What is truly unusual about the photo, however, is this “horseless police buggy.” Looking like a cross between a nobleman’s carriage and a butchered Model T, one wonders if such a vehicle ever really existed–and what possible policing purpose it might have served. Was it for transporting suspects? Quickly getting officers to the scene of the crime? Overtaking speeding carriages?

One thing’s for sure: whether it actually existed or not, that’s one funky police cruiser. No wonder the kid on the right is running for cover.

This photo taken from the Rama tour Union Square.

At first sight, few photos seem as nondescript as this snapshot of the old Chinese Opera House on Doyers Street. Doyers Street—one of Manhattan’s shortest, most obtuse thoroughfares—displays here few of qualities that made it the most feared stretch of road at the turn of last century. When this photo was taken in 1909, Doyers was better known as “The Bloody Angle,” a name bestowed on it for the sheer number of gangland murders that occurred here. The Chinese Opera House was itself the site of one of the most famous of these attacks, with two dozen wounded or killed when a gang fired a volley of bullets into an audience full of rivals. One wonders, then, if any of the potential Chinese patrons of the theater that walked by would have been brave enough to actually stop and read the actors’ names on the playbills posted in front, given the inherent danger of lingering on Doyers.

Despite this, however, most of the details in this photo seem to present an innocuous, and boring, street scene, with the only apparent item of noted being the metal shutters on the theater corroding at the seams. Though the harsh New York winter would certainly seem to hold blame for the unusual condition of these shutters, a closer look at the piping above the door seems to reveal a few sprinklers that might also have contributed to this effect. For being a century old, the sprinklers are surprisingly modern.

When I first began editing this photo to include in my tour of Chinatown, however, something about it gave me an eerie feeling. It wasn’t just Doyers’ reputation that was coloring my feelings of the photo, it was something about the content itself making me uneasy. It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but I finally pegged down what was making me uneasy about this snapshot: somebody was staring at me from the window above the opera house.

Who was this mystery woman, staring at the cameraman with such thinly veiled suspicion? My initial assumption was that she was likely a prostitute, wary of outsiders. Though Chinatown’s reputation for vice was strong in New York, a large gender imbalance ensured that all of the prostitutes in the neighborhood were white—the rare Chinese girl bring too valuable as a wife to be considered for such work. Still, the look on this woman’s face expressed to me something far deeper than mere distrust. Would a prostitute stare out the window with such thinly veiled contempt? Another detail from the photo, seemed to offer a clue to her identity.

This advertisement for a picnic in Cypress Hills [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress_Hills,_Brooklyn]] (“gentlemen’s tickets 25 cents, ladies tickets 15 cents”), reminded me of something else I had come across in my research. Due to the huge gender imbalance in New York’s Chinese population, many Chinese men married Caucasian women, much to the consternation of the local missionaries, who generally looked down on such interracial marriages. The missionaries, claiming that the “white wives of Chinatown” were little more than enslaved opium addicts (despite much evidence to the contrary), often offered to take these women on picnics, where they would offer to help them “escape” their enslavement. Whether this advertisement is for one such picnic or not is uncertain, but the idea of white women being enslaved by opium was so pervasive that it became the subject of a Broadway play.

The idea of the enslaved white wife of Chinese men became so pervasive that such women became the points of interest on tours led through the area. Journalists covering Chinatown, often filing their prose with easy stereotypes, would seek out and belittle many of these women, playing down their high education, respectable breeding, and attentive life as mothers to portray them as victims “trapped” by their situations. Maybe this woman, then, was one such wife, wary of being hounded and belittled by yet anther tourist or journalist with a camera?

One thing seems certain: in this photo, as in Chinatown, more lingers behind the shutters than meets the eye.

Ever get a wedgie from walking too much in the summer heat? From what it looks like to us with the Mary Poppins-like lady in this 1899 photo of the Brooklyn Bridge promenade, the problem dates back at least three centuries.

This photo taken from the Rama tour A View From the Bridge.

The term IED, or Improvised Explosive Device, may be relatively new to the English language, but the primitive devices themselves stretch back centuries. Shortly after the turn of the last century, New York’s Union Square was the site of one such attack.

