transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] It's a night out in New York City in 1954. You could be doing, well, anything. There are movies, theaters, parties, bars, restaurants. You could be at the opera or the ballet. You could be dancing among the young and beautiful at El Morocco, the Stork Club, or the Copacabana. Instead, you're standing on a street corner. Elbow to elbow with strangers, just waiting. Because in just a few minutes, you've been promised you're about to get the best show in town. And so you shove your hands in your pockets to warm them and try not to get elbowed by an overly aggressive photographer next to you. You watch as burly men carrying equipment set up for a movie scene they're about to shoot. Maybe you get a glimpse of the actor, Tom Ewell. But everyone knows that despite his recently celebrated turn on Broadway, he's not the one who anyone is here to see. Finally, you get a glimpse of white fabric, a flash of a blonde bob, a smile that sets the world sideways. The crowd comes to life with shouts and cheers around you. Marilyn Monroe is here to shoot what will become the most iconic scene in her career. Today, there's nothing extraordinary about the corner of Lexington and 52nd Street. In 2026, there are three lanes of fast moving traffic. There's a Halal cart on the sidewalk and a Paris baguette at the intersection where, in a pinch, you can get a fairly generic sandwich. On the sidewalk on the southwestern side of the intersection, there's a mundane looking office building. It's the site of a moment that redefined celebrity a few decades earlier, and there's not even a plaque. Even if you've never seen the Billy Wilder movie The Seven Year Itch, I can almost guarantee you're aware of its most indelible image, immortalized on the movie's poster, and in recreations and parodies in the decades since. In the movie, Marilyn Monroe, playing the character credited only as the girl, leaves the trans-lux movie theater on 52nd Street with Tom Ewell's character, Richard Sherman, after seeing the creature from the Black Lagoon. Then Monroe's character in a white halter dress with accordion pleats, stands on a subway grate to enjoy the breeze from a passing train below, her dress lifting around her. The scene was scheduled to shoot on September 15th, 1954. 20th Century Fox, the studio behind the picture, smelled an opportunity for publicity. They got word out to the public about when and where that scene would be filming, and what exactly the scene would be. Fans and photographers descended, all jockeying for position to get a glimpse of the movie star's legs and whatever else they might see. And it was quite the crowd. Anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people were shouting and screaming every time Wilder cued the special effects man below the grate to turn on the giant fan. Cameras flashed and snapped, and Marilyn's dress blew up around her again and again and again. The crew shot the scene 14 times as the crowds roared. The truth was the crowds were never going to see what they were probably hoping for. In her biography, Marilyn noted that she wore two pairs of white underwear beneath the dress to prevent a wardrobe malfunction. But still, the sexy little scene was a sensation. As it turns out, all that noise from the crowds? Screaming and shouting and trying to get close enough to see whatever Marilyn's underwear wasn't hiding? Well, it kind of made the footage unusable. They had to reshoot that scene on a studio lot in California, a set dressed up to look like New York City. That's the shot that actually appears in the movie The Seven Year Itch, not the one where hordes of fans and opportunists were shouting just beyond the camera's sight line. But that night in New York wasn't a total wash. It created plenty of buzz, and photos they took became publicity pictures for the movie, pictures that would arguably become the most iconic images of a woman who was already an American icon. And that night in New York City, with the fan below her and the fans surrounding her, would change Marilyn's life forever in a more personal way. It wasn't just strangers in the crowd watching as Billy Wilder told her to pretend to feel the subway breeze over and over again. Her husband was also on set that day. Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper himself, the guy who set a record for the longest ever hitting streak in major league baseball, which still stands to this day. At this point, he was just a few years into retirement and only a few months into their marriage. He stood there just waiting and watching every time Billy Wilder called action, and the crowd cheered and jeered, heckling his wife, their eyes glued to her legs. Joe DiMaggio was a jealous man, and he had a temper. Now, it's impossible to know exactly what occurred in the privacy of a marriage, but according to sources, that night the couple argued loudly in the St. Regis Hotel, where they were staying, while they were in New York. There are some accounts that DiMaggio was physically abusive. Less than three weeks later, the couple announced their divorce. The Daily News put it plainly, quote, Maryland splits with Joe over sexy pictures. These days, the Translux Theater is long gone, and even the original subway grades themselves have been replaced. There's no plaque, but still, you can stand on the site of the most successful publicity photo shoot in history. The place where an American icon revealed her legs and her husband revealed his insecurities. Welcome to a very special episode of Very Special Episodes, an IHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is Very Special Places NYC. Today we'll be taking you through some of our favorite stories of New York City's secret history. Stories that prove that the world is a very interesting place if you know where to look.

