Captains, Pirates and Ghosts
Kelly Choi explores the South Street Seaport and climbs aboard the tall ships that made New York an international trade center.  We see the city’s earliest hotel rooms, meet sea pirates like Captain Kidd who made Manhattan their home, and search for ghosts in the oldest tavern in New York City.

Hidden Gems
Secrets of New York - Hidden Gems is a half hour television show that explores four of the City's historically significant landmarks in ways the viewer has never experienced. Sponsored by American Express.

Montayne's Rivulet
Kelly Choi joins the Central Park Conservancy's Doug Blonsky for a look at Montayne's Rivulet, one of the park, and city's best secrets.

New York City's Waterfront
Kelly takes a virtual trip back in time to see what Manhattan looked like 400 years ago before the tops of hills were scraped off and dumped into the river. Kelly also journeys through underground brooks and streams, and we learn what’s really underfoot at South Street Seaport where the skeletons of sunken ships provided the City’s earliest landfill. Kelly then explores how landfill changed two centuries later with the engineering marvel that created the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Prohibition and the Mob
In the 20s, when every illegal bar in Manhattan was making payoffs just to stay open, criminal enterprise became Organized Crime. On the surface the best speakeasies, like the 21 Club, glittered with patrons willing to pay as much for a night out as the average American earned in a year. Kelly travels through the 21 Club’s secret vault and onto the island of Broad Channel in Queens. There houses built on pilings over the water of Jamaica Bay still stand from the time when speedboats would load illegal booze from the rum ships floating just outside international waters. Plus we make the acquaintance of Arnold Rothstein, the Prohibition-era gangster who met his end at a secret location we’ll get to visit.

Medicine in New York City
It wasn’t just immigrants that flooded into the City during the nineteenth century, but also yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. Kelly traces the struggle that finally brought the City’s first permanent Board of Health to fight the epidemics that had killed thousands of New Yorkers. Plus we meet two medical heroes who saved hundreds of lives: Edward R. Squibb, who started at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the 1840s and perfected the manufacture of ether as an anesthetic, and a living legend of surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center who changed heart and vascular surgery, Dr. Frank Spencer.

Cinema
Kelly traces New York City’s cinematic history, all the way back to 1897 and Brooklyn’s Vitagraph Studios, the oldest movie studio building in the country. Along the way, Kelly also discovers the accomplishments of the first African American feature film director and the important role the City’s movie business continued to play after studios moved to Hollywood. Even Mickey Mouse found his voice in New York City.

Speakeasies
When Congress made liquor illegal in 1920, ordinary citizens who just wanted a drink had to become criminals to get one. The law intended to shut down legal drinking establishments produced a doubling in the number of underground world speakeasies. Kelly revisits the golden era of saloon culture at Bill’s Gay Nineties with an 1880s tasty and highly flammable cocktail. Included is a look at the City’s queen of speakeasies: America’s first female master of ceremonies, the legendary Texas Guinan. Finally Kelly takes a trip uptown to Harlem to a speakeasy that’s still operating where it was on West 133rd when it was called Swing Street.

New York City at War
From the American Revolution to World War II, New York City has experienced its share of war. Kelly reveals that New York had its own Tea Party, just like Boston, back when we were still a British colony and uncovers the truth about the infamous British prison ships during the Revolutionary War with Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Edwin Burrows. She also gets to the bottom of the worst riots in America’s history that took place on the streets of this City during the Civil War as well as the only act of foreign sabotage that rivaled the terror of 9/11 in lower Manhattan: the destruction of Black Tom Island by German spies during World War I.

Theatre
Kelly introduces viewers to the history of New York City’s theatre district as she explores the ghosts who seem to make regular appearances in the dressing rooms and backstages of Broadway, tours the secret apartments that exist above many of Broadway’s theatres and uncovers the strange connection between a human skull at the Players Club and one of America’s greatest actors.

Crime and Justice
How did New York City once end up with two police forces that spent more time battling each other than fighting crime? And how did the City’s biggest mafia don help win World War II from his jail cell? Kelly gets to the bottom of these gritty and fascinating secrets in the City.