Living History

One of the pleasure of living in a city like New York is that history is literally all around -- and alive!

It's alive! 

Not just in the structures or the institutions -- literal and figurative -- that inhabit our city. It's also the people and their creations, some quite grand, some quite idiosyncratic. 

Two very different but notable examples:

The Payne Whitney Smith mansion on Fifth Avenue, right across from Central Park and The Met, hosts a room that is perhaps the most spectacular one in all of NYC -- dubbed the Venetian Room. This article provides pictures and history of this room that was designed by the legendary Stanford White and is a living artifact of the Gilded Age, a time once distant but also familiar to NYC today.

Then there's Swine Bowl. Yes, that's what it's called. It was an annual football game played by  childhood friends every Thanksgiving weekend since 1954. It started to Westchester but migrated to NYC in the early 1960s and has bonded these old friends through marriages, careers, children, and grandchildren. After 65 years, Swine Bowl has come to an end but it's an example of living history in NYC, one of many, that will never die.

In NYC, history lives side by side with its residents, and you'll find it in the most unexpected places.