Gary Shteyngart's month of vermouth-rinsing and fat-washing.

I'm standing on Wall Street with the New York Stock Exchange behind me. If you come stand where I am, you will be surrounded by some of the newer tallest buildings in the entire city, but I'm also surrounded by some of the oldest buildings in the city. New York began to grow into what it is today. In this lesson I want to show you how it went from an indigenous people's forest, to a Dutch colony, to the U.S Capitol, and eventually to the financial center that it is today, and I also want to show you how you can go see remnants of what once was.

ORIGINALLY called Idlewild Airport, John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK) was built to relieve congestion at LaGuardia in 1948. It opened with six runways and five distinct architecturally stunning terminals. By the next decade, the airport was handling the largest amount of international air traffic in the world and was the first place to serve passenger jets. But JFK’s world renowned status soon took a nosedive. With increased demand and a terminal layout designed from a pre-jet age, it simply couldn't keep up.