New York City is a packed metropolis with many hidden nooks and crannies and surprises. As you can imagine, New York secrets abound, and to compile them all would probably take multiple volumes. Sufficed to say, the Big Apple is a fascinating place and is always one of the best cities ever!
We’ve compiled some New York secrets and quirky facts for you below.
33 New York secrets and facts from the mundane to the really weird
1. The Lenape tribe originally inhabited the area now known as New York City. They called the area Manna-hata, roughly translating to a place where you find wood for bows (and arrows).
2. When the Dutch founded a trading post in 1625 on the south part of what is now Manhattan Island, they named it New Amsterdam, after the capital city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
3. The name Wall Street refers to a wooden wall originally used to protect “New Amsterdam” from Native Americans and the British.
4. The British then conquered the Dutch in a fight for New Amsterdam (well, the Dutch surrendered before bloodshed). New York became the town’s name after British monarch King Charles II gave the land to his brother James Stuart, Duke of York.
5. The influence of the Dutch still lives on in New York, however. They named Brooklyn and Harlem after Dutch towns. Both neighborhoods offer some great apartments for rent in N.Y.C.
6. Did you know SoHo was New York’s red light district before becoming an artist enclave?
7. SoHo has several hidden restaurants or secretive eateries, such as the exclusive après ski fondue chalet hidden inside Café Select located behind the kitchen through a door labeled “No entry, employees only.”
8. If you like pirates, well, pirates like New York! Captain William Kidd a.k.a. Captain Kidd was a Scottish-born pirate (1654–1701) who spent part of his life in New York City. He actually buried treasure (later recovered) on Gardiner’s Island, which is off of Long Island.
9. It’s not so much a New York secret itself as what secrets it might contain: The Morbid Anatomy Library (which had a previous incarnation as the Morbid Anatomy Museum) is a fascinating research library and creepy collection in Brooklyn that houses all sorts of rare books, prints and photographs, art and other “ephemera” that relate to medicine, anatomy and death. It’s free and open to the public.
10. Some swear that there’s a reason why New York bagels are so much better than those made just about anywhere else. The secret? It’s not in the recipe. It’s in the N.Y.C. water, delivered virtually unfiltered from the New York Catskill Mountains and has a unique proportion of calcium and magnesium, which makes N.Y. bagels soft and chewy on the inside and delightfully crispy on the outside.
11. Underneath the world-famous Waldorf Astoria Hotel are secret train tracks built in the 1930s to shuttle President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in order to keep his polio disease a secret from the public.
12. If there’s ever another Night at the Museum movie based in New York, we can imagine they might use the World War I fighter plane found on the roof of 77 Water Street in the Financial District. Sure, the astroturf runway isn’t real and there’s probably no gas in it, but this British Sopwith Camel fighter plane arrived in 1969 as a publicity stunt to keep watch over Manhattan.
13. There’s a gorgeous Frank Lloyd Wright house on Staten Island called the Crimson Beech, but we won’t share the address for the reasons of privacy. (You can probably find photos of the architectural gem by searching online, of course.)
14. Yes, that’s a submerged, rusting yellow submarine sitting in Coney Island Creek off of Brooklyn. It’s a homemade submarine named Quester I, and made of salvaged metal by shipyard worker Jerry Bianco. His intent was to search the wreckage of the SS Andrea Doria but made a wreck himself when the submarine keeled over to the side and partially sank post-launch.
15. The SS Andrea Doria did not sink in Coney Island Creek, by the way, but was on its way from Genoa to New York when the MS Stockholm hit it and it sank. The death toll on the Andrea Doria from the collision was 46, but the sunken ship itself is still claiming victims as it’s now called “The Mt. Everest of Wreck Diving.” Some believe the shipwreck is cursed, as almost 20 divers have perished trying to explore the wreckage. Thus, one can wonder, was Jerry Bianco and his ill-fated yellow submarine also cursed? Or, did this Brooklyn submarine failure save him from a possibly worse fate had he reached the Andrea Doria?
16. Five large pieces of the Berlin Wall have lived on in N.Y.C., although one large segment was apparently put in storage. Artist Peter Max carved another to put on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum but returned it to the owner many years ago to the original owner.
17. Rockefeller Center is actually home to several secret gardens that live upon its various roofs, some with lovely reflecting pools.