Speaker 2:
[08:01] Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. I am Jason English. She is Dana Schwartz. He is Zaron Burnett. Usually on this show, we tell one incredible story, but today we're going to do something a little different, and we're going to talk about one incredible location and several stories that are hiding in plain sight. Dana, tell us about your trip to New York City.

Speaker 1:
[08:24] I'm very excited for this episode. I love New York City. Let me be the first to say it's one of the greatest cities in the world. I love secret history and stories. So on this trip to New York City, I made it my mission to try to find locations that just seem ordinary, that a normal person might just walk on by, but have full stories behind them. So that was what was very exciting to me, is to find the places in the city where you might not even know important, fascinating, interesting history happened right there.

Speaker 2:
[08:58] Well, I think since I read your first draft of this, it's made my walking around New York more interesting. And I don't even know, I'm just imagining the history that's happening at places. There might not even have been any, but the idea that look deeper into these mundane places, and you might have a whole other world opened up.

Speaker 1:
[09:17] That's it. So should we go to New York? There are more than 100 sculptures in New York's Central Park. Some are fictional characters like Alice in Wonderland. Some, like the sculpture of Balto, the heroic sled dog, aren't even human. But plenty of the sculptures are honoring real living people, including a sculpture by John Quincy Adams Ward of William Shakespeare. It's a statue mid-park at the southern end of the mall, the head of an area known as the Literary Walk, because of the number of statues of notable writers.

Speaker 3:
[09:58] In fact, there is this area called the kind of artist and writer's walk. It's actually one of the most beautiful areas of Central Park, especially in the fall when all the leaves, so it's like a canopy of trees. Again, there were no statues in Central Park before this one. Today, this gorgeous walk, which used to be a carriage path, people in the Gilded Age would ride their carriage.

Speaker 1:
[10:22] That's Greg Young. Greg is a historian and half of the duo behind the wildly successful Bowery Boys podcast, which explores hidden New York City history. Nothing about the Shakespeare sculpture in Central Park seems particularly out of the ordinary. It's a nice bronze sculpture, a perfect backdrop for your picnic or frisbee game. Its plinth is very tall. It's impossible to get at eye level. Maybe that's fitting. After all, William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest playwright in world history. He should be looking down at all the passers-by, swirling the clinking ice in their machas, and arguing about whether they should try to get a reservation at Balthazar. Like I said, it's a nice statue, but there's something astonishing about it that you won't learn from its engraving, or from the little information board nearby. That statue of William Shakespeare, still standing today in Central Park, has a connection to one of the most notorious murderers in American history. Back in 1864, when the idea came about for a statue of William Shakespeare for the 300th anniversary of his birth, a committee put together a plan for raising the funds. Now, a statue in Central Park obviously doesn't seem like a big deal. But as Greg explains, back then, it was actually a pretty big decision.

Speaker 3:
[12:01] Let me explain how shocking or just how stunning that even is as a story, because Central Park isn't even completed yet, okay? And the original design of Central Park was that it was not supposed to have any kind of ornamentation, whether it wasn't going to have statues. It was going to be a place where you could sort of take your horse, ride around in your carriage, or walk around, and it wasn't supposed to have a lot of memorials to culture in it.

Speaker 1:
[12:29] The fact that this statue got the go-ahead just goes to show how prominent and powerful the committee of men advocating for it was. The committee was made of, well, the type of people you expect for this kind of thing, people who love public arts and theater, actors, directors, wealthy people, the literati. One of the men on that committee was a man named Edwin Booth, almost universally celebrated as the preeminent Shakespearean actor of his day. And Edwin had quite the theatrical pedigree. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was the most famous Shakespearean actor of his day, who had moved from England to the United States and spent decades touring with his portrayals of Shakespeare's most famous characters. As a young man, Edwin had traveled alongside his father, absorbing the words of the Bard's poetry by Osmosis before he eventually set out on his own, becoming a prominent and celebrated actor in his own right, known for his signature role, Hamlet. The Booth Theatre in New York City is still named for him today. And Edwin had become not only a critically acclaimed actor, but also a man of society with famous and connected friends. The type of person who serves on a committee to erect a statue of William Shakespeare in Central Park.

