History is written by the victors — as Winston Churchill once said — but the victors tend to leave the best stuff out.
Thankfully, we have author and activist Andrew Carroll, whose life mission is to keep the past alive. Carroll, the author of two previous bestselling books on war letters, is back with a new book, “Here Is Where: Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History” (Crown Archetype ), which explores the country’s unmarked historic sites.
It turned into a 13-year project, the products of which fill 24 filing cabinets.
But perhaps his best stories — or at least the majority of his discoveries — occurred in and around New York City, he tells the Post. In fact, “I could have filled a whole book with just stories from New York.”
Among them are: Martin Luther King’s near-assassination in Harlem, the “Doctor Riot” of the 18th century and the city’s first terrorist attack during the Civil War.
None of these sites are marked with plaques or statues. They won’t appear in any guidebook. But Carroll offers them here:
WHEN A BOOTH SAVED A LINCOLN
Exchange Place, Jersey City
During the Civil War, the NJ Railroad Company ran trains through what is now the PATH’s Exchange Place. One night in 1863/1864 (the date is unknown, Carroll says) Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s oldest son, was en route to DC when he fell from the loading platform onto the train tracks. Who was there to save him? None other than prominent Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth. That these lives would intersect before Lincoln’s assassination seemed “farfetched” to Carroll, but he dug deeper and found a letter written by young Lincoln, which confirmed the story: “I was twisted off my feet . . . personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized . . . Upon turning to thank my rescuer, I saw it was Edwin Booth.”
THE FIRST 9/11 ATTACK
Grand Central Terminal
On Sept. 11, 1976, a group of Croatian separatists hijacked a Chicago-bound TWA Flight 355 out of La Guardia Airport. They warned that the plane was outfitted with explosives, though it turned out to be a bluff — it was only a pressure cooker (eerie, considering modern attacks, but it wasn’t a bomb then).
However, warnings of a second bombing site — at Grand Central — turned out to be true. The real bombs were stashed in a subway locker under the terminal. A bomb squad safely removed the explosives from the station and transported it to Rodman’s Neck in The Bronx. There, the bomb exploded after the team tried dismantling it, killing one officer, Brian Murray, and wounding two. Meanwhile, the hijackers surrendered their plane and its passengers after it was revealed that their in-air bomb was a false alarm.
“There were no other hijacking-related fatalities within the United States for another 25 years,” Carroll writes. “To the day.”
WINSTON CHURCHILL HIT BY A CAR
Fifth Avenue and 76th Street
Eight years before the British declared war on Germany, “Last Lion” Winston Churchill nearly lost his roar when he was struck by a taxi cab while visiting New York’s Upper East Side in 1931. “He was actually just looking the wrong way,” Carroll says, “much like many of us do in England.” The cab struck him hard, and he was described at the time as a “bloody heap on the ground.” He spent eight days in Lenox Hill Hospital, and luckily made a full recovery. “Imagine how history could have gone differently if the cab had been going just a little bit faster,” Carroll says.
ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT BIRTH
960 Fifth Avenue
The epicenter of the early environmental movement happened in one of the places most devoid of wildlife: Manhattan’s Upper East Side. From his home on 960 Fifth Avenue, Madison Grant (1865-1937), an environmentalist, founded the New York Zoological Society (now the Bronx Zoo) and launched a bison-rescue effort, and a Save the Redwoods League. He also helped to save critically endangered species across the world, including Sudanese white rhinos, African elephants, South African mountain zebras, and others. But he was less sympathetic to his fellow man. Grant is perhaps best known as being a friend of the Nazis and a supporter of eugenics and “race improvement” — which removes any mystery about why there is no placard or statue dedicated to his wildlife work.
FIRST PERSON HIT BY A CAR
74th Street and Central Park West
Before cars ran on gas, they operated on batteries. And New York was a testing ground for the new type of electric cars, Carroll says. By 1897, the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company had released an entire fleet of electric cabs onto the streets of New York. They were “all the rage,” Carroll writes. But that same year, a cabdriver in an electric car named Arthur Smith accidentally ran over a 68-year-old man named Henry Bliss on the corner of 74th Street and Central Park West. About 4,000 people are hit and killed by cars every year in the US; Bliss has the ignominity of being the first.
