NYNew York Famous People

Five presidents, from a Kinderhook tavern to a hospital in Queens

Martin Van Buren was born in 1782 at Kinderhook in Columbia County, where his father kept a tavern. He grew up speaking Dutch at home, the only president who learned English as a second language, and served from 1837 to 1841. Millard Fillmore was born in a log cabin at Summerhill in Cayuga County in 1800, was apprenticed to a cloth maker, became president in 1850 when Zachary Taylor died, and later served as the first chancellor of the University at Buffalo. Theodore Roosevelt was born at 28 East 20th Street in Manhattan in 1858, ran the city police board, won the governorship, and took office as president in 1901. Franklin Roosevelt was born at Springwood in Hyde Park in 1882 and is buried in the garden there. Donald Trump was born in Queens in 1946.

Two more presidents built their careers in New York without being born in it. Chester Arthur was a Vermonter who ran the New York Custom House and is buried at Menands outside Albany. Grover Cleveland was born in New Jersey, served as mayor of Buffalo and then governor of New York, and went to the White House from Albany. Alexander Hamilton, who never held the office, arrived from Nevis in 1772, represented New York at the Constitutional Convention, and is buried in the Trinity Church yard on Broadway.

Reformers who worked out of small towns upstate

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born at Johnstown in 1815 and wrote the Declaration of Sentiments read aloud at the Seneca Falls convention in July 1848. Susan B. Anthony was born in Massachusetts but lived on Madison Street in Rochester, where she was arrested in November 1872 for voting and fined one hundred dollars that she never paid. Sojourner Truth was born into slavery around 1797 at Swartekill in Ulster County, spoke Dutch as a child, and in 1828 went to court in Kingston and won back her son Peter, who had been sold illegally into Alabama. Harriet Tubman was born in Maryland but bought a farm in Auburn in 1859 from William Seward and died there in 1913. Frederick Douglass ran his newspaper The North Star out of Rochester beginning in 1847.

Names whose origins surprise people

Lucille Ball was born in Jamestown in 1911, a furniture manufacturing town near the Pennsylvania line. Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, in 1916, the son of a rag and scrap peddler. Rod Serling was born in Syracuse in 1924 and raised in Binghamton, whose park carousel and bandstand run underneath the Twilight Zone episode Walking Distance. John D. Rockefeller was born at Richford in Tioga County in 1839 and did not move west to Cleveland until he was a teenager. Michael Jordan was born in Brooklyn in 1963 before the family moved to North Carolina. Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Edith Wharton were all born inside the state as well, Melville in Manhattan in 1819, Whitman at West Hills on Long Island the same year, Wharton on West 23rd Street in 1862.

Brooklyn and the Bronx as a talent factory

Hip hop has a documented address. Clive Campbell, a Jamaican immigrant known as DJ Kool Herc, stretched the drum breaks on two copies of the same record at a party in the recreation room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on August 11, 1973. Shawn Carter grew up in the Marcy Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Christopher Wallace on St. James Place in Clinton Hill, a mile and a half apart.

The borough's earlier output was just as concentrated. Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900 above the family department store. Barbra Streisand was born there in 1942, Lou Reed the same year before the family moved to Freeport. Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in Williamsburg in 1926, Jerry Seinfeld in Brooklyn in 1954, Eddie Murphy in 1961. Lou Gehrig was born in Yorkville in 1903 and was pulled out of Columbia by the Yankees. Vince Lombardi was born in Sheepshead Bay in 1913, the son of a butcher. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was born Lew Alcindor in Harlem in 1947 and won 71 straight games at Power Memorial Academy before he ever played a college minute.

The writers and what they wrote about

Washington Irving was born in Manhattan in 1783, named for the general whose war had just ended, and set the Sleepy Hollow story in the countryside near his Tarrytown house. Whitman worked as a printer and edited the Brooklyn Daily Eagle before Leaves of Grass. Edith Wharton wrote the New York of her own childhood into The Age of Innocence and in 1921 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924 and preached at a Pentecostal storefront church as a teenager before he left for Paris at 24.

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