The New York City subway system turns 120 years old later this year so we thought we'd honor the world's longest subway system with a supersized overview history -- from the first renegade ride in 1904 to the belated (but sorely welcomed) opening of one portion of the Second Avenue Subway in 2017.

New Yorkers like Alfred Ely Beach had envisioned a subway system for the city as early as the 1870s. Yet years of political delay and a lack of funding ensured that dreams of an underground transit would languish. It wasn't until the mid-1890s that the city got on track with the help of August Belmont and the newly formed Interborough Rapid Transit.

We’ll tell you about the construction of the first line, traveling miles underground through Manhattan and into the Bronx. How did the city cope with this massive project? And what unfortunate accident nearly ripped apart a city block mere feet from Grand Central?

You'll also find out how something as innocuous sounding as the ‘Dual Contracts’ actually became one of the most important events in the city’s history, creating new underground passages into Brooklyn, the Bronx and (wondrously!) Queens.

Then we’ll talk about the city’s IND line, which completes our modern track lines and gives the subway its modern sheen.

Through it all, the New York City subway system is a masterwork of engineering and construction. In particular, after listening to this show, you won’t look at the Herald Square subway station the same way again.

Today's episode is a remastered and re-edited edition of two 2011 Bowery Boys podcasts, featuring newly recorded material to take the story to the present day.

Visit the website for more information and images

FURTHER LISTENING

Other Bowery Boys podcasts on the subway and mass transit:

Miss Subways: Queens of the New York Commute
Opening Day of the New York City Subway 
The First Subway: Beach's Pneumatic Marvel
Subway Graffiti 1970-1989
Cable Cars, Trolleys and Monorails
New York's Elevated Railroads 
The East Side Elevateds: Life Under the Tracks

The story of a filthy and dangerous train ditch that became one of the swankiest addresses in the world -- Park Avenue. 

For over 100 years, a Park Avenue address meant wealth, glamour and the high life. The Fred Astaire version of the Irving Berlin classic "Puttin' on the Ritz" revised the lyrics to pay tribute to Park Avenue: "High hats and Arrow collars/White spats and lots of dollars/Spending every dime for a wonderful time."

By the 1950s, the avenue was considered the backbone of New York City with corporations setting up glittering new office towers in the International Style -- the Lever House, the Seagram Building, even the Pan Am Building. 

But the foundation for all this wealth and success was, in actually, a train tunnel, originally operated by the New York Central Railroad. This street, formerly known as Fourth Avenue, was (and is) one of New York's primary traffic thoroughfares. For many decades, steam locomotives dominated life along the avenue, heading into and out of Cornelius Vanderbilt's Grand Central (first a depot, then a station, eventually a terminal).

However train tracks running through a quickly growing city are neither safe nor conducive to prosperity. Eventually, the tracks were covered with beautiful flowers and trees, on traffic island malls which have gotten smaller over the years. 

By the 1910s this allowed for glamorous apartment buildings to rise, the homes of a new wealthy elite attracted to apartment living in the post-Gilded Age era. But that lifestyle was not quite made available to everyone. 

In this episode, Greg and Tom take you on a tour of the tunnels and viaducts that helped New York City to grow, creating billions of dollars of real estate in the process. 

FURTHER LISTENING

Listen to these related Bowery Boys episodes after you're done listening to the Park Avenue show:

The Pan Am Building
It Happened In Madison Square Park 
The Chrysler Building and the Great Skyscraper Race
The Rescue of Grand Central Terminal
 

FURTHER READING

This week we're suggesting a few historic designation reports for you history supergeeks looking for a deep dive into Park Avenue history. Dates indicated are when the structure or historic district was designated

St. Bartholomew's Church and Community House (1967)

Seventh Regiment Armory/Park Avenue Armory (1967)

Consulate General of Italy (formerly the Henry P. Davison House) (1970)

New World Foundation Building (1973)

Racquet and Tennis Club Building (1979)

Pershing Square Viaduct/Park Avenue Viaduct (1980)

Upper East Side Historic District Designation Report (1981)

Lever House (1982)

1025 Park Avenue Reginald DeKoven House (1986)

New York Central Building (1987)

Seagram Building (1989)

Mount Morris Bank Building (1991)

Expanded Carnegie Hill Historic District Report (1993)

Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (1993)

Pepsi-Cola Building (1995)

Ritz Tower (2002)

2 Park Avenue Building (2006)

Park Avenue Historic District Designation Report (2014)

Few areas of the United States have as endured as long as Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood with almost over 375 years of history and an evolving cultural landscape that includes Quakers, trees, Hollywood films, world fairs, and new Asian immigration.

In this special on-location episode of the Bowery Boys, Greg and special guest Kieran Gannon explore the epic history of Flushing through five specific locations -- the Bowne House, Kingsland Homestead (home of the Queens Historical Society), the Lewis Latimer House Museum, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and a downtown dumpling restaurant named Old Captain's Dumplings.

Built on the marshy banks of Flushing Creek, the original Dutch village of Flushing (or Vlissingen) was populated by English settlers, Quakers like John and Hannah Bownewhose home became one of America's first Quaker meeting places -- and the site of a religious struggle critical to the formation of the future United States.

By the early 19th century, Flushing was better known for its tree and shrub nurseries which would introduce dozens of new plant species to North America. After the Civil War, Flushing became a weekend getaway and commuter town for the residents of western Long Island. The former civic center of town -- the 1862 Flushing Town Hall -- is still a vibrant performance venue today.

The creation of the borough of Queens in 1898 brought surprising changes to Flushing -- from the arrival of the early silent-film industry to the development of new parks and highways (thanks to our old friend Robert Moses).

But the most stunning transformation of all came after 1965 when American immigration quotas were eliminated and Flushing gained thousands of new residents from China, Taiwan, Korea, India, and other South Asian countries.

Visit the website for more images and information about visiting the places featured on this show

In today’s episode, Tom visits the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side to walk through the reconstructed two-room apartment of an African-American couple, Joseph and Rachel Moore, who lived in 1870 on Laurens Street in today’s Soho neighborhood.

Both Joseph and Rachel moved to New York when they were about 20 years old, in the late 1840s and 1850s. They married, worked, raised a family – and they shared their small apartment with another family to help cover costs. 

Their home has been recreated in the Tenement Museum’s newest exhibit, “A Union of Hope: 1869.” The exhibit reimagines what their apartment may have looked like – and it also explores life in the Eighth Ward of Manhattan, and, specifically, within the black community of the turbulent and dangerous decades of the 1850s and 60s.

This is the first time the museum has recreated the apartment of a black family – although, as you’ll hear, the museum’s founders had long planned for it. And the exhibit is also the first time the museum has recreated an apartment that wasn’t housed in one of their buildings on the Lower East Side, but in another neighborhood. 

So, just who were Joseph and Rachel Moore? And how and why did the Tenement Museum choose to put them at the center of their new exhibit? 

FURTHER LISTENING:
Tales from a Tenement: Three Families Under One Roof (episode #246)
Nuyorican: The Great Puerto Rican Migration to New York (episode #384)
The Deadly Draft Riots of 1863 
Seneca Village and New York's Forgotten Black Communities

Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence is a perfect novel to read in the spring — maybe its all the flowers — so I finally picked it up to re-read, in part due to this excellent episode from the Gilded Gentleman which we are presenting to you this week. 

The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, an enduring classic of Old New York that has been rediscovered by a new generation. What is it about this story of Newland Archer, May Welland and Countess Olenska that readers respond to today?

Noted Wharton scholar Dr. Emily Orlando joins Carl Raymond on The Gilded Gentleman podcast to delve into the background of this novel, take a deep dive into the personalities of the major characters and discuss what Wharton wanted to say in her masterpiece.  

