MUSEYON BOOKS Smart City Guides for Travel, History, Art and Film Lovers

In 1899, The New York Herald hired journalist, and part-time composer, Monroe Rosenfeld to write a series of articles about the burgeoning song-writing business in New York. It is Rosenfeld, in an attempt to convey the cacophony of sound emanating from the popular music houses of the day all at once, who coined the phrase “Tin Pan Alley.” Eventually, the ... Read More »

  The headquarters of General Washington and his men, the home of one of early America’s most infamous men, and the location of numerous ghostly sightings- all in a days work for the oldest remaining house in Manhattan. Read More »

Above 8th St. in New York City, the streets run only one of two ways, horizontal from the East River to the Hudson River and vertical, reaching to north to the Harlem River. All except for a single street that is; Stuyvesant St. It is here, on the one street allowed to cut diagonally across from the West Village to ... Read More »

“Once upon a time there was a tavern Where we used to raise a glass or two Remember how we laughed away the hours And dreamed of all the great things we would do”   And so begins Gene Raskin’s song, “Those were the Days,” written in the early 1960s as a lament for the passing of the golden folk ... Read More »

With the constant re-vamping of New York City and the bleeding over of neighborhoods into the next (“East Williamsburg,” anyone?), few places have held strong to their traditional roots. In that small subset of Old New York institutions that rages against the dying of the old ways is Ferrara’s Bakery & Cafe, a spot where espresso snobs’ and sugar addicts’ ... Read More »

Top Chef may have introduced Middle America to haute cuisine but fine dining has been a part of New York City ever since the Delmonico family opened their eponymous restaurant in the early 19th century.  By the end of that century, New Yorkers’ taste for dining out grew with their wallets and Louis Sherry served the Gilded Age glitterati the ... Read More »

Born Johann Jakob Astor into a poor family of refugees in Waldorf, Germany, John Jacob Astor was the first man in America to fulfill the American dream of becoming obscenely wealthy. In fact, considering inflation, interest rates, the national debt and various other technical jargon, John Jacob Astor was the fourth wealthiest man in American history who would have had ... Read More »

“Let us go on again, and … plunge into the Five Points….We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day, but of other kinds of strollers plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we are going now.” – Charles Dickens, American Notes  Never has a slum been so notorious as that of Five Points. So ... Read More »