January 20 marks the 127th anniversary of the patenting of the roller coaster. These scream-inducing attractions have spread all over the world and endured their own peaks and troughs of popularity, but you can’t tell the story without talking about Queens, where a pioneer of…
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December 17 is a big day for aviation history. In 1903, Ohio bicycle makers Orville and Wilbur Wright took their homemade craft down to Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina and became the first to achieve manned, controlled heavier-than-air flight.The Wrights’ story is well-known…
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The tradition of the Christmas tree was already well-established in the United States by the end of the 19th Century. Although the first national Christmas tree wasn’t set up until 1913, (based on the large tree that was decorated in Madison Square Park in Manhattan in 1912),…
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The day after Thanksgiving has become the biggest shopping day of the year in the United States, earning the nickname “Black Friday” to set it apart from all the other manic shopping days leading up to the December holidays. As it turns out, that term is just as loaded as your…
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Sandy – it weakened from hurricane strength before it made landfall – is far from the only major storm to hit the New York City and Long Island region over the last half-century. But the storm that set the bar for East Coast carnage was the 1938 hurricane, which struck at a time…
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