Edith Wharton published The Age of Innocence at a very important moment in her life. 

When the novel came out in 1920, she had been living in France full-time for nearly 10 years and had seen the devastating effects of World War I up close. Her response was to look back with a sense of nostalgia to the time of her childhood to recreate that staid, restrictive world of New York in the 1870s. A world that, despite its elite social cruelty, seemed to have some kind of moral center (at least to her). 

Baseball, as American as apple pie, really is “the New York game.” While its precursors come from many places – from Jamestown to Prague – the rules of American baseball and the modern ways of enjoying it were born from the urban experience and, in particular, the 19th-century New York region. 

The sport (in the form that we know it today) developed in the early 1800s, played in Manhattan’s many open lots or New Jersey public parklands and soon organized into regular teams and eventually leagues. The way that New Yorkers played baseball was soon the way most Americans played by the late 19th century.

But it wasn’t until the invention of regular ball fields – catering to paying customers – that baseball became truly an urban recreational experience. And that too was revolutionized in New York.

Just in time for spring and the new Major League baseball season, Tom and Greg are joined by the acclaimed Kevin Baker, author of The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City to discuss the early history of the sport and its unique connections to New York City.

This show is truly the ultimate origin story of New York baseball, featuring tales of the city’s oldest and most legendary sports teams – the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants. AND the New York Metropolitans – a different team than today’s Mets located in Queens.

Where was baseball played? Kevin shares the secrets of New York baseball’s earliest venues – from the many Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn

This is a true five-borough origin story! With stops at Hilltop Park (Manhattan), Yankee Stadium (Bronx), Fashion Race Course (Queens), Washington Park (Brooklyn), and St. George Cricket Grounds (Staten Island) among many other sites.

FEATURING the surprising link between baseball and Boss Tweed and his notorious political machine Tammany Hall

PLUS How did segregation distort the game and where did Black ballplayers play the sport? What was baseball like before Jackie Robinson?

Visit our website for more information

The Chrysler Building remains one of America's most beautiful skyscrapers and a grand evocation of Jazz Age New York. But this architectural tribute to the automobile is also the greatest reminder of a furious construction surge that transformed the city in the 1920s.

After World War I, New York became newly prosperous, one of the undisputed business capitals of the world. The tallest building was the Woolworth Building, but the city's rise in prominence demanded new, taller towers, taking advantage of improvements in steel-frame construction and a clever 'wedding cake' zoning law that allowed for ever-higher buildings.

Into this world came William Van Alen and H. Craig Severance, two former architectural partners who had unamicably separated and were now designing rival skyscrapers. Each man wanted to make the tallest building in the world.

But Van Alan had the upper hand, backed by one of America's most famous businessmen -- Walter Chrysler. His automobiles were the coolest, sleekest vehicles in the marketplace. His brand required a skyscraper of radical design and surprising height.

In 1930, the Chrysler became the tallest building in the world, a title it held until the Empire State Building.

Just ten years ago, the Chrysler Building was the fourth tallest in New York City. Today, however, it's the thirteenth tallest building in the city. And that's because of a new skyscraper surge shaping the city's skyline, with supertalls making the skyscrapers of old feel very small in comparison.

It can be bewildering to see the skyline change so rapidly. But that's exactly how New Yorkers felt exactly one century ago.

Visit our website for pictures and other episodes

The Brooklyn waterfront was once decorated with a yellow Domino Sugar sign, affixed to an aging refinery along a row of deteriorating industrial structures facing the East River.

The Domino Sugar Refinery, completed in 1883 (replacing an older refinery after a devastating fire), was more than a factory. During the Gilded Age and into the 20th century, this Brooklyn landmark was the center of America's sugar manufacturing, helping to fuel the country's hunger for sweet delights.

But the story goes further back in time -- back hundreds of years in New York City history. The sugar trade was one of the most important industries in New York, and for many decades, if you used sugar to make anything, you were probably using sugar that had been refined in New York.

Sugar helped to build New York. Thousands and thousands of New Yorkers were employed in sugarhouses and refineries. And of all the sugar makers, there was one name that stood above the rest -- Havemeyer!

The Havemeyers were America’s leading sugar titans and by the 1850s they had moved their empire to the Brooklyn waterfront – and the neighborhood of Williamsburg. Their massive refinery helped establish the industrial nature of Williamsburg and led a rush of sugar manufacturers to Brooklyn, most of which would then be absorbed into the Havemeyer’s operation.

But this story is even larger than New York, of course. It encompasses the transatlantic slave trade, political influence in the Caribbean, Cuba-United States relations, and the sorry working conditions faced by Hayemeyer's underpaid employees.

PLUS: It's Dumbo vs Williamsburg in the Coffee and Sugar War of the 1890s!

Visit the website for more information and images of places from this week's show

So much has happened in and around Madison Square Park -- the leafy retreat at the intersections of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street -- that telling its entire story requires an extra-sized episode, in honor of our 425th episode.

Madison Square Park was the epicenter of New York culture from the years following the Civil War to the early 20th century. The park was really at the heart of Gilded Age New York, whether you were rushing to an upscale restaurant like Delmonico’s or a night at the theater or maybe just an evening at one of New York’s most luxurious hotels like the Fifth Avenue Hotel or the Hoffman House.

The park is surrounded by some of New York’s most renowned architecture, from the famous Flatiron Building to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, once the tallest building in the world.

The square also lends its name, of course, to one of the most famous sports and performing venues in the world – Madison Square Garden. Its origins begin at the northeast corner of the park on the spot of a former railroad depot and near the spot of the birthplace of an American institution -- baseball.

The park introduced New Yorkers to the Statue of Liberty ... or at least her forearm and torch. It stood silently over the bustling park while prize-winning dogs were championed at the very first Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show nearby, held at Gilmore's Gardens, the precursor to Madison Square Garden.

Today the region north of the park is referred to as NoMad, which recalls life around Madison Square during the Gilded Age with its high-end restaurant and hotel scene.

Tom and Greg invite you on this time-traveling escapade covering over 200 years of history. From the days of rustic creeks and cottages to the long lines at the Shake Shake. From Franconi's Hippodrome to the dazzling cologne fountains of Leonard Jerome (Winston Churcill's grandfather).

Visit the website for more information.

This episode was edited by Kieran Gannon

FURTHER LISTENING RELATED TO THIS SHOW

-- The Delmonico Way with the Gilded Gentleman and current Delmonico's proprietor Max Tucci 
-- The Murder of Stanford White
-- The Flatiron Building

FX is debuting a new series created by Ryan Murphy — called Feud: Capote and the Swans -- regarding writer Truman Capote's relationship with several famed New York society women. And it's such a New York story that listeners have asked if we’re going to record a tie-in show to that series. Well, here it is! 

Capote -- who was born 100 years ago this year -- and the "swans" are part of the pivotal cast of this podcast, the story of one of the most exclusive parties ever held in New York. Tom and Greg recorded this show back in November of 2016 but, likely, most of you haven’t heard this one.

Truman was a true New York character, a Southern boy who wielded his immense writing talents to secure a place within Manhattan high society. Elegant, witty, compact, gay — Capote was a fixture of swanky nightclubs and arm candy to wealthy, well-connected women.

One project would entirely change his life — the completion of the classic In Cold Blood, a ‘non-fiction novel’ about a horrible murder in Kansas. Retreating from his many years of research, Truman decided to throw a party.

But this wasn’t ANY party. This soiree — a masquerade ball at the Plaza Hotel — would have the greatest assemblage of famous folks ever gathered for something so entirely frivolous. An invite to the ball was the true golden ticket, coveted by every celebrity and social climber in America.

