This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate Demet.

Some were running from, and some were running towards.

Some were born there, born with the city and their veins, they tell you.

And in the summer of 1892, there were 3.3 million people living in New York.

The city bulged with immigrants from abroad, people fleeing famines, pogroms, and with

transplants from other states and other cities that simply weren't New York.

They came looking for jobs, for opportunity, for more out of life, you know, to make it,

to hustle, to scrape, to push themselves forward in a city unafraid to push back.

So they squeezed into tenements, found a space on the floor of a flop house, pushed a

cart, shined a shoe, stole a watch from a pocket on a trolley platform.

In some would go to the opera, in some would trade in diamonds, in some would shout orders

for stocks on the floor of the exchange for the railroad companies and the shipping concerns

that brought still more people to New York.

Some would deposit checks and notes in the banks, fat with capital, that would build the

buildings that would rise ever taller to be seen from farther and farther away by still

more people looking for more out of life.

In all of them, these 3.3 million New Yorkers, all of them would sweat.

Because it was the summer, and it was 1892, and there was no air conditioning, no oscillating

fans, no refrigeration.

But there were strawberries rotting on the backs of fruit carts.

There were horses and manure everywhere, steaming in the streets.

...