After decades spent chronicling New York City, Ric Burns and James Sanders reveal what still surprises them — and the places every New Yorker should experience
Credit: Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Ric Burns and James Sanders are the filmmakers behind the 10-part docuseries New York: A Documentary Film
- The pair explore how New York’s history and resilience are reflected in its ever-changing landscape and diverse population
- Episodes 9 and 10 premiered on PBS Sept. 20
Ric Burns and James Sanders, the filmmakers behind the long-running PBS docuseries New York: A Documentary Film just released episodes 9 and 10 on Sept. 20, 23 years after episode 8. Now that they’ve spent decades examining New York City through their work on a project that spans 27 years, they still find plenty of reasons to marvel at the Big Apple.
Burns, the director and co-writer of the 10-part docuseries (it premiered in 1999 and, until now, had been on hiatus since 2003), says New York’s magic is in the way its history remains visible beneath an ever-changing landscape — especially in the financial district.
“There’s no part of New York more haunted by the past and by layer after layer of history than the southern tip of Manhattan,” Burns tells PEOPLE. “It’s a world-famous canyon of towers now and the center of world finance, but it was all rocky, thickly wooded marshlands once, and it’s dense to this day not only with some of the oldest skyscrapers in the world but with history going back 400 years.”
He adds, “This is where the first Dutch colonists built a wall to keep out Native Americans and the English along what’s now called Wall Street. This is where the African Burial Ground is, where some of the enslaved Africans who built that wall lie. This is where George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States, and where Alexander Hamilton, who invented the American economy, is buried.”
Credit: Helen Handelman
“This tiny triangle of real estate has been built upon again and again and again not only upwards but out,” Burns says, noting that landfill extended Manhattan into the surrounding waters and eventually became part of the land on which the original World Trade Center was constructed.
“Go there after the sun goes down some time, and its hard not to feel you’re somehow at the very heart of American history,” Burns says.
Credit: Gary Hershorn/Getty
Meanwhile, co-writer James Sanders has his own hidden gem in the city.
“A favorite spot in New York would have to be the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, which was reconstructed in the early 2010s as Four Freedoms Park, a moving memorial to one of the greatest of all New Yorkers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” he says. “From this elegant stone terrace, designed by the legendary architect Louis Kahn, visitors can look out upon the roiling waters of the East River as if from the bow of a great ship.”
“Behind it sits Roosevelt Island itself, transformed over the past half century from an isolated phalanx of mental asylums and infectious-disease hospitals into a bustling residential complex, and more recently, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, into one of the world’s leading technology campuses, Cornell Tech,” he continues.
Credit: Roy Rochlin/Getty
“Ahead of those is an awe-inspiring panorama, with the historic skyline of midtown Manhattan on the right, now flanked by an imposing new skyline on the opposite shore, at left: the 21st century city of apartment towers, schools, libraries, parks and promenades that line along the Queens waterfront — and which are also the product, in large part, of the Bloomberg era,” he adds. “Few places in the city offer such breathtaking evidence of New York’s changing landscape in the decades since 9/11.”
Burns says he is equally fascinated by the ways New Yorkers have found new purposes for pieces of the city’s past.
“It’s amazing to see how the city has been built and torn down and rebuilt again not only over the centuries but just over the last 25 years,” Burns says. “And often it’s rebuilt without being torn down at all.”
One of his favorite examples is the High Line, the former elevated freight line transformed into a public park.
“Think of the High Line, a one and a half mile-long rusting, crumbling, weed-covered, one-time elevated freight line that is now one of the most thrilling public parks in New York City,” he says. “Sometimes we create the future by holding onto the past in ways no one ever imagined before.”
But what ultimately makes New York special to Burns isn’t a building, park or historic site. It’s the people.
“What makes New York such a special place is that — more than any other place in the world — it’s a place where everyone in the world belongs,” Burns says. “It’s a tough place, it’s a driving place, but it’s a place that doesn’t ask you where you’re from, or what your religion is, or anything else, for that matter. It’s a home for everybody.”
“That’s what has made it not only the birthplace of American capitalism, but the birthplace of American democracy, but the most creative, resilient, hopeful place in the world,” he adds.
Episodes 9 and 10 of New York: A Documentary Film are now airing on PBS.
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