Speaker 3:
[14:05] William Shakespeare was actually really popular in the mid-19th century in all different classes. And in fact, I would even say that the working class, a lot of immigrant communities, especially out in the West, really understood and connected to Shakespeare, which I find really heartening in a way because I think a lot of times it's seen as like highfalutin and hard to understand.

Speaker 1:
[14:31] To raise money for the statue, there would be a one night only benefit performance of what else? A Shakespeare play. And to really bolster up interest, they would do something really special that night. For the first and only time, Edwin Booth would be performing alongside two of his brothers, his older brother, Junius Brutus Jr. and his younger brother, John Wilkes. Yes, that John Wilkes Booth.

Speaker 3:
[15:05] You have to remember, I mean, you probably know this from American history, but John Wilkes Booth is an actor. He was a part of the crew of the American Cousin on that night where Lincoln was assassinated. But not only was he an actor, he was one of the most famous actors. He and his brother and his father, Junius.

Speaker 1:
[15:28] The play they decided to put on was Julius Caesar. I know what you're thinking, but no, John Wilkes did not play the role of the man who assassinates a tyrant. Brutus was actually played by Edwin, who it really should be noted was the far better actor compared to John Wilkes. Although John was notably handsome. John Wilkes played Mark Antony. The show was a rousing success.

Speaker 3:
[16:01] They were such a prominent family. And this statue was actually seen as something very civic, that they were really going to be a part of building this aspect of New York. No one's thinking of Central Park at this time as being what it is today. So the fact that they're responsible for this is very significant. And so they end up, it's like a fundraiser, they appear, they do Julius Caesar. It's the three brothers, John Wilkes, Edwin and Junious. And they perform on the stage of Edwin's Theater to raise money for this particular statue. And it is one of the biggest shows, like New York has some big shows, you know, whatever. You've got like Lady Gaga, Five Nights at whatever, Barclay Center, you've got the Beatles, you've got Simon and Garfunkel. This is really like a top 10 type of sellout show. And it's like Julius Caesar, right? We've all seen this. It would not be the show I would have selected as being one of the greatest of all time, but it drew so many people, they were able to immediately raise money for the construction of the statue.

Speaker 1:
[17:08] The Three Brothers for the Price of One performance ended up raising $4,000 or about $80,000 today. But there was a brief hiccup. During the second act, Shakespeare's dialogue was drowned out by the sound of clanging firebells outside on the street. The show paused and Edwin quietly spoke with the theater manager before returning to stage and breaking the fourth wall to address the audience. He informed them that a small fire had broken out nearby at the Lafarge Hotel, but it was put out. The show could continue. At that time, neither the audience nor the actors on stage had a full understanding of what had actually occurred that night. The year is 1864, and the performance might have been entertaining enough to put the Civil War out of mind, but the war was still going on. A group known as the Confederate Army of Manhattan had infiltrated the city, and they were attempting to burn the city down.

Speaker 3:
[18:17] At the time that this happened, this was in November, it was like around Thanksgiving, in fact, of 1864, and the Confederacy, they were losing by the time, they were losing very, very badly, and it was almost a set done by this time. But there were a collection of Confederates who came to New York City in disguise. They met in New York City, and they thought that one great way to turn the tide, or just a real sudden shock and awe type of situation, was to go through New York and to set all of these fires all over the place. And they used what was called Greek fire. Today, it's almost like a Molotov cocktail.

Speaker 1:
[18:58] They lit fires in a theater, in PT. Barnum's New York City Museum, and in 19 hotels, including the Lafarge.

