Destination City

Leon Trotsky was living in The Bronx with his common-law wife and two children when the Russian Revolution broke out. President Woodrow Wilson and his successor, Warren G. Harding, had little in common—except both came to New York City to indulge in extramarital affairs. Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart were roommates for two years in the 1930s, sharing a Manhattan apartment dubbed “Casa Gangrene.” Simone de Beauvoir smoked her first joint at the Plaza Hotel in 1947. While living in Brighton Beach, Woody Guthrie wrote a song about his bigoted landlord, “Old Man Trump”—Donald’s father. The thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald was a menace to his Bronx neighbors, once firing a BB gun at their windows. Greta Garbo had a fear of dentists’ offices and found a practitioner who would examine her at a bench on Central Park West. Barack Obama spent his first night in Manhattan “curled up in an alley-way” on West 109th Street.

Telling these tales and many others, Destination City presents the surprising stories of historical figures who are not usually associated with New York City but spent key parts of their lives there. Vignettes recount incidents in the lives of hundreds of notable people—writers, artists, actors, scientists, activists, politicians, revolutionaries, and more. Some were greeted with ticker-tape parades; others came to the city penniless. Some fell in love with the city; others despised it. But all were marked in some way by their time in New York. Robert Pigott’s writing captures the fabric of a bygone city, bringing to life the colorful world these figures inhabited. Charming and wry, this book is for all readers interested in an unconventional angle on New York City past and present.