Who could write an accurate assessment of social New York better than a celebrated Broadway playwright? Exactly; that is why we were so happy to find this essay by Clare Boothe Luce (1903 – 1987) on just that very topic:
"The New York Social Register for 1931 contained about thirty-five thousand names, an increase of fifteen thousand over the Social Register of 1914; and the fourteen social registers of the largest American cities contained more than one hundred thousand names - an increase of over fifty thousand names during the same length of time."
These figures are particularly remarkable when one considers that the social register of exactly one hundred years ago, Longworth's New York Directory, boasted exactly eighteen names."
From Amazon: Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce
When this article hit the newsstands, W.W. II was in full swing throughout many parts of Asia, Europe and North Africa. America had not yet committed itself to the war, but the grim, far-seeing souls who ran New York City recognized that it was inevitable - and much to their credit, they had been studying the possibility of New York City air raids since 1939.
- from Amazon:
Another article about wartime N.Y. can be read here...
Click here to learn about the New Yorkers who volunteered to fight the Germans and Japanese in W.W. II.
Attached is a spirited article that gives an account of the Jewish population surge in 1920s New York. Even as early as 1921, nearly half of the Jews in all of North America lived in that city and every fourth New Yorker was a Jew.
Click here to read about the Jewish population growth in the Unites States during the 1920s. In the early Fifties many of the people from the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico decided to pack their bags and move to New York City. Overnight, it seemed, a portion of Harlem came to be known as "Spanish Harlem" - where hastily assembled mambo dance halls could be found among restaurants serving the exotic cuisine of the Caribbean. There were also complications that emerged with the new comers that are addressed in this 1955 article:
"Today, however, there is a forceful change taking place, an influence so great that New York City officials have forecast a startling racial shift within a few years and are already making plans for meeting this switch..." "New York City's contributions to the American language go considerably further than the pronunciation of 'avenyeh' for avenue or 'erl' for lubricant. Peter Stuyvesant's village has made rich entries into our spoken and written tongue. A handful, culled from Dr. Mitford M. Matthew's A Dictionary of Americanisms
follows."
Click here to read more articles about American English. If you've been wandering the internet hoping to get some idea what the fair isle of Manhattan looked like on 1940s color film, then your search is over (for a little while). These color images first appeared in a 1940 issue of Click Magazine and you will get a glimpse of the Bowery, Broadway, and Fifth Avenue -there are also two color pictures of New York at night for all of you wanted to see what the door man at El Morocco wore or the club-crawlers in Harlem. | 
