If These Streets Could Talk, They’d Sound Like Ken Burns

Attention, dads: Ken Burns was in town recently, scouring SoHo for history. The documentary filmmaker, having made mammoth miniseries on the Civil War, the Roosevelts, Prohibition, the Vietnam War, country music, jazz, baseball, and other hallmarks of the American story, has finally gotten around to our messy, violent, idealistic founding. His new series, “The American Revolution”—six episodes, twelve hours, ten years in the making—airs on PBS in November, just shy of the nation’s two- hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. Burns was up to something extremely 2025: shooting a man-on-the-street promotional video.

SoHo, Burns explained, has a slew of streets named for Revolutionary generals. “It’s almost like a cemetery,” he said. The plan: prowl the cobblestones, spit out some rapid-fire history, and release the video through his online platform, UNUM. (He’d been posting from such locations as Monticello and Yorktown.) A two-man crew miked him up on Spring Street, outside a children’s gym. Even before the camera rolled, Burns, in jeans and a sweater, was bursting with facts. “This city is the British stronghold,” he said. (History, for Burns, happens in the present tense.) “When Washington loses it, on September 15th—this day, two hundred and forty-nine years ago—it will stay in British hands for seven years and two months and ten days, because November 25, 1783, is Evacuation Day, the day the British finally fucking leave New York.”

He posed outside the Ear Inn (est. 1817), as a colleague pointed an iPhone at him. “Hey, it’s Ken Burns for ‘UNUM on the Road’!” he began. “We’re on the corner of Washington Street, named after the most important person in the Revolution, George Washington, after whom we do not have a country if he does not exist.” Cut. “I feel like Borat,” he said.

The group walked east. “I live in rural New Hampshire, but I know this area pretty well,” Burns said. “I walk these blocks wondering who went through them—particularly down here, where there’s so much history.”

On Varick, he stood in front of the former Trump SoHo. “Varick is named after Richard Varick, who was a mayor of New York City but also a soldier in the Revolution and a private secretary to George Washington,” he professed for the camera. “If you want to get to New Jersey, you take Varick.” Cut. “Boom! Onwards.”

At the corner of MacDougal and Prince, Burns talked about Alexander McDougall, a member of the Sons of Liberty and the first president of the Bank of New York. “Now they’re going to come fast and furious,” he said, darting through shoppers with tote bags. On Sullivan Street, he expounded on John Sullivan, a general who was captured at the Battle of Long Island and who later uprooted Native American villages upstate. “So, there’s some undertow with John Sullivan,” he noted. He passed a matcha place advertising passion-fruit-coconut lattes, something that did not exist in Revolutionary times. “Well, tea is a big reason for the war—the tax on tea! We can talk matcha.”

Next: Thompson Street, named after William Thompson, a “not very distinguished” general. A car with a Vermont plate nearly grazed Burns, but he was unfazed; Vermont was not yet a state during the Revolution, “so how can he hit me?” He passed a Marc Jacobs (not a general) boutique and hit Wooster Street, named after General David Wooster. As he crossed Greene (“You cannot say enough about the importance of Nathanael Greene”), a bro in a backward cap started filming Burns on his own smartphone and asked, “What do you do for a living?”

“Ignore strangers,” Burns said.

“Hey, a stranger’s a friend in disguise,” the bro replied.

“I’m just teasing you. I’m a filmmaker.”

“Have you made something that I might have heard of?”

“Doubtful,” Burns said, and scurried away. He stopped at Mercer Street (Hugh Mercer, “a brigadier general who was bayonetted and eventually died from his wounds at the Battle of Princeton”) and ended at Lafayette, named, as any “Hamilton” fan knows, for the Marquis de Lafayette, who came from France as a nineteen-year-old to help fight the British and was, Burns added, “very handsome.”

After they wrapped, Burns sat on a bench in Cleveland Place (Grover Cleveland—wrong century) and recounted his own New York story. From 1975 to 1979, he split his time between Amherst and Manhattan, where he slept on couches and tried to raise money for his first documentary, about the Brooklyn Bridge. “I looked twelve years old,” he recalled. He’d drink with friends at the Ear Inn or go to jazz shows at Bradley’s, on University Place. He prefers to stay in SoHo when he’s in town and, like a lot of New Yorkers, sees the neighborhood as a place where the past is palpable. “I am the biggest kvetcher about what we’ve lost,” he said. “The Gourmet Garage on Broome Street—why did that disappear?” ♦