FEATURING: Harper Lee, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Frank Sinatra, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Halston, Katharine Graham and a cast of thousands (well, or just 540)

Visit our website for fabulous pictures of this star-studded affair

OTHER RECOMMENDED LISTENING:

The History of the Plaza Hotel
The Beatles Invade New York
Leonard Bernstein's New York, New York
At Home With Lauren Bacall

The Kosciuszko Bridge is one of New York City's most essential pieces of infrastructure, the hyphen in the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that connects the two boroughs over Newtown Creek, the 3.5 mile creek which empties into the East River.

The bridge is interestingly named for the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kościuszko who fought during the American Revolution, then attempted to bring a similar revolutionary spirit to his home country, leading to the doomed Kościuszko Uprising of 1794.

Kościuszko, the man, is a revered historical figure. The bridge, however, has not always been loved. And many non-Polish people even struggle to pronounce its name, inventing a half-dozen acceptable variants.

The original Kościuszko Bridge was not exactly beloved by drivers, vexed by its inadequate handling of traffic and its poor roadways. Its glorious replacement, installed in two phases in 2017 and 2019, lights up the night sky -- and the filmy waters below.

In this episode, Greg tells the entire story -- of both the man and the bridge. But it's also a story of Newtown Creek, the heavily polluted body of water which runs beneath it. How did this once placid creek become so notoriously filthy? And how did the most prominent bridge over that waterway become associated with an 18th century hero?

PLUS The return of Robert Moses!

Visit the website for more information

On the morning of November 14th, 1943, Leonard Bernstein, the talented 25-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, got a phone call saying he would at last be leading the respected orchestral group — in six hours, that afternoon, with no time to rehearse.

The sudden thrust into the spotlight transformed Bernstein into a national celebrity. For almost five decades, the wunderkind would be at the forefront of American music, as a conductor, composer, virtuoso performer, writer, television personality and teacher.

He would also help create the most important Broadway musicals of the mid-20th century — On The Town, Wonderful Town and West Side Story. These shows would not only spotlight the talents of its young creator. They would also spotlight the romance and rhythm of New York City.

Bernstein is one of New York’s most influential cultural figures. He spent most of his life in the city, and that’s the focus of today’s story – Leonard Bernstein’s New York.

The new film Maestro, starring Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan, focuses on Bernstein’s personal story and intimate life. That specific angle is not our objective today – for the most part. We’re looking at the relationship between the creator and his urban inspiration. Where did Bernstein make his name in New York City and how did his work change the city?

FEATURING The Village Vanguard, City Center, Carnegie Hall, the old Metropolitan Opera and the Dakota Apartments

And co-starring Jerome Robbins, Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, Comden and Green, Lauren Bacall, Tom Wolfe of course Felicia Montealegre

Visit the website for more information and images

Music snippet information

“On The Town: Act I: Opening: New York, New York” (Studio Cast Recording 1961)

CBS Broadcast, Manfred Overture, Op 115 (New York Philharmonic)

“Joan Crawford Fan Club” The Revuers

Symphony No. 1 Jeremiah (New York Philharmonic)

CBS Broadcast, Don Quixote, Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character, op. 35 (New York Philharmonic)

Fancy Free Ballet_ VII. Finale

I Get Carried Away, On The Town

Christopher Street (From Wonderful Town Original Cast Recording 1953)

On the Waterfront Main Title (Revised)

Candide, Act II - No. 31, Make Our Garden Grow (Finale)

West Side Story_ Act II_ Somewhere

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings, Op. 11 (New York Philharmonic)

Leonard Bernstein - Young People's Concerts - What Does Music Mean? (1958) 

Kaddish, Symphony No. 3 (To the Beloved Memory of John F. Kennedy)  I. Invocation - Kaddish 1

The Ladies Who Lunch / Company Original Broadway Cast

Mass - Hymn and Psalm_ A Simple Song 

Dybbuk Suite No. 2 - Leah  (New York Philharmonic)

Leonard Bernstein and Shirley Verrett at GMHC Circus Benefit, Madison Square Garden

Mahler - Symphony No.5 (New York Philharmonic)

Manhattan's Grace Church sits at a unique bend on Broadway and East 10th Street, making it seem that the historic house of worship is rising out of the street itself.

But Grace is also at another important intersection -- where religion and high society greeted one another during the Gilded Age.

Grace is one of the important Episcopal churches in America, forming in 1809 in lower Manhattan literally next door to Trinity Church. But when society began moving uptown, so too did Grace, making its home on a plot formerly occupied by Henry Brevoort’s apple orchard. 

Grace was also one of the most fashionable churches in New York City for several decades in the 19th century. The fashionable weddings and funerals hosted at Grace Church sometimes drew thousands of onlookers, and a few celebrated ceremonies were as raucous and chaotic as rock concerts.

But looking past the fashion and frills, Grace Church did create a deep and lasting spiritual connection with the surrounding community which continues to this day.

In this episode, Tom and Greg are joined by Harry Krauss, historian for Grace Church, for a tour of this gorgeous, landmark parish.

FEATURING: Walt Whitman, Rufus Wainwright, Tom Thumb, the Earl of Craven and a heavenly chorus of hundreds!

This week we're highlighting an especially festive episode of the Gilded Gentleman Podcast, a show with double the holiday fun, tracing the history of Christmas and holiday celebrations over 19th-century New York City history.

Licensed New York City tour guide and speaker Jeff Dobbins joins host Carl Raymond for a look at the city’s holiday traditions dating back to the early Dutch days of New Amsterdam up to the modern innovations of the early 20th century. 

You'll learn....

-- the connections between Sinterklaas and Santa Claus

-- the history of display windows, department store Santa Clauses and Christmas tree sellers

-- how Hannukah was adapted in America to help newly arriving Jewish immigrants keep hold of their traditions

-- why Santa could truly be called "a native New Yorker"

And then Carl welcomes actor John Kevin Jones who has been performing an annual one-man adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at the Merchant’s House Museum, now in its 11th season. Kevin discusses the origins of Dickens’ famous story and how he adapted it for the stage.

For decades New Yorkers celebrated Evacuation Day every November 25, a holiday marking the 1783 departure of British forces from the city they had occupied for several years during the Revolutionary War.

The events of that departure -- that evacuation -- inspired annual celebrations of patriotism, unity, and a bit of rowdiness. Evacuation Day was honored well until the late 19th century. But then, gradually, the party sort of petered out.....

Of course, Americans may know late November for another historically themed holiday – Thanksgiving, a New England-oriented celebration that eventually took the place of Evacuation Day on the American calendar. But we are here to tell you listener – you should celebrate both!

Greg and Tom tell the story of the British's final years in their former colonies, now in victory known as the United States, and their final moments within New York City, their last remaining haven. The city was in shambles and the gradual handover was truly messy.

And then, on November 25, 1783, George Washington rode into town, basically traveling from tavern to tavern on his way down to the newly freed city. The Bowery Boys chart his course (down the Bowery of course) and make note of a few unusual events -- wild parties, angry women with brooms, and one very lucky tailor.

PLUS: Where and how you can celebrate Evacuation Day today. 

Other Bowery Boys episodes to check out when you're done with this one:

-- New York City During the Revolutionary War
-- The Revolutionary Tavern of Samuel Fraunces
-- The Great Fire of 1776
-- The Brooklyn Navy Yard and Vinegar Hill

Greta Garbo in New York! A story of freedom, glamour, and melancholy, set at the intersection of classic Hollywood and mid-century New York City. The biography of a legendary star who became the city's most famous 'celebrity sighting' for many decades while out on her regular, meandering walks.

