In addition to its tri-annual exhibits, the Hoboken Historical Museum has a great gift shop with many unusual Hoboken-specific items, including Hoboken: The Sinatra Tour, A Self-Guided Walking Tour of sites related to the famous entertainer. You can pick it up for $1 at 1301 Hudson Street during Museum hours, Tuesday – Thursday 5 – 9 p.m. and Saturday & Sunday noon – 5 p.m. The entrance is through the walkway cut into the former Bethlehem Steel Shipyard Machine Shop. Suggested admission to the Museum is $2; members admitted free.

The Sinatra Tour takes over two hours on foot and includes the Chairman’s birthplace, the site of the Crystal Ballroom where he sang as a youth, the Hoboken Public Library’s collection which includes an oil painting of the singer with his mother Dolly, the firehouse where Sinatra’s father Marty was a captain, and several local sites packed with Sinatrabilia.

Here’s a sample from the introduction, “Francis Albert Sinatra (1915-1998): “A Kid From Hoboken Who Got the Breaks”:

Old Blue Eyes. The Voice. Chairman of the Board. Or, in Hoboken, simply “Frankie.” Old-timers here may argue about whether Frank Sinatra was a class act or a bum, whether he was the best or others were better, but whatever they say about Sinatra, they say it like family. They knew the guy. He was from Hoboken. Nothing can change that.

He was, as one writer put it, “a kid from Hoboken who got the breaks.” And in the course of his sixty-year career, that skinny kid the others called “Slats” reshaped American popular music and ideas about style.

Frank Sinatra was America’s first teen heartthrob, earning another nickname – “Swoonatra” – after girls started fainting at his concerts during the 1940s. Boys imitated his slicked-back hair and cocky demeanor. All across the country – and then the world – sighing, swooning, swaggering fans fell in love with that voice, with an intimate style of singing that brought the listener inside the song, alongside the singer.

Perhaps that is why former bobby-soxers and zoot-suiters – sometimes with their kids and grandkids in tow – have journeyed for years to Sinatra’s birthplace, or packed into local taverns to celebrate the birth of this city’s most famous native son.

Excerpt © the Hoboken Historical Museum, 1998.