An Eyesore and a Plague

At the turn of the 20th century, New York City’s millionaires started moving to the suburbs in Long Island and Westchester County. They had enormous homes and just about everything money could buy. There was just one problem: they weren’t alone. Around the same time, ordinary, middle-class New Yorkers started exploring the suburbs themselves. The millionaires were horrified to see commuters and tourists enjoying their suburban paradise. But the beaches and the roads were public: how could the millionaires possibly stop people from using them?It was actually pretty easy. All they had to do was pass one tiny amendment to an obscure part of New York State law…This is the story of how New York’s turn-of-the-century millionaires incorporated their private homes as legal municipalities, and how they used this power to exclude outsiders, dodge local taxes, and attempt to recreate feudal Europe in the New York suburbs.

Listen and follow

Information for podcasters

• Podcast GUID: 3de160f4-4472-51ea-ae90-ab083362e8f1
• This podcast doesn’t have a trailer. Apple Podcasts has a specific episode type for a trailer, which also gets used by many other podcast apps: but there isn’t one correctly marked in the RSS feed from the host.
• This podcast has no playable episodes.
• This podcast appears to be missing from Apple Podcasts and iVoox. We list all the podcast directories to be in.
• See this podcast’s listener numbers, contact details and more at Rephonic
• Validate this podcast’s RSS feed with Livewire, Truefans or CastFeedValidator

Privacy: The player will download audio directly from the host if you listen. That shares data (like your IP address or details of your device) with them.
Cache: This podcast page made Nov 14, 3:56am UTC. Scheduled for update on Dec 14. Rebuild this page now