Speaker 3:
[19:06] And so a group of these men went out into the city one particular night, and they were to some degree successful, some of them. I mean, overall, they were a bit incompetent, thank goodness. This was really before even like he'd go out and do the circus properly. This was like a major venue, kind of like Freak Show meets Zoo meets sort of like an Anything Goes type of place. They attempted to burn that down. Someone ran in and they threw the flames onto the stairs, and it caught fire. But again, like, they didn't do a very good job of it. Most of these fires were put out very quickly.

Speaker 1:
[19:46] Though there was momentary panic, the fires were effectively put out and the plot was foiled. The next morning, the Booth brothers all met for breakfast at Edwin's home on East 19th Street. Of course, the news of the day came up, how Confederate radicals had tried to burn the city to the ground. To Edwin's shock and surprise, John Wilkes defended the plot. Those men were trying to get retribution for all of the atrocities the Union had committed. Can you blame them? Well, yes. Yes, you can. Edwin, who had just voted for Lincoln's re-election, was aghast. He kicked John Wilkes out of his house then and there.

Speaker 3:
[20:33] So John Wilkes' booth actually, yeah, was very Southern sympathizing, which would set him askance from his brother, Edwin, who was more for the Union. He didn't have anything to do with these fires, but as we know, as the Confederacy decided to do more and more things that were more desperate in nature, he ended up getting pulled into the conflict eventually himself.

Speaker 1:
[20:56] In April of the following year, John Wilkes' booth would assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, fewer than five months after he had starred in a famous play about a political assassination.

Speaker 3:
[21:11] Oh, yeah, exactly, Julius Caesar, right? In fact, I believe John played Mark Anthony, and Edwin played Brutus, and then Cassius was the brother, Junius. But I wonder, I mean, certainly things were already clicking in John Wilkes' mind by this point, I assume.

Speaker 1:
[21:30] Lincoln's assassination occurred at the Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC during a production of Our American Cousin. Booth knew the play well. He supposedly tried to time his gunshot with a moment in the play where he knew the line always got a laugh to help muffle the sound. After the killing, John Wilkes Booth leapt from the box with Abraham Lincoln's bloody body, and his shocked wife, onto the stage. It was a feat of athleticism that had actually become something of a signature stunt for John Wilkes when he was performing. With the diction of a trained actor, he shouted out the phrase, sic semper tyrannis, thus always to tyrants. It's a line that's attributed most often to Lucius Junius Brutus, or to his descendant Marcus Junius Brutus, who took part in the assassination of Julius Caesar. As I mentioned earlier, there's a Broadway theater still named after Edwin Booth. I've seen a few shows there actually. Next to Normal, The Glass Menagerie, more recently they put up the Tony award-winning musical Kimberly Akimbo. And the crowd favorite John Proctor is the villain. But its history goes back much further than that. The Booth Theatre has been around for more than a hundred years. It opened in 1913, named for the famous Shakespearean actor who had died 20 years earlier. The first show they ever put up was an import from London called The Great Adventure. I've never heard of it, and I'm guessing you haven't either. But I did recognize the name of the second play they ever produced at the Booth Theatre. It's a three-act play by Tom Taylor that today isn't really known for its merits. The next play they put up at the Booth Theatre in 1915, a revival of Our American Cousin. You could spend a lovely afternoon in New York shopping in SoHo. The streets are dense with designer clothing and jewelry stores. But even if you're not in the market for $4,000 jackets, there are plenty of options. Next door to the Burberry on Spring Street is a store called Koss, where you can get minimalist fashion for, well, a slightly more reasonable price. But if you happen to be in the neighborhood, the best find at Koss wouldn't be its corduroy barrel leg pants or gallery tote bag with croc effect leather. No, the most interesting thing in the store isn't for sale at all. If you go into the store and turn left, you'll find a staircase leading down to the menswear department. You'll have to keep walking past the racks of funnel-necked wool jackets and wool blend straight leg pants. In the back, near the register, there's, well, a well. A circular brick well that looks extremely old and extremely congruous among the Scandinavian-style minimalism of Koss's clean lines. It looks extremely old because it is. The now-sealed well at 129 Spring Street is what's left of the Manhattan Well, the site of a grisly and tragic death. On January 2nd, in 1800, the body of a young woman named Elma Sands was found inside the well, igniting a media firestorm. It would become one of the earliest murder trials in the still-new United States. You might not know the name Elma Sands, but here's a name I'm betting you do know, Hamilton. Even if you're not a musical theater nerd to the degree that I am, unless you've been living under a rock or down in a well, you know the ten-dollar founding father whom Lin-Manuel Miranda set to rap on Broadway back in 2015. There's a song right before the second act where Hamilton sings during his tenure as a lawyer. He's addressing an invisible jury with pomp and bravado. Quote, this is the first murder trial of our brand new nation. And continues on a bit before he's interrupted by his co-counsel, Aaron Burr, stepping in with a little less bravado, declaring, our client, Levy Weeks is innocent. Those lines are referencing something that did actually happen. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, future assassin and victim, did work together in 1800 on the legal defense of Levy Weeks. It wasn't actually the first murder trial in the new United States, but it is the first one we have full transcripts of, so close enough. Julie Elma Sands, known as Elma, lived at a boarding house in Manhattan owned by a relative, Catherine Ring, and her husband. Now, when I say Manhattan, that word probably connotes some degree of glamour or big city bustle in your mind. You're going to want to put that aside.

