Lindsay K. Campbell, author of City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City’s Nature, on the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm at the Navy Yard

Bonnie Yochelson, author of a forthcoming study of Alice Austen, on the pioneering Gilded Age photographer’s home in Staten Island

Joseph Alexiou, author of Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal, on the notoriously polluted creek, and the Conservancy working to restore it.

Sergey Kadinsky, NYC Parks Department analyst and the author of Hidden Waters of New York City, on the Ridgewood Reservoir in Highland Park, on the Queens-Brooklyn border.

Sharon Zukin, author of Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture, on ‘B. Altman’s,’ the famous Midtown department store, and the new world of consumption it helped make

Randall Mason, co-author of North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City, on this now-abandoned, once-feared part of Gotham’s archipelago, which served for decades as (often forced) quarantine for the ill during various epidemics

Stacy Horn, author of Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York, on the notorious ‘lunatic asylum,’ prison, workhouses, and hospitals that once stood on Roosevelt Island

Brendan Cooper, author of “The Domino Effect: Politics, Policy, and the Consolidation of the Sugar Refining Industry in the United States, 1789–1895,” on the rise and fall of the enormous Williamsburg, Brooklyn factory

Bob McGee, author of The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers, on the iconic stadium (formerly in Crown Heights) and its still-bemoaned departure

Shane White, author of Prince of Darkness and Stories of Freedom in Black New York, on the African Grove, a theater company which played with an entirely black cast and crew to mostly black audiences in the last days of slavery in NYC