Dear Reader,
My new nonfiction book, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, is a personal memoir with fascinating bits of history and travel lore thrown in. I wrote it so you’ll get to know us and our city, including even stuff that most New Yorkers don’t know. A fun book, but with serious moments. You’ll learn who we are and how we live and die. (Dying in a big city like New York is amazingly complicated.) And a host of other things:
•
how many languages are spoken in the city
(you’ll be surprised);
•
how we have fun (it can get a bit crazy);
•
how we worship (like 60,000 Pentecostals in
Central Park);
•
how Fifth Avenue went from goats to grandeur;
•
how the Statue of Liberty almost didn’t happen;
• and how I had an affair with a Broadway chorus boy (if the Cardinal Archbishop of New York could do it, so could I).
I’ll take
you on an imaginary walk along the docks in the 1870s, so you can experience
the offal boat piled high with smelly carcasses (horses, cows, pigs, etc.)
bound for a bone-boiling plant upriver.
You’ll see a mammoth grain elevator being loaded with grain from a canal
boat; the giant jaws of a cotton press squeezing a bale of cotton down to one
foot thick; sugar refineries twelve stories high; and the overripe apples and
dusty candy of the ramshackle Hotel de Flaherty.
I’ll invite
you into the legendary Waldorf Astoria Hotel, whose elegant hallways were once
shared by the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor, an ex-U.S. president, and the
notorious mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano.
You’ll
learn how I have found sacred places of my own in a bustling, noisy city, and
survived 2 1/2 fires in my apartment building.
And so much
else: hustlers, scams and cons, Mohawks and Tibetans, gay bars, a cemetery that
offers whiskey tastings, and which modern hotel would-be suicides should avoid
at all costs, and why.
I’m a
veteran New Yorker living in Greenwich Village high above the Magnolia Bakery
of “Sex and the City” fame. Since the
pandemic keeps most people from visiting New York, I want you to learn about us
in hopes of visiting us in more normal times.
New York is the most exciting city in the world. Everyone should visit it at least once and
preferably many times. It’s unique, and
it has something for everyone.
About the Author
Clifford Browder is a writer and retired freelance editor living in New York City, which he celebrates in his blog, “No Place for Normal: New York.” His published works include two biographies; three New York City memoirs; a critical study of the French Surrealist poet André Breton; and four historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. His poetry has appeared both online and in print. He has never owned a car, a television, or a cell phone, barely tolerates his computer, and eats garlic to fend off vampires. (So far, it seems to be working.)
About the Book
A quirky memoir by a longtime resident, with glances at his city’s history and bits of travel lore all rolled into one.
Readers will learn how the Statue of Liberty almost didn’t happen; how the author found the sacred in the city, and learned the Charleston on You Tube; how mobsters shared the corridors of the legendary Waldorf Astoria hotel with the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor and an ex-president; and how the author had an affair with a Broadway chorus boy (if the Cardinal Archbishop of New York could do it, so could he).
Plus Mohawks, hustlers, scams and cons, wigmakers and crematory managers, racoons in Central Park, Trump Tower, cholera, and the Beatles. A fun book, but with some serious moments.
New York is the most exciting city in the world. The author wants to share it with everyone.
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