New York, United States, is one of fourteen destinations featured on Waddles' World Tour, RestMap's free daily 5-letter word puzzle. Each week's puzzles are themed around a different city, and every solve unlocks an authored travel fact about the place. The Statue of Liberty anchors the New York week. Below are five sourced facts that turn up across the New York puzzle set.
The Waldorf Astoria Hotel hides a secret train platform — Track 61 — directly beneath the building, originally used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to travel in and out of the city without being seen in his wheelchair. His custom armor-plated railcar is still stored there.
Source: NYC Tutoring, The Tour GuyWhen indoor toilets were first introduced to New York in the mid-1800s, many residents refused to install them because they believed poisonous 'sewer gas' would rise through the pipes and kill their families. Doctors at the time actually supported this fear, claiming the gases caused serious illness and death.
Source: 6sqft, CitySignalIn 19th-century New York tenements, 25 to 30 people commonly shared a single outdoor privy. The city had over 9,000 'privy vaults' — euphemistically called 'school sinks' — in tenement courtyards, and emptying them was a lucrative business: 'night soil' cart men competed for contracts to haul human waste to the city's edges.
Source: 6sqft, SueAnn PorterCentral Park looks completely natural but is entirely artificial — every lake, hill, stream, and wooded area was designed and built by human hands. Before construction, designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux moved 10 million cartloads of earth to sculpt the landscape.
Source: Open Culture, Central Park ConservancyBefore Central Park was built, the area from West 82nd to West 89th Street was home to Seneca Village — the largest community of African American property owners in pre-Civil War New York, with three churches and a school. The entire community was demolished by eminent domain in 1857.
Source: History.com, Central Park Conservancy