Speaker 3:
[27:20] We need to go back to the year 1799. New York City is certainly not developed in any way, shape or form. We don't really even have the old famous grid plan of avenues and streets. Most of New York was below today's Canal Street. So this is right just slightly above Canal Street. So completely undeveloped, it would be small shacks again like a boarding house.

Speaker 1:
[27:48] On December 22nd, 1799, Elma went missing. For almost two weeks, nobody had any idea where she could be, if she was even alive. And then her muff handwarmer was found in the well in the wildland, known as Lispenard's Meadow. SoHo wasn't SoHo then. There were no designer stores or cute, overpriced coffee shops. It was a green space where hunting parties could occupy themselves, and where a well stood to provide fresh water to the local area.

Speaker 3:
[28:29] This is an era before New York had a water system. In fact, it's a very fraught time between now and the 1840s when we finally get this proper Croton aqueduct, which brings in clean, clear water. So, if we don't have that, you got your water from wells and you got them from cisterns. And so, what happened is these sort of community wells became the center of activity, because it's where everyone's going.

Speaker 1:
[28:57] But on January 2nd, they weren't pulling water up from the well. Half a dozen men strained with a net to pull the body of a dead woman up from the depths below. There she was, dark hair strewn across her face, her pale skin bruised and waxy. It was Elma Sands, and she was long dead. Eventually, word spread and the constables heard the name Levy Weeks. Weeks was another border at the house where Elma lived. People said the two were romantically involved. There were rumors of a secret engagement. If anyone had murdered Elma Sands, and according to the verdict of the city coroner who examined her body, someone almost certainly had, it seemed likely it would have been Weeks. The public outcry came fast and intense. A beautiful young woman only 22 years old was found dead in the wintery cold water of a well. How could the city not fall into frenzy? Fortunately for Levy Weeks, arrested and awaiting trial in Bridewell Jail, he had a powerful brother, Ezra.

Speaker 3:
[30:18] So, Ezra Weeks is one of New York's great builders, a very well-connected man. In fact, he helped build Gracie Mansion back when that was an actual mansion, which today is the mayor's house. But it was a mansion up on the Upper East Side. He also assisted in the construction later, well, not to spoil it, of Hamilton Grange, which is the house of Alexander Hamilton.

Speaker 1:
[30:45] Ezra Weeks had also worked with Aaron Burr through Burr's association with something called the Manhattan Company. The Manhattan Company was really a tool for funding political candidates, but it ostensibly had the goal of establishing water infrastructure throughout the city. Ezra worked on laying wooden pipes to carry fresh water from wells dug in Lispennard's Meadow, including, incidentally, the Manhattan Well where Alma Sands was found.

Speaker 3:
[31:17] So, a very well-connected, a very wealthy man, his brother gets accused of murder. So, what does he do?

Speaker 1:
[31:28] He made sure to get his brother the best legal minds in the city. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the dream team.

Speaker 3:
[31:37] Of course, as we know, it will end in the infamous duel of 1804, where Burr murders Alexander Hamilton. But at this time, they're just like kind of frenemies, and they also just happen to both be very well-respected lawyers.

