By SAM ROBERTS

NEW YORK - Forlornly unidentified and altogether forgotten, these sites have been literally lost to history.

On Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, there is a block where the first cellphone call was completed in 1973; on West 125th Street, where the old Blumstein’s department store stood, nothing marks the place where the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed in 1958.

Then there is the spot on Fifth Avenue where Winston Churchill, crossing against the light, was struck by a car in 1931 and nearly killed.

And what about the old Winter Garden Theater at 691 Broadway? In 1864, on the very night that Confederate sympathizers singled out the Lafarge Hotel next door in their plot to burn down New York, the Booth brothers - John Wilkes, Junius Brutus Jr. and Edwin - starred in “Julius Caesar.” The benefit performance, which was billed as the brothers’ sole joint engagement, raised $3,500 for the Shakespeare statue that still stands in Central Park. (John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.)

Andrew Carroll, 39, an amateur historian, recently embarked on a 50-state journey to uncover, memorialize and preserve these and other sites where history happened serendipitously, and which, for one reason or another, have been relegated to anonymity. “It’s sort of a reverse scavenger hunt,” he said. “Trying to find things that aren’t there.”

His nonprofit Here Is Where campaign is collaborating with National Geographic Traveler.

Mr. Carroll’s latest crusade (www.HereIsWhere.org) was inspired by a story he read 15 years ago about a dramatic rescue that occurred during Mr. Lincoln’s first term as president. The president’s son Robert Todd Lincoln was about to board a sleeping car at Exchange Place in Jersey City, New Jersey, one night when he fell between the platform and the train as it started to pull out of the station.

“My coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform,” Lincoln recalled years later. “Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name.”

Mr. Carroll hopes to install a marker at the site, now a station for trains between New York and New Jersey.

“We’re all attracted to great stories, and in that way history sells itself,” he said. If history is taught by rote, though, students will tune out, he said. “The more we make history about memorizing names and places and dates we’re going to lose the next generation.”

Those great stories, he said, reveal some of the eternal truths about human nature, humanity’s brutality, heroism, resilience. “For every John Wilkes Booth,” he said, “there was an Edwin.”

New York is rich in historic sites that have escaped the lore of the city.

Kalustyan’s, the Middle Eastern and Indian food market at Lexington Avenue and 28th Street, is the only building in the city still standing where a president of the United States was sworn in.(On September 20, 1881, Vice President Chester A. Arthur took the oath at his home there after President James A. Garfield died of gunshot wounds.) A plaque in the locked vestibule for the apartments upstairs is the only hint of anything historic.

In 1908, baseball’s greatest hit, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” was published by the composer’s company on West 28th Street and made its debut with a performance at the Amphion, an opera house in Brooklyn. No marker identifies either site.

“What Andy’s doing is sensational,” said Keith Bellows, the editor of National Geographic Traveler, “in that he’s peeling back a layer of history to expose Americans where they live and where they travel to things they otherwise might not have been aware of.”


CLOSE CALL Fifth Avenue between 76th and 77th Streets was where Winston Churchill was hit by a car in 1931 and nearly killed.


SWORN IN Kalustyan’s, on Lexington Avenue, is the only building in New York still standing where a president was sworn in: Chester A. Arthur. / PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD PERRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES