10 Facts You Didn’t Know About New York City

5.  America’s First Subway System.  Most think the NYC subway began in early 1900s.  Actually it was first conceived in 1865 by Alfred Ely Beach.  The first line, a prototype, used a pneumatic train and only ran one block.  The idea was scrapped by city officials who favored elevated trains.

4.  More gold than Fort Knox.  This is actually fairly well known thanks to the movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance.  Manhattan’s Federal Reserve Bank of New York has an underground vault with more gold than anywhere else in the world.  Their vault contains over 550,000 gold bars weighing in at 27.4 pounds each, but only 5% is owned by the US Government.  The rest of the gold is foreign owned.

3.  First Streetcar.  To take the load off of horses, streecars were invented so they could be pulled by one horse and, like a train, road on a steel track in New York City.  The first streetcar ran along Bowery Street and began in 1832.  New Orleans followed in 1835 and built their own streetcars.  Many cities adopted streetcars, favoring them over less efficient transportation, which later were powered by either a cable or electricity.

2.  Where baseball was born.  Alexander Cartwright published the first official rules for baseball and invented the modern baseball field in 1845 for the members of his club, the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club.  These rules were widely adopted and in 1858 the National Association of Base Ball Players, the first baseball league, was formed.  In 1903 a baseball team moved to the Bronx from Baltimore, and was renamed the Yankees in 1913.

1.  First homes to have electricity.  Thomas Edison built the Pearl Street Power Station in Manhattan, 1882, determining to bring cheap electricity to people’s homes.  The power station served 85 customers within a one mile radius.

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