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Kelly ventures to mysterious islands around New York to unearth the secrets that lie hidden in their past. On Hart Island, she meets with experts who enrich our understanding of the site’s rich history: before it became the city’s cemetery for unclaimed bodies, Hart Island was the training ground for African American regiments during the Civil War, as well as a mental asylum and hospital site. We also travel up the Hudson River to an abandoned castle on Bannerman Island, and explore the remains of a lost colony on Ruffle Bar in Jamaica Bay. Kelly also takes a tour of the only privately owned island left in New York City, two and a half acre Rat Island in the Bronx. We take to the water in this episode to the small islands we often see in the distance but can’t set foot on until now.

Before Radio and phonograph there was sheet music and pianos, lots of pianos, with aggressive song pluggers pounding out the next big hit for the music publishers along west 28th Street. They made such a racket, it sounded like a hundred people banging on tin pans, so Tin Pan Alley was born, and with it a new way of selling pop music to America. Kelly walks through the city’s musical past, into gambling halls where thugs and song writers rubbed shoulders, and into the vertical Tin Pan Alley of the next generation, the famous Brill Building at 49th and Broadway where almost every big Rock n Roll hit of the early 1960’s was created. We meet Neil Sedaka, the star who sold 25 million records as a singer and song writer in Brill Building from 1958 to 1963, and we explore the now-empty sound studios where records, television shows and films were mixed. Kelly meets the creators of a successful musical called Murder for Two and learns the basics of writing a good musical at the famous BMI Workshop. Whether it was the best song in a Vaudeville revue, number one in Billboard magazine or a hit Broadway show, New York City is still the heartbeat of American Pop Music.