18. Speaking of New York gardens, one of the smallest gardens in the city is actually an overgrown alleyway with a few benches called Septuagesimo Uno, located on the Upper West Side. At a mere two-fifths of an acre, this teeny park gives the term “pocket park” a run for its money.
19. There are six other parks in N.Y.C. that are smaller than Septuagesimo Uno, but most are not very usable: the smallest being McNally Plaza, basically an iron fence surrounding a solemn stone marker honoring the veterans of World War I.
20. Some people call the Tabernacle Prayer Church in Queens “N.Y.C.’s Best Kept Secret.” Why? The beautiful church building, outrageously ornate in a good way, was a lavish movie theater that opened in 1929. The historic landmark now offers regular church services with rousing gospel music.
21. While we don’t recommend it, many urban explorers have illegally gone to the abandoned 13-acre North Brother Island located in the East River out of the fascination of the ruins there. A hospital located on the island where people who were sick with contagious diseases, such as tuberculosis, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus and typhoid fever, quarantined. The island is now a bird sanctuary.
22. If you thought Typhoid Mary was just a legend, no, she actually lived on North Brother Island in quarantine starting in 1908 for more than 20 years. She infected 53 people with typhoid fever despite being asymptomatic. (She was a cook and kept on cooking for the public despite being told to stop by health authorities.)
23. North Brother Island was also the location of the biggest loss of life in the city until 9/11. In 1903, a steamboat named General Slocum was on its way to Long Island for an annual church picnic. Fire bloomed in one of the machine rooms, and allegedly a 12-year-old boy tried to warn the captain but he brushed it off. When the boat sank, it was on the banks of North Brother Island, and more than 1,000 people died.
24. Perhaps due to this event, the patients who died on the island haunt North Brother Island and sometimes residents hear screams from the hospital ruins and see ghosts on the island’s shores from Manhattan.
25. Many consider the most haunted place in N.Y.C. the aptly named “House of Death” located in Greenwich Village. Built in 1856, This modest-looking brownstone apparently houses the ghost of Mark Twain, although he himself only lived there for a little more than a year. At the House of Death, Mark Twain allegedly saw a piece of wood kindling move on its own so he shot it and it dripped blood — though Twain himself said this must have been from a rat moving the wood.
26. Jan Bryant Bartell was a writer and actress who lived in Mark Twain’s spooky house starting in 1957 and wrote about her unsettling paranormal experiences there in the book “Spindrift.” She eventually died under mysterious circumstances in 1973. Later, one of the most disturbing events at the House of Death was when a father murdered his own six-year-old after a cocaine binge back in 1987.
27. Radio City Music Hall is haunted, as many theaters in N.Y.C. are, but that’s not its best secret. There’s actually a secret apartment in Radio City Music Hall, created for theater impresario (producer) Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882-1936). This beautiful art deco apartment with 20-foot-high ceilings entertained luminaries, such as Olivia de Havilland and Alfred Hitchcock. Abandoned for a while after Roxy’s death, it now rents for private luxury events.
28. If you really want to live in style, check out the most expensive apartment in New York City, costing $192,000 per year.
29. Are there really “mole people” living underneath the streets of N.Y.C.? Yes, and many of them say they prefer to live there where no one bothers them with taxes or rent. Stories of underground cannibalism, alligators and elaborate secret passages ala Beauty and the Beast are greatly exaggerated New York secrets, however.
30. Speaking of secret passages, there’s a fake brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that hides a subway ventilator. It’s also said to host a secret passageway to the 4/5 trains below.
31. This isn’t the only fake rowhome in N.Y.C. A Con Edison substation located in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx has a façade that consists of beautiful, almost-too-pristine-looking townhomes.
32. Wondering why there are black squirrels in N.Y.C.? It’s due to a recessive gene that tends to come out in more isolated squirrel populations, which can happen on urban islands. Black fur may also keep the squirrels warmer.
33. Frank Sinatra’s iconic “New York, New York” was originally sung by Liza Minelli in the 1977 movie “New York, New York.” If you haven’t heard her sing it yet, drop what you are doing and prepare to be wowed.
Experience “The City” for yourself with a New York apartment
We’ve shared some fun New York City secrets. To learn real New York City secrets, you’ll need to live there. While rent is definitely more expensive in N.Y.C. than your average town, you can still find many great apartments for rent in New York.
Source: rent.com
