Esther Crain

Esther Crain is a writer and native New Yorker. In 2008 she launched Ephemeral New York (ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com), a website that chronicles the city's past through photos, newspaper articles, art, and other artifacts. The site has been featured in The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and other publications. In 2014, her first book, New York City in 3D in the Gilded Age explored this dynamic period in New York history with the help of rare stereoscopic photographs and a stereoscope viewer. On September 27, 2016, her second book, The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910, will be released. Beautifully put together and bursting with color, the book takes a deeper dive into the Gilded Age—exploring what day-to-day life was like in an age of posh Fifth Avenue mansions and crowded tenements; of deep political corruption and a widening gap between rich and poor. Rarely seen photographs and illustrations help tell the story of how New York transformed from a small-scale post-Civil War city lit by gas and powered by horses into a mighty metropolis of skyscrapers, subways, blazing electric light, and rapid social change.