While Boston and Philadelphia often dominate the conversation about America's Revolution, New York was at the center of events surrounding Independence and the City's history is often overlooked. The war literally began and ended in the city, from the earliest major battle - the largest and most important of the war - to the British evacuation.
My grandfather Sidney Lipsyte, the son of immigrants who became a New York City public-school teacher and administrator, lived from 1904 to 2005, a good run I don't expect to match. He witnessed, and sometimes experienced, a century of mayhem and invention: human flight, human spaceflight, pandemics, vaccines, economic devastation, Nazi conquest, atomic murder, peace treaties, civil rights, pacemakers, penicillin, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.
