Empire State Editions imprint: 31 books
A Shot Story
From Juvie to Ph.D.
Language: English
Release Date: August 27, 2015
The botched robbery didn’t do it. Neither did the three gunshots. It wasn’t until he was administered last rites that David Borkowski realized he was about to die, at age fifteen. A Shot Story: From Juvie to Ph.D. is a riveting account of how being shot saved his life and helped a juvenile delinquent...
The Rat That Got Away
A Bronx Memoir
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2009
The Rat That Got Away is an inspiring story of one man’s odyssey from the streets of the Bronx to a life as a professional athlete and banker in Europe, but it is also provides a unique vantage point on the history of the Bronx and sheds new light on a neglected period in American urban history.
Allen...
Before the Fires
An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2016
People associate the South Bronx with gangs, violence, drugs, crime, burned-out buildings, and poverty. This is the message that has been driven into their heads over the years by the media. As Howard Cosell famously said during the 1977 World’s Series at Yankee Stadium, “There it is, ladies and...
The Ville
Cops and Kids in Urban America, Updated Edition
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2015
In Brownsville’s twenty-one housing projects, the young cops and the teenagers who stand solemnly on the street corners are bitter and familiar enemies. The Ville, as the Brownsville–East New York section of Brooklyn is called by the locals, is one of the most dangerous places on earth—a place...
When Ivory Towers Were Black
A Story about Race in America's Cities and Universities
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2017
When Ivory Towers Were Black lies at the potent intersection of race, urban development, and higher education. It tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students earned degrees from a world-class university. The story takes place in New York City at Columbia University’s...
Artists' SoHo
49 Episodes of Intimate History
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2015
During the 1960s and 1970s in New York City, young artists exploited an industrial wasteland to create spacious studios where they lived and worked, redefining the Manhattan area just south of Houston Street. Its use fueled not by city planning schemes but by word-of-mouth recommendations, the area...
Heartbeats in the Muck
The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor, Revised Edition
Language: English
Release Date: November 19, 2012
Heartbeats in the Muck traces the incredible arc of New York Harbor’s environmental history. Once a pristine estuary bristling with oysters and striped bass and visited by sharks, porpoises, and seals, the harbor has been marked by centuries of rampant industrialization and degradation of its natural...
A Dancer in the Revolution
Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2014
A Cotton Club dancer and Communist Party leader shares the story of his life in arts and activism from the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights Era.
Through his extraordinary life, Howard “Stretch” Johnson epitomized the generation of African Americans who broke through boundaries...
Fifth Avenue Famous
The Extraordinary Story of Music at St. Patrick's Cathedral
Language: English
Release Date: May 13, 2010
Victorian-era divas who were better paid than some corporate chairmen, the boy soprano who grew up to give Bing Crosby a run for his money, music directors who were literally killed by the job—the plot of a Broadway show or a dime-store novel? No, the unique and colorful history of St. Patrick’s...
Classical New York
Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham
Language: English
Release Date: September 4, 2018
The first book to come out of a national movement of interest in the classical heritage of the United States (including dedicated projects in Philadelphia and Chicago)
Neighborhood Success Stories
Creating and Sustaining Affordable Housing in New York
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2018
Illustrates examples of successful community development on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in the Bronx, using seven different methods of finance, only one of which is still available today.
Murder, Inc., and the Moral Life
Gangsters and Gangbusters in La Guardia's New York
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2016
In 1940 and 1941 a group of ruthless gangsters from Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood became the focus of media frenzy when they—dubbed “Murder Inc.,” by New York World-Telegram reporter Harry Feeney—were tried for murder. It is estimated that collectively they killed hundreds of people...
City of Gods
Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2016
Known locally as the birthplace of American religious freedom, Flushing, Queens, in New York City is now so diverse and densely populated that it has become a microcosm of world religions. City of Gods explores the history of Flushing from the colonial period to the aftermath of September 11, 2001,...
by Colin Davey
Language: English
Release Date: May 14, 2019
Language: English
Release Date: May 14, 2019
Contains a detailed "tour" through the old Hayden Planetarium (demolished in 1997 to make way for the Rose Center), painstakingly recreated through archival research and richly illustrated with period photos