For the uninitiated, what was the Automat?

Sam: The Automat, I hope they're not too many uninitiated, was a great Horn & Hardart restaurant where you put nickels in slots, the machine spun around and you pulled out your lemon meringue pie or your baked beans or sandwich or soup or whatever else you wanted. It was a fascinating way that actually began in Philadelphia opened in New York early in the 19th century.

It was a sanitary way, it was an egalitarian way. Everyone had to put it in the same nickels and you sat at the same tables, you didn't leave tips. You never were quite sure how much you were paying for things because you were just putting nickels in a slot. It lasted for a long time. The last one as I recall was right near the Daily News where I used to work on Third Avenue and 42nd Street. It became a terrific New York institution.

Brian: You have the lifespan of The Automat in New York as being from 1912 to 1991. Actually, probably my earliest memory of Manhattan is of my parents taking me in from Queens and eating at one of those Horn & Hardart automats. I seem to remember it being near Grand Central. I don't know if that's accurate or not when I was really little. It was nostalgia even for my parents at that point. You go beyond middle-class nostalgia to The Automat as an early place that homeless people congregated and an Edward Hopper painting in the 1920s that reflected that.

Sam: That's right. That famous Edward Hopper painting is called The Automat. It doesn't really look like one but that's the name of it. It really was the arch when fast-food lunch arguably was invented in New York. People used to go home and have dinner before the workweek became what we know now before the Industrial Revolution. The idea of lunch and a fast-food lunch as I point out in the book was a New York institution.

Brian: The image shows three little glass-enclosed cases with a slice of lemon meringue pie in each one and coin slots with the instructions, "2 quarters only". That one didn't take nickels. You have Neil Simon, in that passage saying he used to hang out at The Automat. He learned more talking to the patrons there than he learned in his three years at Princeton. Too bad that his parents didn't know that they could keep shelling out quarters and nickels for a lemon meringue pie rather than all that money for tuition.

Sam: It would have been a good investment.

Brian: A History of New York in 101 Objects with Sam Roberts here. Next item, number 79. Look, it's a very young and wiry Johnny Carson with a very aging Groucho Marx. What's the story? Why is this New York?

Sam: If I had been really high tech, I would have included an audio recording, which is all that's left. Apparently, there is no video. This was Johnny Carson's first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1962. Who was he introduced by as I pointed out in the book? Groucho Marx. Johnny Carson got such a big hand that Groucho Marx said, "Boy, you think it was Vice President Nixon who was being introduced." He was being facetious, of course. The reason Johnny Carson is a icon in this book, and an object, if you will, or the show is, is because he defined New York in the '60s and early '70s to so much of the nation.

John Lindsay was the mayor. This was the big city. This was sophistication. This was Fun City as it was called, facetiously in that period of time, the late '60s, early '70s. It was the time of New York jokes not particularly flattering. Anytime four people get in a cab and they're not arguing, well, a bank robbery must have taken place, things like that. It was a defining time for television too. As I pointed out in the book, you couldn't even say, "Pregnant pause," the two words together because they were considered off-color. Carson broadcast from New York in the beginning really define New York to the rest of the nation.

Brian: Now after a long hiatus, The Tonight Show is back in New York.

Sam: Indeed but back in a very different New York too.

Brian: Indeed. Next item, number 87. This is the famous Daily News headline that many have heard about and very few have seen, this the actual front page of the paper, FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

Sam: It is a great headline. Of course, he never used those exact words "Drop Dead," but I challenge anyone to say that wasn't his intent. That's what he meant when he denied loan guarantees initially to the city when it was in the middle of its fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. That's a companion object to another one that's in the book. That is Milton Glaser's famous "I Love New York" logo. The book includes what I learned, was a fascinating story behind that. Milton was asked by the state commerce department to draw some sort of graphic for a promotional campaign for the state commerce department. He did. The commerce department loved it, and then he was in a cab and he thought of another idea. He went back to the commerce department, said, "Hey, I've got a great idea, and they said, "Forget about it. This one's already been accepted." He said, "No, no, let me show it to you," and he did. It was "I Heart New York" and they said, "Wow, this is great." Of course, it became one of the most iconic vivid graphic symbols adopted all over the world.

Brian: To this day, Milton Glaser's name was just mentioned on the show earlier this week because he's still at it. He had a "Save the Earth" button that was very prominent. A lot of people were wearing it at the Climate March on Sunday. Milton Glaser is still creating iconic images for his times. Number 91, the ninth out of the 10 that we've got on our site in the slideshow@wnyc.org, click on Brian Lehrer Show, anyone walking around New York in the '80s or anyone who lived through the horribleness of the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the city will remember the "Silence Equals Death" button.

Sam: If you talk about iconic objects, that certainly was one of them. It affected the gay community enormously. It was in one respect, arguably the launching pad for the gay rights movement. It had an enormous impact in terms of death and devastation on the arts community and this button, this poster really became symbolic. In fact, interestingly enough, there's an exhibition now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Disobedient Objects, which includes a poster of this symbol as well. It became so powerful.

