New York Harbor of Memory

The dead beneath Manhattan, the stage that found a voice, and the harbor scarred twice

Six places where New York buried something and then had to remember it: a colonial African cemetery struck by a backhoe, 11,500 prisoners of war whose skulls washed up in Brooklyn, the Harlem stage that made America listen, the rowhouse where the New World Symphony was written, and the two explosions that wounded the same harbor eighty-five years apart.

Itinerary

1. African Burial Ground: The Forgotten Dead Beneath Manhattan — In 1991 a survey promised that two centuries of development had destroyed anything buried at 290 Broadway. Then the backhoes hit bone, and coffin after coffin — the largest colonial-era African cemetery in North America, holding as many as 20,000 of the people New York had written out of its story.
2. Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument: Brooklyn's Forgotten Dead — More Americans died on sixteen British prison ships anchored in Wallabout Bay than in every battle of the Revolution combined. For decades their skulls washed from the Brooklyn shore "as thick as pumpkins in an autumn cornfield" — until a 149-foot Doric column finally rose over their bones in Fort Greene Park.
3. Apollo Theater: Where Harlem Made America Listen — Every Wednesday since the 1930s, the audience at 253 West 125th Street has held absolute power: clap and a career ignites, boo and a stagehand sweeps the act into the wings. Ella Fitzgerald won here at seventeen; James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and Lauryn Hill all stepped into the same merciless spotlight.
4. Antonin Dvorak: The New World Symphony Was Written Here — In a rowhouse on East 17th Street, an already-famous Czech composer spent three years absorbing a city unlike anything in Bohemia — and drew on African American spirituals to write the "New World" Symphony. Neil Armstrong later carried a recording of it to the Moon. The building was demolished in 1991, over the protests of Vaclav Havel.
5. Black Tom: The Night German Spies Blew Up New York Harbor — At 2:08 a.m. on July 30, 1916, German saboteurs detonated a munitions depot on a man-made island in the harbor. The blast registered up to 5.5 on the Richter scale, woke people in Maryland, shattered windows across Lower Manhattan, and drove shrapnel into the Statue of Liberty — which is why her torch has been closed to visitors ever since.
6. American Airlines Flight 11 — At 7:59 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Boeing 767 lifted off from Boston bound for Los Angeles. Within fifteen minutes five hijackers had seized it; within the hour it was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center — the first strike of the deadliest act of terrorism in history, and the harbor's second wound in eighty-five years.