Lit NYC

When a white man shot four Black teens inside a subway car before disappearing into a tunnel just before Christmas Eve in 1984, young reporter Jon Kalish was assigned to the story by NPR.  When Bernhard Goetz turned himself on New Year's Eve, confessing that "I wanted to waste them all," what came next seemed clear to Kalish.  Instead, the Manhattan district attorney struggled to ev...

The Metropolitan Diary — the longest-running column in The New York Times — turns 50 this year. For a half century, a page that was introduced as part of a push to relieve the publication’s  stuffy reputation has been the only one in the paper of record where ordinary, so to speak, inhabitants of the paper’s namesake city could read, and publish, brief stories and bits of doggerel about ordinary l...

Kim Deitch, a second-generation illustrator, has been at it since he start selling strips (and dope) to The East Village Other in 1967. His new book, How I Make Comics , is full of interlocking comics connected by comics about making comics, with Kim and his wife Pamela Butler as characters in those comics as what started off as a gag title became something much more — beginning with a too-good-to...

" It’s a tour for people who like the nitty gritty of why we had so much sewage, why corruption led to the garbage being a problem for so long, what our policies were that caused this rat issue. It's an urban policy and urban planning tour with rats and some sex facts, including rat sex." Suzanne Reisman, author of Off the Beaten (Subway) Track, New York City's Best Unusual Att...

John Strausbaugh, the longtime editor of fNew York Press, joins Amy Sohn — who kicked off her career there as a 22-year-old columnist there — and guest host Brian Berger of Strauss Media for a deep dive into the late, great and occasionally lamented alt-weekly that humbled the then-mighty Village Voice and launched a generation of new writers.  

Anthony Janszoon van Salee and his wife Geitje were always feuding with neighbors and authorities, who put them down as the Turk and a whore and who kept putting them on trial before they were finally exiled from Manhattan — only to become the biggest landowners in what’s now Brooklyn, with descendants who married into American royalty.  Alan Mikhail, the author of Newcomers: The Story of Anthony...

Clinical psychologist Philip T. Yanos, the author of "Exiles in New York City: Warehousing the Marginalized on Ward's Island," talks about host Amy Sohn about growing up in a place a stone’s throw from Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx that’s been used over decades to house the mentally ill, the homeless and migrants — and that’s now connected through landfill with the sports fields o...

Sade Lythcott, the CEO of the National Black Theatre, the longest continually run black theater in New York, visits Lit NYC to talk with hosts Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel about the theater her mother, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, founded in 1968, how she found her way back to it after charting a different path in life, the new building the theater is putting up now to ensure its future and much more:

Writer, journalist, artist and illustrator sits down with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to discuss her sweeping new history of the Jewish Labor Bund, her family connection to it and much more in a conversation that ranges all the way from the Pale of Settlement all the way to Occupy Wall Street and beyond.

An epic art show at the Lexington Avenue Armory made a young Marcel Duchamp, who was back in France, one of America’s first modern celebrities even before he first arrived in New York City for what became decades of painting, conceiving, chess-playing and love-making — though not always in that order. John Strausbaugh, the author of Duchamp Takes New York, joins Amy Sohn and Brian Berger for a wid...

NYC Department of Records Associate Commissioner Kenneth Cobb and Research Associate Marcia Kirk visited Lit NYC to explain how the Municipal Archives came across the death ledger for the town of Newtown, Queens where George Rex, who froze to death in 1885 at the age of 89, had his occupation recorded as “The Last Slave,” what the Municipal Archives has found since then about his life, death and f...

Geographer, cartographer and urban explorer Andrew Lynch, the chief operating officer of QueensLink, joins Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to discuss the group’s vision to transform the borough for the better by extending the M train from Queens Boulevard to the Rockaways on a railway that’s abandoned for 60 years while surrounding that with new parks and trails, how he got involved in this crusade, and...

Joe Flaherty was a dock worker and high school dropout on the wrong side of 30 when he found an unexpected writer’s life beginning as a columnist for the Village Voice. A couple years later, he was running the 51st State campaign of Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin as two of the city’s most famous writers made their bid to run it on a 51st State platform built around the idea of giving New Yorkers...

Eric Goldwyn, one of the authors of a new report from the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University with a modest proposal to remap the city with 12 new projects, 64 new subways stations and 41 new miles of rail talks with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel about that idea and much more.

The self-described “ last Confederate widow,’ whose newly published photographs of gay men in Central Park’s Ramble in 1968 and 1969 are the earliest shots of outdoor cruising in a natural setting, joins Alex Krales and Harry Siegel to discuss his work in a New York City where homosexuality was still both a taboo and a crime, and much more. 

An iconic restaurant in Fulton Mall became an Arby's, before it was revived amid the pandemic. St. John Frizell, one of the stewards of Gage and Tollner joins Lit NYC hosts Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to talk about the craft of the cocktail, the business of Brooklyn, the nature of the great good place, and much more. 

In 1980, a movie narrated by a sociologist once described as Jimmy Stewart’s urban planner cousin, and full of surveillance footage of the city's public spaces, delivered perhaps the richest and wisest look ever made at how New Yorkers use the city's public spaces. Municipal Art Society president Keri Butler joins Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to discuss the film, Whyte's zen koans abou...

Henry H. Sapoznik sits down with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel for a wide-ranging conversation about assimilation and adaptability, the difference between faux music and folk music, the overlaps between kosher, halal and Chinese foods, and much more. 

The ineffable and inimitable gadfly and entrepreneur Baruch Herzfeld joins Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to talk about schemes and dreams, the thousand-dollar bet he lost to  a Fugee but hasn’t paid, the guys who climbed telephone poles when Williamsburg was wild, and much more — but mostly the city-wide battery-swap network he’s trying to build. 

The creators of the acclaimed new documentary about Gotham’s close brush with bankruptcy in 1975 sit down with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to discuss the film, the city that was, how its near collapse led to the city of today how Michael’s father Felix helped pulled it back from the brink with Big MAC, or the Municipal Assistance Corporation, and more.

Ben Fractenberg, visuals editor for THE CITY, joins Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel for a wide-ranging conversation about street photography, photo journalism and much more., ahead of the opening reception for his solo show, In Tension, this Friday evening from 6-9 at Gallery 198, at 198 24th St. in Brooklyn, with his work then on display there through November.

The ubiquitous illustrator talks with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel about what he wants to illustrate now that he no longer needs to take assignments, how New York City shaped his work, why he thinks being called "the Vermeer of the Borscht Belt" is a misnomer, and much more. 

"The tabs were this incredibly paradoxical force in New York during these years’ Jonathan Mahler said in his coversation with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel. “On the one hand, they were totally polarizing, turning the world into into heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys — like comic books for adults. On the other hand, everyone is reading the Post and the News and Newsday, and they were uni...

Laurie sits down with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to dig into what they don't tell you in the children's books about the life and death of the world's most iconic aviatrix, and the story of how the New York publishing world helped cast her in that role.

The photographer sits down with Lizzie Walsh and Harry Siegel to talk his decades shooting the city’s incredible, almost invisible water system, how the Department of Environmental Protection tried to stop his first edition of Waterworks from being published after 9/11, how COVID helped lead him to create a totally new second edition, and much more.