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Philip White must have walked William Street countless numbers of times. It lay a mere block west of his drugstore located at the corner of Frankfort and Gold Streets. Read More

Franklin Market was one of the many city-run markets. In operation from the late eighteenth-century, it received its official license in 1820. The market was best known for its butcher stalls whose owners typically wore high hats and long tailed… Read More

Collect Pond (called Kalchhook by the Dutch)was initially a spring-fed pond covering about seventy acres fringed by marshland created by its many outlets and surrounded by wooded hills. According to many, “there was no more beautiful spot on the… Read More

Patterned after London's Crystal Palace and its Great Exhibition, New York's Crystal Palace opened in 1853. Its exhibits showcased the world's new industrial achievements of the world but also trumpeted U.S. national accomplishments. It was a… Read More

Sarah Garnet was the oldest child of a large and prosperous Long Island family. A student in the New York public school system, at age fourteen she was appointed monitor under the supervision of John Peterson. Like Maritcha, she spent her entire… Read More

Susan McKinney Steward was Sarah Garnet's younger sister, and equally energetic and ambitious. Admitted to the New York Medical College for Women, a homeopathetic school founded by a wealthy white abolitionist woman, Clarence Sophia Lozier, McKinney… Read More

Victoria Earle Matthews was born a slave, the child of a Georgia slaveholder and one of his female slaves. Her mother escaped north during the Civil War, returning after emancipation to claim her children. By 1873 the family had settled in New York… Read More

Ida B. Wells was the galvanizing force that propelled Brooklyn’s black women into public activism. Originally from Mississippi, Wells moved to Memphis in the early 1880s and embarked on a career in journalism. In 1889 she became editor and… Read More