The U.S. Kosher wine industry began on the Lower East Side, when Sam Schapiro began producing a sweet, heavy Concord wine in 1899.

The oldest municipal golf course in the U.S. is in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, opened in 1895.

In 1935, a live alligator was found in a New York City sewer in Harlem; it was more than seven feet long, and the story was reported in The New York Times on February 10, 1935.

The man generally credited with inventing toilet paper was a New Yorker, Joseph C. Gayetty; he came up with the useful product in 1857.

Before effective sewers and flushable toilets were introduced to the city, much of the garbage and refuse was simply dumped on the streets. Until the 1840s, thousands of pigs roamed the city, feeding off the garbage.

Under Dutch rule in the 17th Century, the tallest structure in New York was a two–story windmill.

Before 1898, New York and Brooklyn were separate cities. When they were united New York was the largest city in the U.S., and Brooklyn was the third largest.

New Yorkers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cody Stanton started the U.S. women’s rights movement in 1848.

John Randall, Jr. laid out the grid system for New York streets, composed of avenues running north to south and streets running east to west, from Houston Street to 155th Street, in 1808.

Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan got its name because it was the place where young women would go to do laundry in the 17th century; at the time, Maiden Lane was in fields beyond the city limits (Wall Street was the northern border of the city).

Canal Street was originally a real canal; the original Dutch settlers, remembering the canals of their native land, dug the channel through the marshy ground all the way from the Hudson to the East River.

Wall Street took its name from a wooden wall that the settlers built across the tip of the island for defense against attacks from the north.

Water Street in Lower Manhattan originally ran along the very edge of Manhattan Island. It’s now several blocks inland from the East River, due to land reclamation (basically, dumping trash and dirt along the coastline and creating new land out of it) during the 19th century.

Before it was a paved street, Broadway was a dirt path used by the Algonquin Indians, called the Wiechquaekeck Trail.

The Bronx is the only borough in New York City connected to the mainland United States.