New Book Releases

Unbeknownst to most of the city’s inhabitants, a rural community of garbage workers once existed on a now-vanished island in New York City.

Barren Island was a swampy speck in Jamaica Bay where a motley group of new immigrants and African Americans quietly processed mountains of garbage and dead animals starting in the 1850s. They turned the waste into useful industrial products until their eviction by Robert Moses in 1936, all in the name of progress. Barren Islanders built businesses, fought fires, demanded a public school and worshipped at churches as they created a quintessentially American community from scratch. Author Miriam Sicherman tells the story of a Brooklyn neighborhood lost in the annals of New York City history.

Just off the coast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound sits Hart Island, where more than one million bodies are buried in unmarked graves.

Beginning as a Civil War prison and training site and later a psychiatric hospital, the location became the repository for New York City's unclaimed dead. The island's mass graves are a microcosm of New York history, from the 1822 burial crisis to casualties of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and victims of the AIDS epidemic. Important artists who died in poverty have been discovered, including Disney star Bobby Driscoll and playwright Leo Birinski. Author Michael T. Keene reveals the history of New York's potter's field and the stories of some of its lost souls.

New York's Long Island is long on history from land to sea! Ralph Brady covers well known and unknown sites, events, homes, places and people.

Everyone lucky enough to live on Long Island already knows that it's like nowhere else in the world. From lighthouses and a one-hundred-year-old carousel to World War II camps and missile sites, Long Island native Ralph Brady reveals the secrets to what makes this little-big island so special with a tour of some of Nassau and Suffolk's most historic locations. Walt Whitman, William Vanderbilt, Theodore Roosevelt and many others occupied remarkable homes around the island. Charles Lindbergh made his historic flight to France from what is now a shopping mall. For many years, a Long Island factory gave the world the game of Scrabble. Even the waters teem with history, with the modern submarine making its start off the coast. Come explore these and other settings from Long Island's past.