Garbo had once been Hollywood's biggest star, a screen goddess who survived the transition from silent pictures to sound in such movies as Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, and Camille. But her career was over by the 1940s, her exotic and distant screen presence no longer appealing in the years of World War II.

And so the actress -- famous for her line "I WANT TO BE ALONE" -- moved to New York City and stayed here for the rest of her life, living in a fabulous apartment near Beekman Place on the east side of Manhattan.

Her favorite activity was walking, two long trips a day in her dark glasses and trench coat, committed to freedom of urban exploration and enjoying a livelihood in the city that we all take for granted.

In attempting to live her life freely, however, she opened herself to the intrusive behavior of others — some obsessed with her as an iconic movie star, others simply gravitating to her elusive reputation. By the 1970s and surging by the 80s, Garbo sightings became a popular urban scavenger hunt. You had Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and Greta Garbo! 

Visit the website for more information and images

Interested in more Bowery Boys podcasts about New York and the movies? Here's some suggestions:

Marilyn Monroe: Her Year of Reinvention
The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino
At Home With Lauren Bacall
Mae West: 'Sex' on Broadway

Her New York story reveals some bigger themes about living in a big city -- finding privacy and even solitude in a place with eight million people.

Here's the first episode of HBO's The Official Gilded Age Podcast, hosted by Tom Meyers of the Bowery Boys Podcast and Alicia Malone of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the official companion podcast for the HBO series The Gilded Age, streaming on Max. Each week Tom and Alicia will discuss what happened on screen and the real people, places and events featured on the show. 

Easter Sunday, 1886, and a new war is brewing in Gilded Age society. Are you ready to pick a side? Join  hosts Alicia Malone and Tom Meyers as they dissect Episode 201, “You Don’t Even Like Opera,” with extraordinary guest Lord Julian Fellowes.

Subscribe to HBO's The Official Gilded Age Podcast to get future episodes

So we don't know if you’ve heard, but New York City is an expensive place to live these days. So we thought it might be time to revisit the tale of the city’s most famous district of luxury — Fifth Avenue.  For about a hundred years, this avenue was mostly residential -- but residences of the most extravagant kind.

At the heart of New York’s Gilded Age — the late 19th-century era of unprecedented American wealth and excess — were families with the names Astor, Waldorf, Schermerhorn, and Vanderbilt, alongside power players like A.T. Stewart, Jay Gould and William “Boss” Tweed.

They would all make their homes — and in the case of the Vanderbilts, their great many homes — on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

The image of Fifth Avenue as a luxury retail destination today grew from the street’s aristocratic reputation in the 1800s. The rich were inextricably drawn to the avenue as early as the 1830s when rich merchants, anxious to be near the exquisite row houses of Washington Square Park, began turning it into an artery of expensive abodes.

In this podcast, Tom and Greg present a world that’s somewhat hard to imagine — free-standing mansions in an exclusive corridor running right through the center of Manhattan. Why was Fifth Avenue fated to become the domain of the so-called “Upper Ten”? And what changed about the city in the 20th century to ensure the eventual destruction of most of them?

 The following is a re-edited, remastered version of two past Bowery Boys shows — the Rise and Fall of the Fifth Avenue Mansion. Combined, this tells the whole story of Fifth Avenue, from the initial development of streets in the 1820s to its Midtown transformation into a mecca of high-end shopping in the 1930s. 

\This could also serve as a primer to the HBO series The Gilded Age, the official podcast co-hosted by Tom Meyers which debuts on October 30.

Visit the website for further information.

A brand new batch of haunted houses and spooky stories, all from the gaslight era of New York City, the illuminating glow of the 19th century revealing the spirits of another world.

Greg and Tom again dive into another batch of terrifying ghost stories, using actual newspaper reports and popular urban legends to reveal a different side to the city's history.

If you just like a good scare, you'll enjoy these historical frights. And if you truly believe in ghosts, then these stories should especially disturb you as they take place in actual locations throughout the city -- from the Lower East Side to the Bronx. And even in cases where these 19th-century haunted houses have been demolished, who’s to say the spirits themselves aren’t still hanging around?

Featured in this year's crop of scary stories:

-- A ghostly encounter at the Astor Library (today's Public Theater) involving a most controversial set of mysterious books;

-- A whole graduating class of ghosts stalks the campus of the Bronx's Fordham University, and it may have something to do with either Edgar Allan Poe or the film The Exorcist;

-- Just north of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, a haunted townhouse vexes several tenants, the sight of a hunched-over man in a cap driving people insane;

-- In the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, a small apartment in today's Two Bridges neighborhood becomes possessed by a poltergeist with a penchant for throwing furniture .... and punches. One vainglorious showoff named Jackie Hagerty learns the hard way;

-- And before the days of Riverside Drive, a rustic old mansion once sat on the banks of the Upper West Side, with a mysterious locked room that must never be opened.

Visit the website to see images of the real-life haunted houses and places featured in this podcast.

Listen to the entire collection of Bowery Boys ghost stories podcasts here.

Theodore Roosevelt was both a New Yorker and an outdoorsman, a politician and a naturalist, a conservationist and a hunter. His connection with the natural world began at birth in his Manhattan brownstone home and ended with his death in Sagamore Hill.

He killed thousands of animals over his lifetime as a hunter-naturalist, most notably one of the last roaming bison (or American buffalo) in the Dakota Badlands. Many of his trophies hang on the walls of his home in Long Island; other specimens "live on" in institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History.

But as this episode's special guest Ken Burns reveals in his newest mini-series The American Buffalo, Roosevelt's relationship with the animal world was complicated and, in certain ways, hard to understand today.

As one of America’s great conservationists, President Roosevelt's advocacy for wildlife and public land helped to preserve so much of the natural richness of the United States.

And his involvement in the creation of the New York Zoological Society (aka the Bronx Zoo) would set the stage for one ambitious project that would help bring the American buffalo back to the Midwestern plains.

This episode marks the 165th anniversary of Roosevelt's birth in October and the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site (which plays a small but important role in today's story. )

Visit the website for more information and images from this week's show.

This show was engineered by Casey Holford at Stitcher Studios and the interview edited by Kieran Gannon.

The rebirth of the East Village in the late 1970s and the flowering of a new and original New York subculture -- what Edmund White called "the Downtown Scene" -- arose from the shadow of urban devastation and was anchored by a community that reclaimed its own deteriorating neighborhood.

In the last episode (Creating the East Village 1955-1975) this northern corner of New York's Lower East Side became the desired home for new cultural venues -- nightclubs, cafes, theaters, and bars -- after the city tore down the Third Avenue Elevated in 1955.

By the mid-1970s, however, the high had worn off. The East Village was in crisis, one of the Manhattan neighborhoods hit hardest by the city’s fiscal difficulties and cutbacks. It had become a landscape of dark, unsafe streets and buildings demolished in flame.

But the next generation of creative interlopers (following the initial stampede of Greenwich Village beatniks and hippies) built upon the legacies of East Village counter-culture to create poems, music, paintings, and stage performances heavily influenced by the apocalyptic situations around them.

This was something truly distinct, a creative scene that was thoroughly and uniquely an East Village creation -- punk and hardcore, murals and graffiti, fashion and drag. In this episode Greg hits the streets of the East Village in a special live-on-the-streets event, with musician and tour guide Krikor Daglian (of True Tales of NYC), exploring the secrets of the recent past -- from the origins of skateboarding to the seeds of the American alternative rock scene.

