Charting Elvis's New York City Haunts

By Stephen M. Silverman

Monday August 12, 2002 10:45 AM EDT

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As of Friday it will be 25 years ago that Elvis Presley died, and New York will not be left out of the nostalgia for the lost King of Rock 'n' Roll. Both The New York Times and New York Post have gone to town with stories of Presley's favorite hangouts in the Big Apple. Though a Memphis boy through and through, Presley, who was 42 when he died Aug. 16, 1977, made his first trip to Manhattan in 1956, to appear on a few TV shows. The most famous, notes The Times, was CBS's "The Ed Sullivan Show," which was broadcast from the theater where David Letterman now tapes his "Late Show." The next year, 1957, Sullivan made his now-infamous decision to show the swivel-hipped musician only from the waist up, so as not to offend viewers' sensibilities. But it was in 1958 that Elvis took his most publicized New York trip: to the Brooklyn Army Terminal, before he was shipped off to serve with the U.S. Army in Germany. Despite his passages through New York, the Southern boy never really warmed up to the big city, Gordon Stoker, a member of Elvis's backup group, the Jordanaires, told the Post. "He didn't like the hustle and bustle," reveals Stoker. Viva Las Vegas.

Remember Elvis's amazing and sometimes bizarre life in our special photo gallery.