It's a city with a million stories, and most of them go untold. Surveying four centuries of New York lore, Sam Roberts introduces the first woman to appear nude in a motion picture, becoming the face of Miss Manhattan; the couple whose soirée ended the Gilded Age with an embarrassing bang; the husband and wife who invented the modern celebrity talk show; the victim of the city's first recorded murder; and the woman who successfully sued a bus company for racial discrimination a century before Rosa Parks.