When I first moved to Manhattan, it seemed like a huge, overwhelming metropolis. But I soon began to learn its neighborhoods, and I knew I would write those neighborhoods, not as they are today but as they were, each as unique as the people who inhabited them. In The Sisters of Book Row, my Applebaum sisters live and work in a neighborhood of used and rare bookstores known throughout the world. Once vital and eclectic, the few short blocks south of Union Square known as Book Row are now virtually unrecognizable. Not changed because an overzealous censor tried to ban and burn their way of life, but because of time and progress.
As a historical author, my mission is to discover the people and the neighborhoods of the past and share them with my readers. Some have grown smaller; some have changed beyond recognition; others, like Book Row, have virtually disappeared. My challenge is to bring them to life again so that readers can meet the residents, walk their streets and care about what happens to them and why. And when they reach The End, hopefully, they’ll feel like they’ve visited someplace special … because they have.
Here are five historical novels whose stories and characters are inseparable from their New York neighborhoods.
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
In 1938, a chance meeting between Katey Kontent and her friend Eve with a dashing banker begins a trajectory from a shared walk-up apartment to a glittering life among the East Side elite. A coming-of-age story of love and ambition that begins at the “Hot Spot, the wistfully named nightclub in Greenwich Village” and takes the reader on a niche tour of the fascinating lives and unique places that attest to the specialness of Manhattan.
The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman recreates the 1911 Coney Island of Dreamland and Luna Park and the denizens who lived, worked and oftentimes died there. Coralie is the daughter of the impresario of the museum, a Coney Island freak show. Born with webbed fingers, Coralie appears there as the Mermaid but spends her nights swimming in the dark waters of the Hudson River. Eddie, an aspiring photographer, runs away from his orthodox community. Their unexpected meeting draws them together. When their love catches fire, they find meaning where they are no longer “other.” Sometimes dark, sometimes brilliant, these lives are as magical as the telling of their story.
The Girl from Greenwich Street by Lauren Willig
The story of the real-life 1780 murder trial of Elma Sands. Her fiancé is accused of her murder. Rivals Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton sign on as his lawyers. A murder mystery and legal thriller, the story also recounts the pressure of public opinion in a time when Manhattan occupied only the very tip of the island, was constantly under construction, and was plagued by yellow fever. Hamilton complains that Greenwich Street is “Unlike the brick homes lining The Broad Way, the houses here were of wood, ugly, clumsy structures so newly built he could practically smell the wood shavings.” And we can almost smell them, too.
Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl by Renée Rosen
The first time Gloria Downing saw Estee Lauder was when “I was getting my hair cut and dyed at Darlene’s Palace of Beauty on 75th and Broadway.” So begins a lifelong friendship through the 1930s and ‘40s as Estee fights her way to join Rubinstein, Arden and Revlon as a cosmetic icon and takes her place in the Fifth Avenue luxury department stores. Two women reinventing themselves, both determined to take charge of their futures in the city of endless possibilities.
The Address by Fiona Davis
The Address is the Dakota, the iconic German Renaissance-style apartment building built in 1884 between 72nd and 73rd on Central Park West, a neighborhood unto itself until the rest of Manhattan caught up to it. In this dual-timeline story, the lives of two women a hundred years apart intersect when they take refuge at the Dakota, whose walls have kept decades of its residents’ secrets, scandals, joys and transgressions, even murders, safe from the world.