Speaker 1:
[31:51] There was also a third lawyer working on the case, H. Brockholst Livingston, who was known as a top lawyer, but who unfortunately wasn't famous or relevant enough to make it into the musical Hamilton. Maybe it was hard to find a rhyme with H. Brockholst Livingston. The trio of lawyers got weeks out on bail and started working on his defense.

Speaker 4:
[32:18] Order in the court.

Speaker 1:
[32:19] During the trial, they methodically dismantled every seemingly damning piece of evidence against their client. He had an alibi that would have made actually pulling off the murder incredibly difficult. There was no evidence he and Alma actually were secret lovers. Maybe she was really involved in an affair with her relative's husband, her landlord Mr. Ring. As a side note, there were plenty of the challenges to Alma's character that you might expect. That a young unmarried woman might have been involved in the sort of salacious sexual activity that turns public sentiment against you. People speculated Alma might have been suicidal. She could have taken her own life. There was one other fairly damning piece of evidence against Levy Weeks. Immediately after Alma's body had been pulled from the water, the police went to arrest him. He worked as a carpenter, and when the constable approached him in his workshop, Weeks immediately knew they had come because of Alma Sands. Is it the Manhattan well she was found in? He asked. It was. How could he possibly have known that if he hadn't been the one to kill her and deposit her body there? Turns out there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. A neighbor testified that she had run in two weeks at the grocery store early in the afternoon on January 2nd and shared with him that apparently they had found Alma's muff in a well near Byards Lane. He told his brother Ezra who said, oh, it was probably the Manhattan well. After all, Ezra had been working on the water project. And so when the police told Levy that they had found Alma's body, he was just making a reasonable guess as to where that probably was. Still, public opinion was vehemently against Weeks. Newspapers were calling for his execution. A beautiful young woman was found dead. Her body pulled from a well. Somebody's head needed to roll. If you've learned anything from watching true crime documentaries on various streaming services, you know it's always the husband, or in this case, the maybe possibly secret fiance. But Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the third guy who doesn't factor into the musical were excellent lawyers. And when the judge sent the jury off to deliberate, the judge made a frankly astonishing declaration informing the jurors that in the opinion of the court, quote, the proof was insufficient to warrant a verdict against the prisoner. Maybe that's why it's not surprising to hear that the verdict came back less than five minutes later. The jury declared Weeks not guilty. Even still, the sting of public opinion and the damage to his reputation made it difficult for Weeks to remain in New York. He left the city a few years later and settled in Natchez, the capital of the Mississippi Territory, where he was able to reinvent himself and begin a new life as a very successful architect, building a mansion that's now on the National Registry of Historic Places, and getting married and having four kids. We don't know how Alma Sands died. We likely never will. One researcher and writer, Paul Collins, has put forward the theory that a man named Richard Croucher was actually to blame. Croucher was another resident at the boarding house where Weeks and Alma lived, and in the aftermath of Alma's disappearance, he had been one of the loudest voices against Weeks. As it turns out, Croucher had a pretty flimsy alibi and a notorious history of legal trouble and erratic violence, especially when he was drinking. Just three weeks after the Manhattan Well trial, Croucher would brutally rape his 13-year-old stepdaughter. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to hard labor, though he would get out after only three years on a pardon from the governor. But more crimes were to follow. He would break the terms of his parole and eventually be convicted of a crime that led to his hanging. All of this evidence is circumstantial, but it's pretty convincing circumstances in my personal opinion. Over the decades Manhattan changed, Lisbonard's meadow gave way to gridded streets and blocks with restaurants and artisanal coffee shops.

Speaker 3:
[37:34] That's the thing about SoHo in particular. It's always been associated with modernity. All the buildings are cast iron. You know, in the 70s and 80s and 90s, it was super chic. And today it's all boutiques.

Speaker 1:
[37:45] But somehow the walls of the Manhattan Well remained upright, preserved in SoHo even as the city around it became unrecognizable.

Speaker 3:
[37:57] It's since the 1970s that people who have owned that building have associated their well and their address with this particular story. By which I mean, they claim that it is haunted. And they claim that this building has been haunted for decades and decades. And so it makes for a great spooky time in a clothing store, because we rarely get to see architecture, like most people don't see wells, but to see something so old in a clothing store is really fascinating.