NEW YORK’S FIRST TERRORIST ATTACK
Astor Hotel at Broadway and Vesey Street
On Nov. 25, 1864 (then a holiday called Evacuation Day, marking the final departure of British authority in 1783), Confederate officers orchestrated a plan to set fire to lower Manhattan with glass bottles containing a phosphorous liquid called “Greek fire,” as retaliation for the Union’s sacking of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. “Their mission was to burn the city to the ground in what would be the first major domestic terrorist strike on New York,” Carroll writes.
They began at the Astor Hotel, where they poured the chemicals on the floors and beds of their suites, hoping to ignite a fire storm that would turn the city to ash. It didn’t work.
The worst it did was smoke-out the Winter Garden Theater, where, believe it or not, all three Booth brothers — Junius Brutus, Edwin, and John Wilkes — were performing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (a play about an assassination!). The production still manage to raise funds for a bronze statue of Shakespeare in Central Park that stands on the Literary Walk to this day.
ISLAND OF GRAVES
Hart Island
A small island on the northeastern edge of New York City boasts zero citizens — but about 850,000 permanent residents. Hart Island, at the western end of Long Island Sound, is home to the nation’s largest potter’s field, filled with the bodies of the city’s unclaimed and the unwanted. Though there are dozens of white markers representing 1,000 buried infants, there is only one individual headstone, which reads SC-BI, 1985, in remembrance of the city’s first infant to die of AIDS. There are also several famous people buried on Hart Island, including child actor Bobby Driscoll, the voice of Peter Pan in the Walt Disney film, who was laid to rest on the island in 1968 when “no one could identify his remains in his East Village tenement.” A little over a thousand people are still buried here every year and the island’s upkeep is overseen by Rikers Island inmates, Carroll says.
THE ORPHAN TRAINS
Cortlandt Street dock
Between 1854 and 1930, around 200,000 homeless children were transported to the Midwest in search of parents to adopt them. Many of these kids departed from New York City (location is unknown but Carroll believes they left from the Cortlandt docks, which are now paved over) and ended up on farms that needed cheap workers. The children, like those pictured above in 1918, were dispatched by the New York Children’s Aid Society, the largest agency of its kind, and its motto was “fresh air and hard work . . . would enrich their bodies and souls.” But the motto might not have been based in reality. “This was not an adoption service,” Carroll writes. “Some adults were motivated out of pity, but, for many, the children were seen as a labor force.”
THE DOCTOR RIOTS
Broadway between Worth and Duane streets
In the 18th century, doctors engaged in a widespread practice of “resurrection,” or grave robbing, to find suitable cadavers to study. Since most of the bodies were exhumed from pauper and slave grave sites, the doctors mostly got away with it. That is, until a young boy in April of 1788 saw something he shouldn’t have. The unnamed child peeked through a window and watched in horror as several doctors carved up a dead woman. This was especially upsetting for the boy because he had recently lost his own mother. One of the doctors, likely in a cruel jest, lifted the severed arm and waved it at the boy, allegedly saying, “This is your mother’s arm! I just dug it up!” The boy told his father, who insisted on having his wife’s coffin dug up, and after finding it empty, started gathering around the neighborhood to get revenge on the med students. At the height of the Doctor Riots, about 5,000 angry people gathered and threw rocks at medical professionals. Upwards of 20 people died, and many were injured. But within a year, the state had passed heavy fines and prison sentences to those who exhumed the dead.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. STABBED
230 W. 125th St.
On Sept. 20, 1958, at Blumstein’s, a department store in Harlem, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was reading from his memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott, “Stride Toward Freedom.” A strange woman approached the table. “Are you Dr. King?” she asked. When he nodded, she said, “I’ve been looking for you for five years” and thrust a silver letter opener into the upper left part of his chest. Had the puncture wound been a few inches off — or if Dr. King had sneezed or tried to remove the knife — doctors said he would have died, Carroll says. Gov. Averell Harriman (above) visited King and his wife, Coretta, in the hospital. The woman who stabbed Dr. King, an African-American named Izola Curry, was later admitted to Bellevue Hospital, where she was deemed mentally ill. Her motives remain a mystery. Ten years later, King was assassinated.