At that time, Union Square only vaguely resembled the eclectic metropolitan park that New Yorkers love today. Originally built to fill in the awkward gap of roadway created by the extension of the two uptown thoroughfares of Broadway and Fourth Avenue (the park was situated at their “union”), Union Square was initially little more than a giant, ovular traffic island—its verdant, garden-like vegetation corralled off from visitors by iron fences. As the city grew upward, however, the increasingly critical location of the park as a commuter hub and the copious opportunities the broad, open roadways created for drawing crowds turned Union Square into a prime gathering place: with vendors hawking seasonal wares, suffragettes agitating for gender equality, and upstart preachers warning of the wrath of a vengeful God.

Bowing to these realities, city planners redesigned the park in 1871 to accommodate—and better control—the park’s role as the city’s prominent place of assembly: pedestrian paths were widened and lined with benches, fences and shrubbery replaced by grass and shade-producing trees, and a mustering ground and reviewing stand built at the southern and northern sides. At the turn of the twentieth century, with the economy depressed and labor law still in its infancy, Union Square rapidly turned into a Petri dish for New York’s discontents.

It was in this context that, on the morning March 29, 1908, organizers and supporters of the Socialist Conference of Unemployed arrived at Union Square to find the park cordoned off and ringed by mounted policemen. Bowing to souring political attitude towards such demonstrations, the NYC Parks Department decided, in the final hour, to ban this Marxist gathering, claiming the organizers lacked the necessary permits. In the confusion that followed, a confrontation occurred between the two groups, and policemen aggressively pushed the demonstrators out of Union Square and into surrounding streets. Poor workers and laborers slipped and fell over one another on rain-slicked flagstones as a few zealous officer set upon beating stragglers with batons.

Only a few hours later, however, police reopened the park, and a serene calm returned to the now-emptied square, with a handful policemen, journalists, and stragglers milling around in the discussing the implications of confrontation. At 3:30 p.m. this false sense of calm shattered when an explosion went off near the fountain. The shock was so powerful that people outside the park were knocked over, as if hit by a strong wind.

The manufacturer of the bomb was a Jewish-Russian tailor named Selig Silverman who, after immigrating to New York and being beaten by a police officer, took an interest in the early anarchist movement. Silverman, still smarting from the beating, sought revenge. Removing a grapefruit-sized knob from the top of his bedstead, he filled it with a quarter-pound of broken nails and topped this with nitroglycerin and gunpowder which, when lit with a cigarette, was intended to act as a fuse. Arriving late to the disbanded rally, Silverman spotted a group of New York’s finest lingering near the center of the park and slinked over to the nearby fountain, surreptitiously preparing to lob his bomb at the group. At the last moment, however, Silverman made a fatal mistake—he inserted his cigarette into the wrong hole of the casing. This caused the bomb to misfire. In the resulting explosion Silverman not only blew off his right arm and blinded himself (he would die of his injuries in Bellevue two weeks later) but also killed Ignatz Hildebrand, an unsuspecting tailor from Orange, New Jersey, who had also showed up late to the rally and was standing nearby.

In the aftermath, a wave of fear swept across the city. The New York Times, for one of the first times ever, published three photos, each of the event, on its front page. Police interrogated the wife of the hapless Hildebrand and had their one Yiddish-speaking officer translate the reams of diaries and letters found in Silverman’s room. Despite ample evidence that Silverman had been working alone to satisfy a personal grudge, suspicions rapidly spread that the event was part of a larger socialist-anarchist plot. The result was one of the first crackdowns on far-left groups in the city—and the beginning of America’s long and troubled relationship with them for the next 80 years.

Today, all evidence of Silverman’s botched attack has been erased by a third renovation that Union Square underwent in 1928 to make way for New York’s first subway lines. The fountain where Silverman and Hildebrand bled on the ground while journalists and prosecutors stood and watched in shock has been removed and been planted with grass. With the rearranged of the pathways and widening of the surrounding roads, too, even less space remains for rallying and protest than before. Still, standing on the grassy lawn in the center of the park, one can still visualize Union Square as the socialist incubator it once was and, perhaps, channel Silverman’s last few glimpses of that tumultuous world.

Aimed at creating a resonance between history, technology and good old exploration by foot, Rama is a new type of tool for a new type of traveler.

Keep your eyes on this site for updates as we approach our release date in August 2010.