Lawrence R. Samuel Books

On the east side of Midtown Manhattan, next to the United Nations, sits the towering apartment complex Tudor City.An architectural masterpiece created by developer Fred F. French during the Roaring Twenties, Tudor City was the first residential skyscraper complex in the world. It brought middle-class lifestyle to center city. Tudor City has parks, shops and restaurants and even once had a mini-golf course. Developers and preservationists battled over the site in the 1970s and 1980s, with a notable cast of characters including Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Mayor John Lindsay and Representative Ed Koch. The city designated the area a historic district. Author and resident Lawrence R. Samuel charts the ninety-year history of New York's Tudor City.

With more than one million people crammed into just over twenty-two square miles, Manhattan Island is a petri dish for the study of humanity. From murder and suicide to fatal accidents, death takes myriad forms among the hustle and bustle of the city that never sleeps. With the city always a hotbed of mob activity, gangsters have left victims of hits throughout the city. The boom and bust of Wall Street often resulted in tragic economic desperation. The soaring heights of Manhattan's skyscrapers provided for macabre incidents of New Yorkers falling out of windows--or perhaps mysteriously pushed. Pulling from the pages of New York's heyday of newspapers, author Lawrence R. Samuel reveals the lurid and vivid details of Gotham's deadly past.