Meet the remarkable but forgotten men and women who shaped New York City

Those who make history aren’t always remembered by it.

Sam Roberts’ latest book, “The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years and the Untold Biography of the World’s Greatest City” delivers what readers have come to expect from the veteran New York journalist. It’s a detailed look at mostly unknown folks who contributed to the city.

Roberts focuses on ordinary people involved in extraordinary things, city dwellers who caught our imagination – at least for a moment.

Often Roberts looked for firsts, and not just positive ones. The book’s opening chapter is about the city’s original homicide victim – John Colman, second mate on Henry Hudson’s schooner, killed Sept. 6, 1609, while rowing to shore.

Although the cause of death remained unclear, and there were plenty of suspects — the Irish victim disliked Hudson’s mostly Dutch crew, calling them “an ugly lot” — the mysterious attack was blamed on unknown Native Americans.

“Not only is it the first recorded murder in New York (of a European, at least),” Roberts writes, “but its investigation could be considered the first example of racial profiling.”

Nearly two centuries later, another mysterious murder held the city’s attention. On Dec. 22, 1799, Elma Sands, 22, left home, reportedly to elope with her fiancé, Levi Weeks. She was found 10 days later at the bottom of a well.

“She was bruised; her dress was torn,” Roberts writes, “Had she jumped, or been pushed?”

Pushed, concluded the grand jury. Weeks was arrested.

He seemed headed for prison, maybe the gallows. But his brother, Ezra, a respected architect, who would later build Gracie Mansion, had powerful friends.

Taking charge, Ezra Weeks assembled the nation’s first legal dream team — Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Briefly putting aside a feud that would soon turn fatal — for Hamilton, at least — the rivals defended Levi for free.

In court, the legal duo denied Weeks and Sands were lovers. They suggested she was seeing someone else. They noted that she had been taking strong drugs for stomach cramps, and once threatened suicide. They blamed the victim.

The judge took their side, even advising the jury he believed in Weeks’ innocence. The defendant was acquitted.

It was early proof, perhaps, that American justice favored the well-connected. It was certainly proof that New Yorkers loved true-crime stories. The court clerk, who had taken the trial down in shorthand, later published it to acclaim. Hamilton even made him the editor of his new newspaper, the New York Evening Post.

Although Roberts’ book begins by recounting bloody crimes, it also profiles one of the people sworn to prevent them. Jacob Hayes, the great-grandson of Dutch Jews, was appointed a New York city marshal in 1797 when he was 26. He would serve in law enforcement for more than 50 years, eventually supervising others as Manhattan’s High Constable.

The scowling lawman became a fearsome legend, dressed in plain clothes and carrying a gold-tipped staff. Like the boogeyman, his name was “used as a cudgel by frustrated parents, teachers, neighbors and other adults,” Roberts says. Watch yourself, children were warned, or Old Hayes will get you.

“He evoked fear in the hearts of juvenile rapscallions and hardened miscreants alike,” Roberts writes. “He could recognize the faces of former defendants and suspects almost instinctively. Strangers he could not readily identify were suspect immediately by their very anonymity.”

As the years went on, citizens demanded a more professional police force. Although no mayor dared fire Hayes, his time had passed. After he died in 1850, the city successfully pushed through a series of reforms, including giving every police officer a uniform and a copper badge.

That led to a new nickname, “coppers.”

Crime isn’t all that New Yorkers obsess over. There’s also real estate. And Roberts finds room here for several people who changed the city (or attempted to preserve it), from the man who built the first Broadway theater to the homemakers who tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Some people even re-invented neighborhoods.

It was 1899 when Philip A. Payton came to New York to seek his fortune. A Black, 24-year-old high-school dropout, the odds were against him. For eight months, he swept the floors in a real estate office. There were days when he couldn’t afford the nickel fare to ride home.

Eventually, though, Payton opened up his own real estate office with some savings and an idea. He knew the expanding subway lines would bring new tenants uptown. He also knew that many white people wouldn’t want to live next to Blacks – and that he could use that prejudice to his advantage.

“He weaponized racial discrimination,” Roberts writes.

Slowly, Payton began buying apartment buildings in Harlem, and renting to other Blacks. When whites in neighboring buildings moved out, he would also purchase those properties. Block by block, he transformed the neighborhood, even as white landlords fumed.

Payton may have been motivated more by profit than politics, but the result was the same. By the 1920s, four out of five Black New Yorkers called Harlem their own – and the cultural explosion known as the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing.

Culture is a huge part of what defines Manhattan, and after crime and real estate, celebrities are probably what New Yorkers most talk about. In his dedication to lesser-known New Yorkers, Roberts steers clear of most of them.

But he makes an exception for some, like Audrey Munson, the free-spirited model who appeared nude in a 1915 movie, “Inspiration,” and posed for Civic Fame, the statue atop the Manhattan Municipal Building. In 1917, however, she was “the other woman” in an affair that ended with a prominent doctor murdering his wife, then killing himself in prison. The scandal ruined Munson. Eventually committed to an asylum, she died there, in 1996, at 104.

Happier, though, was the union of John “Tex” McCrary and Eugenia “Jinx” Falkenburg. He was a reporter turned government flack who once persuaded a pack of journalists not to report on Hiroshima’s devastation. “The biggest damn story I never told,” he bragged. She was a pinup model, the first Miss Rheingold.

They married in 1945 and persuaded NBC radio to give them an interview program the next year. The assistants they hired — eager upstarts like Andy Rooney and Barbara Walters — booked a stream of politicians and movie stars.

“The modern celebrity talk show was born,” Roberts writes.

The couple worked together on radio and then TV until the early 1950s. Then Falkenburg concentrated on reporting while McCrary focused on politics.

He engineered a 1952 rally in Madison Square Garden to persuade a reluctant Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president. He produced a U.S. trade show in Moscow in 1959 that gave Richard M. Nixon a chance to confront Nikita Khrushchev and eventually become a presidential contender. McCrary liked pulling the strings, calling himself “a catalyst on a hot tin roof.”

Falkenburg retired from broadcasting in 1958; the couple separated in 1980. When they died, within a month of each other in 2003, many New Yorkers no longer recognized their names, despite how popular they had been.

Like most of the people in Roberts’ book, they had been forgotten. But the New York they helped shape lives on.