Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

Destination City: A Gallery of New York’s Most Surprising Visitors and Residents Throughout History by Robert Pigott ’81.

January 14, 2026

Tags Alumni Book

(Columbia University Press, 2025).

Bob Pigott has called New York City home since 1959. By trade, he is an attorney who served as section chief and bureau chief of the New York Attorney General’s Charities Bureau. He’s also a history buff. When reading a biography, he finds himself especially curious about one aspect of the subjects’ life — their first trip to New York City. What did they want to see? Where did they stay? What were their impressions?

In Destination City, he answers such questions. Here are just a few gems: President Woodrow Wilson and his successor, Warren G. Harding, had little in common - except both came to New York City to indulge in extramarital affairs. While living in Brighton Beach, Woody Guthrie wrote a song about his bigoted landlord, “Old Man Trump” - Donald’s father. A 13-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald was a menace to his Bronx neighbors, once firing a BB gun at their windows. Greta Garbo had a fear of dentists’ offices and found a practitioner who would examine her at a bench on Central Park West.

In all, Pigott shares the Big Apple tales of over 150 politicians, poets, artists, scientists, revolutionaries, outlaws, actors, and other notables who no one would ever think of as a New Yorker. He narrowed his list by combing through the New York Society Library’s 27,964 volumes in its biography section.

Described by Esther Crain, author of The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910, as “brisk, entertaining, and full of surprises,” the book does more than educate; it entertains with “well-researched, lively stories [that] will resonate with city natives as well as newcomers and transplants.”