Speaker 1:
[38:30] All of the parties involved in the notorious trial are long dead. And the truth is gone, known only to the ancient bricks of the Manhattan Well, still standing in the basement of a clothing store in SoHo, where shoppers can browse racks of trousers and jackets without knowing the tragic, dramatic history that had once unfolded right where they're standing, wondering what a stone well is doing in the middle of a SoHo store. New York City is full of hidden history, centuries of stories stacked up like the floors of downtown skyscrapers. But Greg brought my attention to another piece of New York City's past I didn't know about. History that's quite literally underfoot, if you know where to look.

Speaker 3:
[39:30] All right, so head down to lower Manhattan and to Pearl Street. So this is the financial district. It's like the oldest district. In fact, across the street is another very famous tavern named Schwartz's Tavern, which was a landmark to the Revolutionary War, like George Washington from this tavern gave his farewell address.

Speaker 1:
[39:52] I've actually eaten there, not bad.

Speaker 3:
[39:55] However, across the street are the remains of a tavern that is almost 100 years older than that. So back in the 1660s, back when New York was, in fact, a Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam, their city hall was actually a tavern, because back then, there weren't that many buildings. You needed a place where people could gather and it was kind of sizable. So naturally, it was a tavern. So that lasted then into, of course, the handover from the Dutch to the English. And it was, you know, it was a British stronghold for forever. And then the New York governor, a man named Lovelace, decided to expand it because it was getting a little rickety by that time. It's already a couple decades old. He built what is called today the Lovelace Tavern right next to it. And they were connected. These were the official city buildings, but they were taverns. They were, in fact, places where you drank and, you know, you had a meal. But it was also a place where you conducted business. I believe there was even like a jail in it and they were, courts were inside of this building.

Speaker 1:
[41:03] It actually sounds like we could learn a lot about efficiency in architecture, a real one stop shop.

Speaker 3:
[41:11] So anyway, lasted for several decades in its own right. But then what's interesting about New York in general is it gets constantly built up, right, and never stops to kind of honor its past. When you find the past is even more amazing because so many things are gone. But with the city, also it starts expanding with landfill. So this used to be on the water, this faced in fact into the water, onto the East River. But then several decades later, they fill it up with landfill. So it's actually like a couple blocks away from the water. And the building is sort of useless by the start of the 18th century. And so kind of falls into like uselessness. And then they go to pave it over because the streets are like kind of rising as more and more people are coming to the city.

Speaker 1:
[42:03] So now jump ahead to the 1960s. Businesses aren't exactly booming. A lot of offices have jumped away from the financial district, moving to Midtown or even leaving New York City altogether.

Speaker 3:
[42:19] But there's this effort to try to revitalize Lower Manhattan. This will culminate of course in the construction of the World Trade Center, which will bring business back to Lower Manhattan. But sort of in this process, they're like redeveloping for new glass skyscrapers.

Speaker 1:
[42:38] New building projects mean there's going to be digging. A lot of it.

Speaker 3:
[42:43] And then while they're digging this one particular skyscraper, they look and they find the ruins of this tavern kind of intact, with like tankards and plates, broken plates and everything.

Speaker 1:
[42:57] The question then is, what do you do with the shockingly preserved historical tavern? The easy answer is, well, pave over it and make a parking lot. And unfortunately, that's exactly what they did. But that's not the end of the story. Because if you know Manhattan, you know that it's always changing. A meadow becomes a neighborhood, becomes a restaurant, becomes a clothing store. A parking lot becomes, well, something else.

Speaker 3:
[43:31] A few years later, they're building something else. They rediscover it, or rather they knew that it was there. They pull that out and they're like, oh, let's actually preserve this. And this is in the 70s now. And so what they do, which is amazing, instead of taking the whole thing out or bringing the sidewalk down so that people could see the walls, in fact, by that point, the street level is about at the top of the building. So they just put a glass sidewalk over the remains of this tavern.

Speaker 1:
[44:03] An actual glass sidewalk. You can go see it, the, quote, portal down to old New York as it's identified on Google Maps, around 85 Broad Street, a literal window into the 17th century.

