article: *My* Town | written down

This page was sparked by the “What’s Mine” prompt. I was thinking about what I feel I own that really doesn’t belong to me, and New York City, my home town, came to mind.

I’m a third-generation NYCer (at least on one side of the family tree) and we native NYCers seem to be rare creatures, everyone else here seems to come from somewhere else. So I feel like the city belongs especially to us “born-here” folks.

At the time the prompt came in I was writing part of a guidebook for the city and was doing a lot of historical research. So the prompt morphed into a record of the coolest facts I discovered about the city; how Captain Kidd once lived here, how we once had two police forces that hated each other and would release each others prisoners, how the two fire departments would compete for business and even hire gang members to “protect” fire hydrants from the other department… just a record of some of the more festive bits of “my” town’s history.

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