FEATURING: CBGB, Supreme, the Pyramid, Club 57, Niagara, 7B, Brownies, and many others

AND special guests Bill Di Paola from the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space and Ramon 'Ray' Alvarez from Ray's Candy Store

ALSO: Check out our Walking The East Village playlist, curated by Krikor and Greg -- on Spotify

Before 1955 nobody used the phrase "East Village" to describe the historic northern portion of the Lower East Side, the New York tenement district with a rich German and Eastern European heritage.

But when the Third Avenue El was torn down that year, those who were attracted to the culture of Greenwich Village -- with its coffeehouses, poets and jazz music -- began flocking to the east side, attracted to low rents.

Soon the newly named East Village culturally became an extension of the Village with new bookstores, cafes, experimental theaters, and nightclubs. By the mid-1960s the hepcats were replaced by hippies, flamboyant and politically active, influenced by the events of the 1960s and a slightly different buffet of drugs.

At the same time, the neighborhood's Ukrainian population grew as well after the United States provided visas to thousands of refugees from Europe displaced by World War II. By the 1960s Puerto Ricans also lived in the eastern end of the district, sometimes called Alphabet City (and eventually Loisaida).

In this first of a two-part series on the history of the East Village, Greg is joined Jason Birchard from Veselka Restaurant, who shares his family's story, and by theater historian David Loewy to discuss the influence of Joe Papp and The Public Theater, a stage whose first production would capture the very counter-culture dominating the streets around it.

Visit the website for images and more information

Further listening:

Nuyorican: The Great Puerto Rican Migration
St. Mark's Place: Party Time In The East Village
The Secrets of St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
 

This episode on the history of Tompkins Square Park ties right into an all-new two-part episode coming in September, the first part coming at you next week. 

Tompkins Square Park is the heart and soul of the East Village.  And it's also one of New York City's oldest parks! However this was not a park designed for the service of the upper classes in the mid-19th century. It provided open air and recreational space for the many hundreds of thousands of immigrants who moved into the Lower East Side, particularly Germans who filled the park with music, food and social gatherings.

But the park has also been a place for people to voice their descent. It's become a most rebellious place over the decades. This is a story of vice presidents and labor unions and drag queens and punks.

Visit the website for more information

This show was originally released in 2014. 

Stroll the romantic, rambling paths of historic Central Park in this week's episode, turning back the clock to the 1860s and 70s, a time of children ice skating on The Lake, carriage rides through the Mall, and bewildering excursions through The Ramble.

You’re all invited to walk along with Greg through the oldest portion of Central Park. Not only to marvel at the beautiful trees, ancient rocks, flowers, and the dizzying assortment of birds but to look at the architecture, the sculptures, and the fountains.

The idea of a public park -- open to all people, from all walks of life -- was rather new in the mid-19th century. The original plan for Central Park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux emphasized an escape to the natural world. But almost immediately, those plans were altered to include more monumental and architectural delights.

In this rambling walking tour, Greg visits some of the most beloved attractions of the park including Bethesda Terrace and Fountain, Naumburg Bandshell, Bow Bridge and Belvedere Castle.

And he's joined by two very special guests:

-- Sara Cedar Miller, historian emerita of the Central Park Conservancy and author of Before Central Park

-- Dr. Emma Guest-Consales, president of the Guides Association of New York City and tour ambassador at One World Observatory.

Visit our website for more information

The tale of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is one of New York's true epic adventures, mirroring the course of American history via the ships manufactured here and the people employed to make them.

The Navy Yard's origins within Wallabout Bay tie it to the birth of the United States itself, the spot where thousands of men and women were kept in prison ships during the Revolutionary War. 

Within this bay where thousands of American patriots died would rise one of this country’s largest naval yards. It was built for the service and protection of the very country those men and women died for. A complex that would then create weapons of war for other battles -- and jobs for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

In this episode, Greg is joined by the amazing Andrew Gustafson from Turnstile Tours who unfurls the surprising history of the Navy Yard -- through war and peace, through new technologies and aging infrastructure, through the lives of the men and women who built the yard's reputation.

And the story extends to the tiny neighborhood of Vinegar Hill, famed for its early 19th-century architecture and the mysterious mansion known as the Commandant's House.

FEATURING the origin story of Brooklyn's most sacred public monument -- at home not in Vinegar Hill (at least not anymore) but in Fort Greene.

Visit our website for more information and also head to Turnstile Tours for information on their tours of the Navy Yard.

Instead of looking back to the history of New York City in this episode, we are looking forwardto the future -- to the new generation of creators who are celebrating New York and telling its story through mediums that are not podcasts or books.

Today we are celebrating the historians, journalists and photographers who bring New York City to life on social media platforms like Instagram. There are a million different ways to tell a good story and the guests on today's show are doing it with photography and short films, exposing new audiences to the best of New York City – its landmarks, its people, even its diners.

Featuring interviews with three of our favorite people:

Nicolas Heller, aka New York Nico, the "unofficial talent scout of New York City," the filmmaker and photographer who manages to capture the magic of the city’s most interesting and colorful characters

Riley Arthur, aka Diners of NYC, who explores the world of New York City diners, great and small, in hopes to bring awareness to many struggling local businesses

Tommy Silk, aka Landmarks of NY, who shares illuminating photos and videos featuring the city’s most interesting and sometimes overlooked architectural gems

Featuring stories of the Neptune Diner, the Green Lady, the Little Red Lighthouse, Junior's Cheesecake, Tiger Hood and City Island.

And follow the Bowery Boys on Instagram and on TikTok and on Threads (@boweryboysnyc)

It’s one of the great narratives of American urban history — the northward trek of New York society up the island of Manhattan during the 19th century. 

Bringing you this special story today is writer, tour guide and historian Keith Taillon from KeithYorkCity, joining Carl Raymond from the Gilded Gentleman podcast to analyze this unique social migration. They present a fascinating virtual tour through over 100 years of New York City history, showing how the Gilded Age developed and evolved from an architectural and urban planning point of view. 

For more information visit the Bowery Boys website, subscribe to the Gilded Gentleman podcast and check out Keith's adventures at his website.

This month we are marking the 160th anniversary of one of the most dramatic moments in New York City history – the Civil War Draft Riots which stormed through the city from July 13 to July 16, 1863.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Manhattan in violent protest, fueled initially by anger over conscription to the Union Army which sent New Yorkers to the front lines of the Civil War. (Or, most specifically, those who couldn’t afford to pay the $300 commutation fee were sent to war.)

In many ways, our own city often seems to have forgotten these significant events.

There are very few memorials or plaques in existence at all to the Draft Riots, a very odd situation given the numerous markers to other tragic and unsettling moments in New York City history. 

In particular, given the number of African-Americans who were murdered in the streets during these riots, and the numbers of Black families who fled New York in terror, we think this is a very significant oversight.

In this episode, a remastered, re-edited edition of our 2011 show, we take you through those hellish days of deplorable violence and appalling attacks on abolitionists, Republicans, wealthy citizens, and anybody standing in the way of blind anger. Mobs filled the streets, destroying businesses (from corner stores to Brooks Brothers) and threatening to throw the city into permanent chaos.

Visit the website for more information

FURTHER LISTENING

Fernando Wood: The Scoundrel Mayor of New York

The Hoaxes and Conspiracies of New York

And did you see this performance from the musical Paradise Square, set during the Draft Riots?

The Pledge of Allegiance feels like an American tradition that traces itself back to the Founding Fathers, but, in fact, the original version is only written in 1892. 

(And the version you may be familiar with from elementary school is less than 70 years old.)

This is the story of the invention of the Pledge, a set of words that have come to embody the core values of American citizenship. And yet it began as part of a for-profit magazine promotion, written by a Christian socialist minister.

