Lit NYC

Episode 66: Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

May 7th, 2026  |  55 mins 17 secs

The writer, journalist, artist and illustrator sits down with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to discuss her sweeping new history of the Jewish Labor Bund, her family connection to it and much more in a conversation that ranges from the Pale of Settlement all the way to Occupy Wall Street.

Episode 65: John Strausbaugh’s Duchamp Takes New York

March 29th, 2026  |  41 mins 10 secs

An epic art show at the Lexington Avenue Armory made a young Marcel Duchamp, who was back in France, one of America’s first modern celebrities even before he first arrived in New York City for what became decades of painting, conceiving, chess-playing and love-making — though not always in that order. John Strausbaugh, the author of Duchamp Takes New York, joins Amy Sohn and Brian Berger for a wide-ranging discussion of the artist’s life in the Big Apple’s old San Juan Hill and all around Manhattan.

Episode 64: Kenneth Cobb and Marcia Kirk’s Vital Records of Mr. George Rex, ‘The Last Slave’

March 13th, 2026  |  46 mins 15 secs

NYC Department of Records Associate Commissioner Kenneth Cobb and Research Associate Marcia Kirk visited Lit NYC to explain how the Municipal Archives came across the death ledger for the town of Newtown, Queens where George Rex, who froze to death in 1885 at the age of 89, had his occupation recorded as “The Last Slave,” what the Municipal Archives has found since then about his life, death and family history, and much more.

Episode 62: Andrew Lynch’s QueensLink

March 7th, 2026  |  39 mins 49 secs

Geographer, cartographer and urban explorer Andrew Lynch, the chief operating officer of QueensLink, joins Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to discuss the group’s vision to transform the borough for the better by extending the M train from Queens Boulevard to the Rockaways on a railway that’s abandoned for 60 years while surrounding that with new parks and trails, how he got involved in this crusade, and much more.

Episode 63: Joe Flaherty’s Managing Mailer

February 27th, 2026  |  43 mins 5 secs

Joe Flaherty was a dock worker and high school dropout on the wrong side of 30 when he found an unexpected writer’s life beginning as a columnist for the Village Voice. A couple years later, he was running the 51st State campaign of Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin as two of the city’s most famous writers made their bid to run it on a 51st State platform built around the idea of giving New Yorkers more control of their own neighborhoods and slogans including “No More Bullshit” and “The Other Guys Are The Joke.”

Joe’s son Liam joins Lit NYC to talk about the very different Park Slope he grew up in, what his father accomplished in his short life before succumbing to prostate cancer at just 47 years old, what his dad would make of Mamdani’s new era, and much more.

Episode 61: Eric Goldwyn’s A Better Billion

February 18th, 2026  |  50 mins 45 secs

Eric Goldwyn, one of the authors of a new report from the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University with a modest proposal to remap the city with 12 new projects, 64 new subways stations and 41 new miles of rail talks with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel about that idea and much more.

Episode 60: Arthur Tress’ The Ramble: NYC 1969

January 24th, 2026  |  47 mins 1 sec

Arthur Tress, “the last Confederate widow’ whose newly published photographs of gay men in Central Park’s Ramble in 1968 and 1969 are the earliest shots of outdoor cruising in a natural setting, joins Alex Krales and Harry Siegel to discuss his work in a New York City where homosexuality was still both a taboo and a crime, and much more.

Episode 59: St. John Frizell’s Gage & Tollner

January 9th, 2026  |  50 mins 46 secs

An iconic restaurant in Fulton Mall became an Arby's, before it was revived amid the pandemic. St. John Frizell, one of the stewards of Gage and Tollner joins Lit NYC hosts Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to talk about the craft of the cocktail, the business of Brooklyn, the nature of the great good place, and much more.

Episode 58: William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

December 28th, 2025  |  50 mins 20 secs

In 1980, a movie narrated by a sociologist once described as Jimmy Stewart’s urban planner cousin, and full of surveillance footage of the city's public spaces, delivered perhaps the richest and wisest look ever made at how New Yorkers use the city's public spaces. Municipal Art Society president Keri Butler joins Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to discuss the film, Whyte's zen koans about public spaces that have stood the test of time in a technologically transformed world, and much more.

Episode 57: Henry H. Sapoznik’s The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City

December 19th, 2025  |  1 hr 6 mins

Henry H. Sapoznik sits down with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel for a wide-ranging conversation about assimilation and adaptability, the difference between faux music and folk music, the overlaps between kosher, halal and Chinese foods, and much more.

Episode 56: Baruch Herzfeld’s Brilliant Battery Brain

December 5th, 2025  |  46 mins 30 secs

The ineffable and inimitable gadfly and entrepreneur Baruch Herzfeld joins Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to talk about schemes and dreams, the thousand-dollar bet he lost to  a Fugee but hasn’t paid, the guys who climbed telephone poles when Williamsburg was wild, and much more — but mostly the city-wide battery-swap network he’s trying to build.

Episode 55: Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost’ Drop Dead City

November 15th, 2025  |  48 mins 41 secs

The creators of the acclaimed new documentary about Gotham’s close brush with bankruptcy in 1975 sit down with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to discuss the film, the city that was, how its near collapse led to the city of today how Michael’s father Felix helped pulled it back from the brink with Big MAC, or the Municipal Assistance Corporation, and more.

Episode 54: Ben Fractenberg’s In Tension

November 5th, 2025  |  47 mins 59 secs

Ben Fractenberg, visuals editor for THE CITY, joins Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel for a wide-ranging conversation about street photography, photo journalism and much more., ahead of the opening reception for his solo show, In Tension, this Friday evening from 6-9 at Gallery 198, at 198 24th St. in Brooklyn, with his work then on display there through November.

Episode 53: Drew Friedman’s Schtick Figures: The Cool, the Comical, the Crazy

October 18th, 2025  |  35 mins 36 secs

The ubiquitous illustrator talks with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel about what he wants to illustrate now that he no longer needs to take assignments, how New York City shaped his work, why he thinks being called "the Vermeer of the Borscht Belt" is a misnomer, and much more.

Episode 52: Jonathan Mahler’s The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990.

September 26th, 2025  |  41 mins 27 secs

"The tabs were this incredibly paradoxical force in New York during these years’ Jonathan Mahler said in his coversation with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel. “On the one hand, they were totally polarizing, turning the world into into heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys — like comic books for adults. On the other hand, everyone is reading the Post and the News and Newsday, and they were unifying all of New York around these storylines.”

Episode 51: Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon

September 20th, 2025  |  56 mins 58 secs

Laurie sits down with Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to dig into what they don't tell you in the children's books about the life and death of the world's most iconic aviatrix, and the story of how the New York publishing world helped cast her in that role.