From a Wall Street Journal review by Edward Kosner of the book by Sam Roberts titled “The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People. 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World’s Greatest City”:

Did you know that the first murder victim in what we now know as New York was a crewman on the flyboat Half Moon, killed in 1609 by a Lenape arrow as his captain, Henry Hudson, sailed up the river that bears his name? Or that in 1800, New York had 12,000 roaming pigs fouling its streets, more than the human population of Washington, D.C., the nation’s new capital? Or that in 1829, the prominent New York judge John Lansing disappeared without a trace almost precisely a century before Justice Joseph Force Crater did his celebrated vanishing act?