Brian: Let's take a couple of listener calls before we do our final object. Harry in Forest Hills, you're on WNYC. Hi, Harry.

Harry: Hi, how are you? Two items but I'll start off with the first one. I think it was up until the-- oh, maybe early 1970s in the Bronx. Originally, I grew up in the Bronx before we moved to Queens. I remember seeing the cobblestones with the trolley rails before they started tarring everything over in the Bronx. I feel a New York cobble with a piece of the trolley track will be iconic.

Brian: I like that. Oh, you have a second one? Go ahead.

Harry: Yes. Of course, the World Trade Center is no longer standing but at one time it was climbed by Robert Willig. His mother was one of the people who was injured. I think it was the end of World War Two when a B-17 had crashed into the Empire State Building.

Sam: I didn't know that.

Brian: Harry, thank you very much. That was very interesting.

Sam: We do have a jar of dust that was collected in Lower Manhattan, right after 9/11, that seemed like a mysterious, respectful enigmatic way of marking 9/11.

Brian: Chris in Peekskill. You're at WNYC. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Hello. Let me just take you off the speakerphone here while I wait. Hello.

Brian: Always good for sound quality to get us off the speakerphone. Hi, there.

Chris: There you go. Good morning. I have a piece of coral that was found on the corner of Seaman Avenue in 204th street. There was a lot there and a piece of coral was found on the bottom of the [inaudible 00:24:06].

Brian: That's in what? Upper Manhattan.

Chris: I had it for quite some time. I've done some research. I use the New York State Earth Science Reference Tables. I can only assume that it's a few hundred years old and it was a part of New York when we were below the equator and under the water. I just figured I'd bring that up and see if maybe your guest has anything to say about that.

Brian: We weren't below the equator but maybe that part of Manhattan was underwater at some point.

Sam: I'm sure it was. I would suggest you bring it to the American Museum of Natural History and I'll bet they can tell you exactly what it is.

Brian: Interesting. One final item in our super condensed radio version of Sam Roberts' A History of New York in 101 Objects, number 98, very much in the news this year, actually the Domino Sugar sign about to go away as the former factory space becomes an apartment building. What does the Domino Sugar sign signify historically that you included it in the book?

Sam: Brian, the Domino Sugar sign should be coming back too eventually but I was looking for an object-

Brian: What do you mean "coming back,"? Is that part of the plan?

Sam: I think the sign itself will be coming back. The building may not but the sign will. I was looking for something in the book that would be symbolic of manufacturing in New York. At one point half the sugar in the country was processed in New York City. It came up by boat, obviously from Cuba and other places, manufactured here, mostly in Brooklyn, and exported to the rest of the country and also the world. The idea was to capture the fact that New York was a manufacturing capital.

As recently as 1950, there were 1 million manufacturing jobs in New York. Now it's hard to exactly measure them but they're probably something like about 100,000. We still make an amazing assortment of things from pianos to 3D printing objects and things like that. The Domino Sugar sign, the old Silver Cup Bakery sign which has been retooled of course, into a movie studio, the Pepsi sign which is on the waterfront in Long Island City, to me, they symbolize the manufacturing past of New York which is so historic.

Brian: Funny enough, I took a Harbor history tour of Baltimore this summer, and there was an almost identical Domino Sugar sign in Baltimore Harbor. I expected to hear the same tale of it being a former industry converted and a former landmark being converted into condos but instead, they boasted of their sugar refining industry today and the jobs that that sign represents. Any clue why it would have persisted to some degree as an industry as close as Baltimore but not in New York?

Sam: My guess is that labor costs and other costs in the port of Baltimore were probably a bit cheaper than in the port in New York.

Brian: Then why was it ever in New York? If you think about sugar being grown in the Caribbean or in the South, in this country, why did they ship it all the way to New York to refine it? Couldn't they have found a port city somewhere along the Southeast coast?

Sam: New York, of course, had the best port in the country, and that's one of the chief reasons it grew into the great city we know today. Also, at the time, at least in the beginning in the 19th century and even earlier, the sugar didn't last that long from the final refining process to immediate use. You wanted to refine it as close as possible to where the consumers were and that was New York. New York was the most central spot to do that.

Brian: That's our super condensed radio version with Sam Roberts of his book, A History of New York in 101 Objects. Sam, did you ever hear the joke in our business that says if they had broadcast news in biblical times, there would have been a report one day that said, "God handed Moses 10 commandments today. Two of them were--" We've got 10-

Sam: Well, we'll save the rest for another book.

Brian: -in the radio broadcast of your 101 objects. Listeners, you can see our slideshow of those 10 produced with Sam's kind permission, at wnyc.org, big fun and we learned some great stuff. Thanks a lot.

Sam: Thank you.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, we have more of your connections to history to come. We have Henry Louis Gates before the show is out today. The latest edition of his Finding Your Roots series premieres on PBS tonight and we'll talk about finding the connections between your personal genealogy and the big narratives of history. Henry Louis Gates coming up, and new ways to invest in real estate and gentrification in New York City. Do we really want that? Stay with us.

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