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Welcome to the Most Notorious Podcast. I'm Eric Rivenes. I know that many of you are watching the alienist on television right now.

There are a lot of true crime and history podcasts out there doing special episodes about it, which is awesome.

I wanted to do something special too, but as always, I try to go right to the experts and know not Caleb Carr.

But someone just as good an expert on 1890s New York City and an actual historical consultant on the show.

I'm so pleased to have author and historian Richard Zachs back again for those of you who may recall he was on once before to talk about the pirate hunter, the true story of Captain Kid.

Which was highly entertaining and informative. Today he's here to discuss one of my favorite books of all time, his classic Island of Vice, theodore Roosevelt's quest to clean up sin loving New York.

So great to have you here once more. Thank you.

Great. Good to talk.

This is a book that makes me so happy whenever I read it. There's just something about this era in New York that I'm completely drawn to.

How did this book come to fruition? Did it take you a long time to write it?

Unfortunately, it took a really long time to write it and it came. It occurred because frankly, I was pretty jealous of Caleb Carr's the alienist and I thought I would take a crack at writing some fiction set in the 1890s.

So I did all this research and probably wasted close to a year and then just was not producing a novel.

And probably the best story that I stumbled on the most under told was Roosevelt as police commissioner. I mean, there are other great ones. There are lots of good ones.

But so it came about that way and then during the course of writing the book, my son wound up getting sick for about a year.

So it took almost five years to write this book, but I'm really pleased the way it came out.

I know that we're going to talk about New York City through this entire interview, but I'd love it if you could kind of set the stage for us to start with.

What was the city in general, like in the early 1890s, politically, economically, culturally, et cetera?

Well, it was the most vibrant, dynamic city in New York City in the country by far. I mean, it had, we forget it was the largest port in the country.

And it had a hundred active piers. It had, it also had a hundred live theaters that were running constantly.

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