TIME TRAVEL DEPT. A SOHO WALKABOUT

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.

- Michael Schulman

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.