If folks, it's Nate.

It's the beginning of August, and here is a summer story from a few summers back.

It got a new episode coming up in a couple weeks, and then a couple weeks after that, in On and On.

But I gotta get some work done on a cool project that I hope to tell you guys about really soon.

In the meantime, enjoy.

Some were running from, 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, still 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

in 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, and there was trash piled

...