Product desciption
New York Night The Mystique And Its History Mark Caldwell by Mark Caldwell 9780743242769, 0743242769 instant download after payment.
Who among us cannot testify to the possibilities
of the night? To the mysterious, shadowed intersections of music,
smoke, money, alcohol, desire, and dream? The hours between dusk and
dawn are when we are most urgently free, when high meets low, when
tongues wag, when wallets loosen, when uptown, downtown, rich, poor,
black, white, gay, straight, male, and female so often chance upon one
another. Night is when we are more likely to carouse, fornicate, fall in
love, murder, or ourselves fall prey. And if there is one place where
the grandness, danger, and enchantment of night have been lived more
than anywhere else -- lived in fact for over 350 years -- it is, of
course, New York City.From glittering opulence to sordid violence, from
sweetest romance to grinding lust, critic and historian Mark Caldwell
chronicles, with both intimate detail and epic sweep, the story of New
York nightlife from 1643 to the present, featuring the famous, the
notorious, and the unknown who have long walked the city's streets and
lived its history. "New York Night" ranges from the leafy forests at
Manhattan's tip, where Indians and Europeans first met, to the candlelit
taverns of old New Amsterdam, to the theaters, brothels, and saloon
prizefights of the Civil War era, to the lavish entertainments of the
Gilded Age, to the speakeasies and nightclubs of the century past, and
even to the strip clubs and glamour restaurants of today.
We see
madams and boxers, murderers and drunks, soldiers, singers, layabouts,
and thieves. We see the swaggering "Sporting Men,"the fearless
slatterns, the socially prominent rakes, the chorus girls, the
impresarios, the gangsters, the club hoppers, and the dead. We see
noneother than the great Charles Dickens himself taken to a tavern of
outrageous repute and be so shocked by what he witnesses that he must be
helped to the door. We see human beings making their nighttime bet with
New York City. Some of these stories are tragic, some
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