A Smorgasbord of Random New York History Facts
Please give me 4 Manhattans then let me lead you through a dramatic recounting of the Revolutionary War. It’s a journey you don’t want to miss.
Lulls in conversation are uncomfortable. For some, it begins a stalemate of stubborn silence, quickly crescendoing to a point of no return, where your options are: call out the silence; discuss the weather, the coward’s route; cut your loses and start sprinting. For others, who hoard useless information, this bodes an opportunity to showcase an out of left field fact, pivoting the conversation into the abyss of your psyche. So to help you default to the latter, here are some possibly useful New York history facts:
Until the 1920s, everyone in New York moved apartments on the same exact day. From colonial times until the beginning of the 20th century, May 1st was Moving Day; if you had to move apartments, that was the sole day you were allowed to do so. As one would guess, this caused total chaos, clogging the streets with horse-drawn moving “vans”, so this was fortunately done away with.
The term “The Big Apple” originated from horse racing. New York’s most famous nickname came from a local newspaper’s horse racing column in the 1920’s – the phrase “Big Apple” was used to describe the big prize money awarded at the important horse races held around the city.
The price of a slice of pizza and the cost of a subway ride have always stayed almost exactly the same. Starting in the 1970s, New Yorkers started to pick up on a peculiar economic law: the price of pizza slice and a ride on the subway are equal. Much more fascinating, if one goes up, the price of the other usually follows within a few months.
The winter of 1780 was so harsh in New York that New York Harbor froze over. People were able to walk over the ice from New Jersey to Manhattan then onward to either Long Island or Staten Island. People relied on sleighs for receiving goods. The high temperature topped the freezing mark only once and there was a seemingly ubiquitous 6-foot wall of snow. Keep in mind, this was during the heart of the Revolution…imagine being a solider weathering such conditions, many with no jackets, limited food, makeshift tents…
The first St. Patrick’s Day Parade in the United States was held on lower Broadway in 1762 by a band of homesick Irish military serving with the British Army stationed in the American colonies in New York. This was a time when the wearing of green was a sign of Irish pride and was banned in Ireland. The parade participants reveled in the freedom to speak Irish, wear green, sing Irish songs, and play the pipes to Irish tunes that were meaningful to the Irish immigrants who had fled their homeland due to religious repression.
The Statue of Liberty was delivered in 350 pieces. Housed in 214 crates, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York City in 1885 in 350 pieces. The statue’s iconic arm, meanwhile, actually arrived in the states a decade earlier, in 1876, where it was put on display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to raise money for the construction project.