Listen to the pledge wording evolve throughout the years and discover the shocking salute that once accompanied it.

Featuring: Tom Meyers as the voice of Francis Bellamy, the inventor of the pledge. This is a reedited, remastered version of an episode of Greg's spin-off show The First, originally released in 2017

Visit the website for more information and images
And after listening, please read this article by Sam Roberts on questions over the pledge's authorship

Take a look at a historic photograph of New York from the 1930s and you'll see automats, newsies, elevated trains and men in fedoras. What you won't see -- dozens and dozens of automobiles on the curb.

In a city with skyrocketing real estate values, why are most city streets still devoted to free car storage? It's a situation we're all so used to that we don't think twice about it. Whatever happened to the curb?

Long-term and overnight parking used to be illegal in the early 20th century. The transition from horse-drawn carriages to gas-powered automobiles transformed neighborhoods like Times Square and reconfigured everyday life on the street. But before the 1920s, parking those glamorous new Model Ts on the street was tolerated only in short-term situations.

By the 1940s, however, New Yorkers were simply too reliant on the automobile, and the city's parking lots and garages were simply not adequate. (For many New Yorkers, like Seinfeld's George Costanza, they're still not acceptable).

Street parking was de facto legalized with the advent of alternate-side parking rules, and soon parking meters and 'meter maids' were attempting to keep a handle on the chaotic situation.

Eventually the car took over. Will it always be this way?

In this special episode, Tom and Greg are joined by Slate Magazine writer Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World, who exposes some shocking parking violations and even offers a few couple solutions for the future.

Visit the website for more images

From 1941 and 1976, dozens of young women and high school girls were bestowed the honor of Miss Subways with her smiling photograph hanging within the cars of the New York subway system.

This was not a beauty pageant, but rather an advertising campaign which promoted the subway and drew the eyes of commuters to the train car's many advertisements for cod liver oil, cigarettes and frozen foods.

The program was overseen by modeling agent guru John Robert Powers whose work for retail catalogs and newspapers would help define the 'girl-next-door' image of the mid 20th century.

However this blonde Midwestern template soon looked out of place promoting the subway system of one of the most diverse cities in the world. By the 1960s, winners of this fleeting title began to reflect the many types of women who commuted and used the subway.

Listen in as Greg tells the story of the Miss Subways pageant then participates as a judge for a brand new Miss Subways competition, held in Coney Island in April. But what does this title mean in 2023?

FEATURING A visit to the New York Transit Museum, the City Reliquary, Coney Island USA's Seashore Theater and Ellen's Stardust Diner

VISIT THE WEBSITE for more information and many photographs

The Brooklyn Bridge, which was officially opened to New Yorkers 140 years ago this year, is not only a symbol of the American Gilded Age, it’s a monument to the genius, perseverance and oversight of one family.

This episode is arranged as a series of three mini biographies of three family members -- John Roebling, his son Washington Roebling and Washington's wife Emily Warren Roebling. Through their stories, we’ll watch as the Brooklyn Bridge is designed, built and opened in 1883.

PLUS: One more Roebling! Greg and Tom are joined in the studio by Kriss Roebling, the great, great-grandson of Washington and Emily Roebling. He shares his own surprising family stories -- and brings in some extraordinary artifacts from his family's past!

Visit our website for more pictures and information about this show

FURTHER LISTENING:

That Daredevil Steve Brodie!
The Queensboro Bridge and the Rise of a Borough
Crossing to Brooklyn: How The Williamsburg Bridge Changed New York
The George Washington Bridge

The Broadway musical is one of New York City's greatest inventions, over 160 years in the making! It's one of the truly American art forms, fueling one of the city's most vibrant entertainment businesses and defining its most popular tourist attraction -- Times Square.

But why Broadway, exactly? Why not the Bowery or Fifth Avenue? And how did our fair city go from simple vaudeville and minstrel shows to Shuffle Along, Irene and Show Boat, surely the most influential musical of the Jazz Age?

This podcast is an epic, a wild musical adventure in itself, full of musical interludes, zipping through the evolution of musical entertainment in New York City, as it races up the 'main seam' of Manhattan -- the avenue of Broadway.

We are proud to present a tour up New York City's most famous street, past some of the greatest theaters and shows that have ever won acclaim here, from the wacky (and highly copied) imports of Gilbert & Sullivan to the dancing girls and singing sensations of the Ziegfeld revue tradition.

CO-STARRING: Well, some of the biggest names in songwriting, composing and singing. And even a dog who talks in German!  At right: Billie Burke from a latter-year Follies. (NYPL)

Visit the website for more information and images.

This episode was originally recorded in 2013. Since then we have recorded many shows on the Broadway theater district. Please check out these shows for more information:

-- Mae West: 'Sex' On Broadway
-- Rodgers and Hammerstein
-- West Side Story: The Making of Lincoln Center
-- The Shuberts: The Brothers Who Built Broadway
-- The Cotton Club: The Aristocrat of Harlem
-- Tin Pan Alley and the creation of modern American music

The history of pizza in the United States begins in Manhattan in the late 19th century, on the streets of Little Italy (and Nolita), within immigrant-run bakeries that transformed a traditional southern Italian food into something remarkable.

But new research discovered in recent years has changed New York food history, revealing an origin tale slightly older than what the old guide books may have you believe.

Understanding the history of American pizza is important because it's a food that brings people together, young and old -- from pizza parties to corner slice places, from classic traditional pies to the latest upscale innovations.

Pizza lovers of all kinds -- even you, Chicago deep-dish lovers -- will find much to enjoy in this show, tracing the early origins of American pizza and specifically how New York City-style pizza was born. (What even is New York style pizza? Even that answer is trickier than you think.)

On this wandering episode -- through Nolita, Greenwich Village and even the Bowery -- Tom and Greg are joined by the prince of pizza himself Scott Wiener of the long-running Scott's Pizza Tours.

Perhaps nobody in New York City knows more about pizza than Scott, and he takes the Bowery Boys on a culinary adventure which includes two of New York's most famous pizza restaurants -- Lombardi's Pizza and John's of Bleecker Street.

And a stop at the most important restaurant-supply store in American pizza history, a place were dreams (and pizza ovens) were once made.

Visit our website for pictures and other information

Our deep thanks to Chicago pizza historian Peter Regas whose research was used in this show.

FURTHER LISTENING: Episodes of the Bowery Boys with similar or related themes

The Big History of Little Italy

The History of the Bagel

Chop Suey City: The History of Chinese Food in New York

A Walk Through Little Caribbean in Brooklyn

A Culinary Tour of the Lower East Side

In the early morning hours of April 15, 1912. the White Star ocean liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg en route to New York City and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Survivors were rescued by the Cunard liner Carpathia and brought to their berth at Pier 54 on the rainy evening of April 18.

On that very spot today, a fanciful waterfront development juts out into the Hudson River, a place called Little Island which opened in 2021. This recreational oasis will draw thousands of people, New Yorkers and tourists alike, this spring and summer.

But on the southern side of Little Island, peering out of the water, are dozens of wooden posts – these are the remains of the former Pier 54.

And it was on this pier, on April 18, 1912, that survivors of the Titanic disembarked and touched land.

This is the story of the places that figured into the aftermath and the story of how New York memorialized those lost to the tragedy.

And in the end we return to Little Island and to the ghost of Pier 54, the place where this disaster became reality for most people. Where survivors were greeted with joy and where many hundreds of people faced the reality that their loved ones were never coming home. 

Visit our website for images and more information.