Speaker 3:
[44:20] That's a really cool secret. When you say things are literally hidden beneath your feet, this is the most literal answer I could possibly give you, is this place.

Speaker 2:
[44:31] Okay. First of all, how cool is it that Greg Young and the Bowery Boys agreed to do this? That's a Hall of Fame podcast. If there's a podcast Hall of Fame, I don't know if there is, but there should be. Greg should be in it. First ballot.

Speaker 1:
[44:44] Yeah. So, so grateful to Greg. It was so sweet of him to spend his time talking with me. So interesting. So smart.

Speaker 2:
[44:51] Zaron, this is a non-typical one. This would be hard to get all this into one film, but did you have any fun putting on your casting hat here?

Speaker 4:
[44:59] I did. This was an interesting one. I have two actors to cast and then also I threw in Shakespeare just because he got mentioned so often. So for Marilyn, I went a couple of different ways because she's been portrayed recently on the screen. I was like, I want to come up someone fresh. So I went with Lea Seydoux, the French actress. I thought she would be really interesting. And then if she's unavailable, Florence Pugh, I thought she could also play it pretty well. For Joe DiMaggio, I thought he may be a little bit tall, but I think he's got the right energy. Is Adrian Brody?

Speaker 1:
[45:30] Yeah. He has the right energy. Maybe not the physique, but I think he could do it.

Speaker 4:
[45:34] Yes, exactly. And he's lean enough, I think he can get it. And then John Wilkes Booth, this was another difficult one. One of the actors I liked was too tall. And then the other one, I think he may be too associated with other things. But if he wears his brown hair and works on a Van Dyke or some type of 19th century appropriate facial hair, I think it could work. So Adam Driver and Orlando Bloom, those are my two options. Right? Especially Orlando Bloom is a surprise one for me. And then Adam Driver is just a little bit big, but I think he's got the aggressiveness that I picture from the ego of John Wilkes Booth.

Speaker 1:
[46:11] Yeah, I'm reading Lena Dunham's memoir right now. And everything I'm learning about Adam Driver is he is definitely an actor's actor. So I think he could have that energy. Totally.

Speaker 2:
[46:21] He went to Juilliard, right? He's like a real actor.

Speaker 4:
[46:24] Properly trained. Oh, and for the last one, William Shakespeare. I thought this because I was imagining the images of a lot of the very famous paintings. Edward Norton.

Speaker 1:
[46:33] Yeah, let's get him a statue.

Speaker 4:
[46:35] Right? Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2:
[46:38] I like the part where it was kind of a twofer. It was not only history hiding in plain sight in the SoHo store, but also in Hamilton. This meticulous historical play also has this tossed-off line that you used as a jumping-off point. So kudos to you.

Speaker 1:
[46:57] Kudos to Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Speaker 4:
[46:59] I loved all the musical theater references. I thought it was so much fun.

Speaker 1:
[47:02] That's really the truth is that I go to New York City to squeeze in as many musicals as I can.

Speaker 4:
[47:08] That's cool.

Speaker 2:
[47:09] For Very Special Character, I think we could easily give it to Greg for agreeing to do this. We could also easily give it to the IHeart Accounts Payable Team for approving the travel expenses and hopefully approving them in the future. Zaron, can we get you to give this treatment to another city of your choice?

Speaker 4:
[47:25] Yeah. I think San Francisco actually know a couple already fun, like hidden history sites. People walk past them all the time. They're on Market Street, Union Square, and they are connected to the San Francisco of the mind in terms of what we think of as being San Francisco, but also it's like, oh, this place has always been counterculture. So yes, definitely.

Speaker 2:
[47:46] Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. This show is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Dana Schwartz. Editing and sound design by Jonathan Washington. Additional editing by Mary Dooe. Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher. Original music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Social clips by Yarberry Media. Our executive producer is Jason English. Special thanks to Greg Young and the Bowery Boys Podcast. That was very cool. Go over and scroll through their archives. You'll get hooked on their show too. We just recorded a mailbag episode, which is going to come out next Wednesday. But if you ever want to email the show, hit us up, veryspecialepisodes.gmail.com. Very Special Episodes is a production of IHeart Podcasts.