On this date in...

1842...The New York Philharmonic gives its first concert in The Apollo Room on Lower Broadway. Today the Philharmonic is America's oldest orchestra.

1941...The city swings into wartime alert as word arrives of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese nationals living in New York are rounded up by FBI agents and held on Ellis Island, then are later transferred to holding camps for the remainder of the war.

1993...Colin Ferguson, an unemployed Jamaican immigrant living in Brooklyn, opens fire on a Long Island Rail Road train, killing six passengers and wounding 19 others in what his defense attorneys later claim is a state of rage over racial prejudice. Ferguson is eventually sentenced to 315 years in prison, and in 1996 Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband, Dennis, was killed in the attack, is elected to the U.S. Congress on a gun-control platform.

Today's New Yorker birthdays include actor Eli Wallach, born in Brooklyn in 1915.