FURTHER READING:

A short history of New York City’s various Titanic memorials

The doctor, the heiress and the accidental nanny: New York women who survived the Titanic

A haunting look inside the Lusitania

FURTHER LISTENING:

Chelsea Piers: New York City in the Age of the Ocean Liner
The Complicated History of the Waldorf-Astoria
How Chelsea Became A Neighborhood

Support the Bowery Boys Podcast on Patreon

Enter the magical world of New York by gaslight, the city illuminated by the soft, revolutionary glow of lamps powered by gas, an innovative utility which transformed urban life in the 19th century.  

Before the introduction of gaslight in the 1820s, New York was a much darker and quieter place after sunset, its streets lit only by dull, foul-smelling whale-oil lamps. Gaslight was first used in London, and it made its American debut in Newport and Baltimore.

The New York Gas Company received its company charter in 1823 and began to install gas pipes under the street that decade.  With gas-powered lighting, New York really became the city that never slept.

It meant you could work late without your eyes straining – or wander the streets with less apprehension. It meant greater ease reading a book or throwing a lavish ball. Gaslight brought the 19th century city to life in ways that are easy to overlook.

In this episode we're joined by author Jane Brox, author of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light who discusses the curious charms of this rare and enigmatic light source.

FURTHER LISTENING: After you listen to the show about the history of gaslight, check out these past Bowery Boys podcasts with similar themes.

-- Electric New York: With the discovery of electricity, it seemed possible to illuminate the world with a more dependable, potentially inexhaustible energy source.

-- Tesla: The Inventor in Old New York 

-- Building Stuyvesant Town

If you like our show, please consider giving the Bowery Boys podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts

We just reedited and reworked our 2017 show on Irish immigration in time for St. Patrick’s Day and a celebration of all things Irish! So much has changed in our world since 2017 and this history feels more relevant and impactful than ever before. 

You don’t have a New York City without the Irish. In fact, you don’t have a United States of America as we know it today.

This diverse and misunderstood immigrant group began coming over from Ireland in significant numbers starting in the Colonial era, mostly as indentured servants. In the early 19th century, these Irish arrivals, both Protestants and Catholics, were already consolidating — via organizations like the Ancient Order of the Hibernians and in places like St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

But starting in the 1830s, with a terrible blight wiping out Ireland’s potato crops, a mass wave of Irish immigration would dwarf all that came before, hundreds of thousands of weary, sometimes desperate newcomers who entered New York to live in its most squalid neighborhoods.

The Irish were among the laborers who built the Croton Aqueduct, the New York grid plan and Central Park. Irish women comprised most of the hired domestic help by the mid 19th century.

The arrival of the Irish and their assimilation into American life is a story repeated in many cities. Here in New York City, it is essential in our understanding of the importance of modern immigrant communities to the life of the Big Apple.

PLUS: The origins of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade!

Other shows you may enjoy:

The Civil War Draft Riots
Jacob Riis: 'The Other Half' of the Gilded Age
Battery Park and Castle Clinton
The Story of Five Points
Bowery Boys Movie Club: Gangs of New York

Wall Street, today a canyon of tall buildings in New York's historic Financial District, is not only one of the most famous streets in the United States, it's also a stand-in for the entire American financial system.

One of the first facts you learn as a student of New York City history is that Wall Street is named for an actual wall that once stretched along this very spot during the days of the Dutch when New York was known as New Amsterdam.

The particulars of the story, however, are far more intriguing. Because the Dutch called the street alongside the wall something very different.

During the colonial era, the wall was torn down and turned into the center of New York life, complete with Trinity Church, City Hall and a shoreline market with a disturbing connection to one New York's financial livelihoods -- slavery.

So how did this street become so associated with American finance? The story involves Alexander Hamilton, a busy coffee house and a very important tree.

Visit the website for more images and information about this subject

More Bowery Boys episodes related to this one:

George Washington's New York Inauguration
Life In New Amsterdam
Land of the Lenape
Tearing Down King George: The Revolutionary Summer of 1776
Trinity Church: Anchor of Wall Street

Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's stoic portrait and one of the most valuable paintings on earth, came to America during the winter of 1963, a single-picture loan that was both a special favor to Jackie Kennedy and a symbolic tool during tense conversations between the United States and France about nuclear arms.

Its first stop was the National Gallery in Washington DC, where over a half million people spent hours in line to gaze at the famous smile.

Then, on February 7, 1963, she made her debut to the public at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hosted in the medieval sculpture hall for a month-long exhibition that would become one of the museum's most attended shows.

On that first day, thousands lined up outside in the freezing cold to catch a glimpse of the iconic painting. By week's end, a quarter of a million people had visited the museum to see the Italian masterpiece.

PLUS: What's it like guarding precious and iconic works of art like the Mona Lisa? Patrick Bringley, a former guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, joins Greg and Tom in the studio to discuss his new book All The Beauty In The World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, recounting a decade of purpose, sorrow and epiphany while working in America's largest museum. 

Visit our website for images and more details 

After listening to this show, you may also like to listen to these other past episodes:

-- Our history of the Metropolitan Museum on its 150th anniversary
-- Why is the Mona Lisa so famous? Find out why in the Gilded Gentleman's show The Theft of the Mona Lisa
-- Exactly one year to the day after the Mona Lisa came to town, so did these guys.

Dorothy Catherine Draper is a truly forgotten figure in American history. She was the first woman to ever sit for a photograph — a daguerrotype, in the year 1840, upon the rooftop of the school which would become New York University.

Catherine was the older sister of professor John William Draper, later the founder of the university’s school of medicine. The Drapers worked alongside Samuel Morse in the period following his invention of the telegraph.

The experiments of Draper and Morse, with Catherine as assistant, would set the stage for the entire history of American photography.

The legendary portrait was taken when Miss Draper was a young woman but a renewed interest in the image in the 1890s brought the now elderly matron a bit of late-in-life recognition.

To see the photograph of Draper and other early photography, visit our website. 

This episode originally appeared on Greg’s podcast called The First which had a respectable run a few years ago. The feed for that show will be going away soon so we wanted to present some of that show’s greatest hits over the next few months, in between regular episodes of the Bowery Boys as bonus stories about American history. Enjoy!

Within the New York City of Edward Hopper's imagination, the skyscrapers have vanished, the sidewalks are mysteriously wide and all the diners and Chop Suey restaurants are sparsely populated with well-dressed lonely people.

In this art-filled episode of the Bowery Boys, Tom and Greg look at Hopper's life, influence and specific fascination with the city, inspired by the recent show Edward Hopper's New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hopper, a native of the Hudson River town of Nyack, painted New York City for over half a decade. In reality, the city experienced Prohibition and the Jazz Age, two world wars and the arrival of automobiles. But not in Hopper's world.

In his most famous work Nighthawks (1942), figures from a dreamlike film appear trapped in an aquarium-shaped diner. But Hopper has captured something else in this iconic painting: fear and paranoia. No wonder he's considered a huge influence on Hollywood film noir and detective stories.

Hopper painted New York from his studio overlooking Washington Square Park, and both he and his wife Josephine Nivison Hopper would become true fixtures of the Greenwich Village scene.

PLUS: Tom visits the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York, to talk the artist's early life with executive director Kathleen Motes Bennewitz. And Greg finds some of the hidden puzzles in Hopper's paintings thanks to American art historian Rena Tobey.

Visit the website for more pictures and other interesting information from this episode.

Other Bowery Boys episodes related to this one:

-- The Armory Show of 1913
-- Jane Jacobs: Saving Greenwich Village
-- New York University:  A School For The Metropolis
-- Tragic Muse: The Life of Audrey Munson

In the 19th century, the Fulton Fish Market in downtown Manhattan was to seafood what the Chicago stock yards were to the meat industry, the primary place where Americans got fish for their dinner tables.

