Alexander Manevitz, author of The Rise and Fall of Seneca Village: Remaking Race and Space in Nineteenth-Century New York City (forthcoming), on the free black community destroyed to build Central Park

Graham Russell Gao Hodges, author of David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City, on Mother Zion A.M.E. Church and its nationally influential antislavery leaders

Leslie Alexander, author of African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861, on the African meetinghouse, headquarters of the secret society that created the state’s first incorporated black organization; for a century, NYC’s most prominent black mutual aid group

Christopher F. Minty, author of “American Demagogues”: The Origins of Loyalism in New York City (forthcoming), on James Rivington and his controversial printshop in Hanover Square

Russell Shorto, author of the national bestseller The Island at the Center of the World, on Fort Amsterdam and the Dutch colony it protected

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

Amy Starecheski, author of Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, on Bullet Space in the Lower East Side

Mark R. Wilson, author of Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II and The Business of Civil War, on the Brooklyn Navy Yard

Kathleen Murphy Skolnik, co-author of The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meière, on the lobby of the AT&T Long Distance Building in Tribeca

Francis Morrone, the noted architectural historian, author of eleven books, on the Institute of Classical Art and Architecture in Midtown