Orvy lives in Peekskill New York with his father, a banker, and his mother, who suffers from consumption: what we know as tuberculosis today. The story begins in June of 1870, as Orvy and his parents set out for a day's visit to New York City. It's their last family outing before Mr. Leblanc takes his wife to California on the new transcontinental railroad for a long rest cure. Orvy will be spending the summer at his grandparents' farm in Spuyten Duyvil at the northernmost end of Manhattan Island.

While they are in the city, they stop off in Central Park. "Back then, the city didn't go further north than Harlem," says Mr. Sirois. "But even that was still just a village. Past that was nothing much more than a few farms that hadn't yet been absorbed, like the one belonging to Orvy's grandparents." Central Park itself was still new and unfinished. But on one side of it, near Sixty-third Street, a Paleozoic Museum was being constructed by the city to house a collection of sculptures and dioramas built by the famous British artist,

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Orvy is a budding artist despite his father's opinion that art is "impractical." When Orvy meets Mr. Hawkins, his skill and knowledge of dinosaurs so impress the older man that he offers to take Orvy on as an assistant.

"Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was very famous in his day," Mr. Sirois says. He had been in charge of relocating the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in England from London to Sydenham in 1852. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, had suggested that the new grounds be decorated with restorations of extinct beasts. Hawkins, well known as a wildlife painter with an interest in prehistoric life, was appointed to head the project. He did so well at it that when he was in the U.S. a few years later, he was approached by Andrew Green of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park. Mr. Green proposed a similar restoration of prehistoric animals in Central Park.

"Hawkins couldn't pass up that opportunity," explains Mr. Sirois. "He agreed at once and set about the task. An educated, scientifically minded and artistically inclined boy like Orvy would certainly have known about Benjamin Hawkins - particularly if, like Orvy, he had an interest in New York City and dinosaurs."

Just as it is today, New York City in 1870 was an exciting place to be. The first primitive subway had just been unveiled by Alfred Beach, the editor publisher of Scientific American. "Beach lived and worked in New York," says Mr. Sirois. "Even by today's standards traffic was terrible. There were no traffic lights in those days, so carriages, horse-drawn trolleys and men on bicycles all vied loudly and furiously for the right of way. You think congestion is bad now? Factor endless horse manure into the equation!" Beach came up with the idea of a subterranean method of transportation. Beach's Folly, as it was known, ran just over three hundred feet up Broadway starting right near City Hall. It had been unveiled with tremendous publicity in February and had attracted attention from the start. With the el and the trains and plenty of shipping and horse-drawn carriages - not to mention the glut of velocipedes - the idea of a subterranean means of getting from place to place and avoiding the surface crowds was intriguing, to say the least.

New York, however, was run by Boss Tweed, the powerful Tammany Hall politician, and his cronies. Tweed didn't like the subway because he believed it would cut into the profits he was skimming from the ground-level trolleys and Hansom cabs. "So," says Mr. Sirois, "Tweed had the project killed. The same fate befell the Paleozoic Museum in Central Park. Tweed simply couldn't see any way to make a buck off of it." He ordered a group of thugs to break into Hawkin's studio and destroy the huge plaster and metal dinosaurs that the English artist and his staff were building.

"It's a true story," Mr. Sirois goes on to say. "That's what was so appealing to me about the idea. A gang of William Marcy "Boss" Tweed's thugs really did break into Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's studio on that day more than a century ago to smash the dinosaur sculptures.

They came back later to destroy the smaller models, too, throwing the armatures in Central Park Lake and burying the pieces elsewhere in the park. Although the records make no note of it, I think it is quite likely that the famous artist could have had a young American apprentice like Orvy working for him. Orvy is a fictional character, but I was able to use some of the most famous real people of the day as characters, too. Tweed himself never appears, but other well-known New Yorkers do, such as Phineas T. Barnum, and the artist Thomas Nast, who invented the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. In fact, when Tweed was on the run from his crimes some years later, he was recognized because of Nast's scathingly accurate caricatures of him and thrown into jail."

Sirois, known primarily as a writer of science fiction, also loves history. "New York, always ahead of its time, was on the verge of the 20th Century even in 1870," he says. "One reason I wrote this book was to let me do a little armchair time-traveling so that I could explore the city in 1870. It was a different place than it is now but in many ways, it would have been recognizable to a present-day New Yorker. I believe that in order to understand who we are, we need to look at where we've been and what we were doing. That's one reason why I enjoy history, and it's another reason why I wrote this book. I'm also hoping I can turn some of today's young people on to history. I hope they enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it."

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An artist as well as a writer, A.L. Sirois has done hundreds of other illustrations, including the drawings for his children's book PENGUIN ISLAND, also from Hard Shell Word Factory. Other recently published works include the science fiction novels BLOOD RELATIONS, its sequel BLIND AMBITIONS, and a collection of short stories titled THE BEGINNINGS OF FOREVER. These are available online from Powell's and Barnes & Noble, or from the publisher, Clocktower Books. His paranormal thriller, DETONATOR, is due later this year from Clocktower.