Needle Park, the infamous hangout in New York for addicts and dealers in the 1960s and 1970s was Verdi Square Park.
It is named for the Italian composer, and occupies a triangular area between Seventy-second and Seventy-third Streets at Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.
Dollar was the English spelling of the German Taler (a silver coin first issued in 1519). American colonists used the word dollar to describe the Spanish peso circulating from South America, and when it came time to devise a system of currency (in 1792), the United States government adopted the dollar as its basic monetary…
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” address to more than 200,000 people on the mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
Reported quarterly, the GNP (Gross National Product) of the U.S. represents the total market value of American goods and services bought for final use during a one-year period. Considered the most comprehensive measure of U.S. economic activity, it includes consumer purchases, private investment, and government spending.
It was Brooklyn-born Shirley Chisholm (1924), who was the first black woman elected to Congress from that borough in 1969. In 1972, she ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for president.
According to folklore, John Henry was an ex-slave who worked as a steel driver. Helping to blast the Big Bend Tunnel through the Allegheny Mountains for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia in the 1870s. His job was to hammer steel into rock to make holes for explosive charges. In the folk song…
Broadway’s all-time longest-running show was A Chorus Line. It ran 6,137 performances from 1975 to 1990. Its nearest competitor is Oh! Calcutta! with 5,959 performances between 1976 and 1989.