Over the decades it went from a retail market to a wholesale business, distributing fish across the country – although as you’ll hear, that was a bit tricky in the days before modern refrigeration.

Today its former home is known by a more familiar name -- the South Street Seaport, a historical district that has undergone some incredible changes in just the past half century. The fish market, once an awkward staple of this growing tourist destination, moved to the Bronx in 2005. But you can still find ghosts of the old market along these historic stone streets.

And you can still find delicious seafood at the Seaport. And the Tin Building has taken dining in the neighborhood to the next level, literally in the architectural remains of a former fish market building.

On this show, we'll be joined by professor Jonathan H. Rees, author of the new book The Fulton Fish Market: A History. By the end of our conversation today, we're confident that you'll never look at the fish section of your local grocer in the same way.

MORE SHOWS SIMILAR TO THIS ONE:

-- South Street Seaport
-- Has Jack the Ripper Come to Town?
-- The High Line
-- Essex Street Market
 

Visit our website for more stories and images from New York City History.

New York City has a new landmark, a little bar in the West Village named Julius', officially recognized by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on December 6th, 2022. 

Now it may not look like much from the outside, but it's here that one moment of protest (the Sip-In of 1966) set the stage for a political revolution, “a signature event in the battle for LGBTQ+ people to gather, socialize, and celebrate openly in bars, restaurants, and other public places.”

So we thought it would be a great time to revisit our 2019 show on the history of Julius'  and a look at the life of gays and lesbians in the mid 20th century. But this show also features an interview -- recorded at Julius' of course -- with When Brooklyn Was Queer author Hugh Ryan who was just on our recent show on the history of Jefferson Market and the Women’s House of Detention .

PLUS there’s even a tie-in to the Worlds Fair of 1964, linking to our last episode.

Visit our website for photographs and more details -- boweryboyshistory.com

This episode features an audio interview clip from the podcast Making Gay History, as well as a musical clip of 'I Hear A Symphony' by The Supremes (Motown).

Our thanks to Andrew Berman of Village Preservation for allowing us to use audio from the 2022 historic plaque unveiling

Flushing-Meadows Corona Park in the borough of Queens is the home of the New York Mets, the U.S. Open, the Queens Zoo, the New York Hall of Science and many other recreational delights. But it will always be forever known as the launching pad for the future as represented in two extraordinary 20th century world's fairs.

There is so much nostalgia today for the 1939-1940 World's Fair and its stranger, more visually chaotic 1964-65 World's Fair. And that nostalgia has fueled a thriving market for collectables from these fairs -- the souvenirs and other common household items branded with the two fairs' striking visual symbols.

The Trylon and Perisphere represented the dreams of 1930s America after the Great Depression, the strange symbols of "the World of Tomorrow." A quarter century later the Unisphere depicted its theme -- "Peace Through Understanding" -- as a space-age fantasy.

Millions of souvenirs were manufactured and sold at these two fairs. And those very treasured items which survive -- in the hands of collectors, at flea markets and antique shops -- are nearly all that remain of these special, ephemeral events.

In this show, Greg is joined by design and cultural historian Kyle Supley, recorded at Brooklyn's City Reliquary where Supley's own collection of World's Fair has found a permanent home.

How do such souvenirs allow us to visit the past? And what do they say about our world today?

FURTHER LISTENING:
-- The Crystal Palace: America's First World Fair
-- 1939-1940 World's Fair
-- 1964-65 World's Fair
-- Ruins of the World's Fair (about the New York State Pavilion)

_________

Kyle Supley is a historian, curator and preservationist with a focus on Mid-Century American culture, consumer products, architecture, and design.

He is the creator and host of the TV show Kyle Supley’s Out There! on Ovation’s Journy Network, a NYC tour guide for Bowery Boys Walks, and a DJ of music from the golden age of disco, at the landmarked NYC gay bar Julius’ in Greenwich Village.

Follow him on Instagram here

Follow the Bowery Boys Podcast on Instagram, Facebook,Twitter and Post

Greg and Tom -- with some help from producer Kieran Gannon -- reflect nostalgically upon old New York City restaurants from the 1990s (Mars 2112, anyone?), wonder what it was like to eat at a chop suey restaurant, praise the strange wonders of Chez Josephine and Congee Village and reveal their favorite places to get pizza in New York City. 

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Here’s the first episode of Side Streets, a conversational show about life and culture in New York City, an exclusive podcast for t hose that support the Bowery boys on Patreon. We’re giving you this preview of the first episode with hopes that you’ll join on Patreon, at any level, to check out the rest. You can listen to more by signing up at Partreon.com/boweryboys. 

Featured on the show:

Congee Village

Square Diner

L&B Spumoni Gardens

Arthur Avenue

Arturo's Pizza

Junior's Cheesecake

Kesté Pizza

Crosswords, jigsaws, mazes, rebuses, Rubik's cubes, Myst, Words With Friends -- and now Wordle? Not only have people loved puzzles for centuries, they've actually gone wild for them. Every few years, a new tantalizing puzzle comes along to captivate the nation.

But each of these little games has an extraordinary history and for this special show, we have the "the puzzler" himself to help us unravel these unique mysteries.

Joining the show today is AJ Jacobs, author of The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life, who leads Greg and Tom down a maze of fascinating origins for the world's most popular puzzles -- many with a connection to New York City.

FEATURING:

-- Sam Loyd, the ultimate puzzle huckster
-- The utterly madcap Rebus Craze of 1937
-- The Secret and the possible treasure buried underneath New York's very streets
-- Stephen Sondheim's glorious contributions to the puzzling world

Visit the website for more information and images

Podcasts mentioned on this show:'

The Straw Hat Riots of 1922

Nellie Bly: Undercover in the Madhouse

Pulitzer vs Hearst: The Rise of Yellow Journalism

PLUS: A special New York City-themed anagram game!

A Special Presentation: We know some of you like to celebrate the holiday spirit with actual alcoholic spirits so we thought you'd enjoy this episode of The Gilded Gentleman, the Bowery Boys spin-off podcast hosted by Carl Raymond, which lays out everything you've wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about absinthe -- aka the green fairy.

Absinthe was one of the most popular and most mysterious drinks in the Belle Epoque and late Victorian and Edwardian worlds,   fueling Paris and London's cafe society and artistic circles 

Brilliant men like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde were proponents of the 'green fairy' along with members of the upper classes as well as everyday workers. Myths sprang up that the elixir created dramatic hallucinations and even provoked ghastly crimes. It became banned throughout most of Europe and even in the United States by the early 20th century. 

Join Carl and his guest Don Spiro, creator of New York's Green Fairy Society to discuss and demystify the myths and legends of this most evocative of spirits. 

And after you're done with this episode, head over and listen to the latest episode of The Gilded Gentleman, also featuring Don Spiro. Only this time they're talking about the history of champagne. 

In 1890 the Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis turned his eye-opening reporting and lecture series into a ground-breaking book called How The Other Half Lives, a best seller which awoke Americans to the plight of the poor and laid the groundwork for the Progressive Era.

Riis exposed more than a humanitarian crisis. He laid bare the city's complacent Gilded Age divide in revolutionary ways, most notably with the use of a new tool -- documentary photography.

For our 400th episode, following our tradition of exploring the legacies of urban planners in past centennial shows (#100 Robert Moses, #200 Jane Jacobs, #300 Andrew Haswell Green), we finally look at the life of the crusading police reporter and social reformer who forced upper and middle class New Yorker to examine the living conditions within the city's poorest neighborhoods.

Riis was himself an immigrant who spent his first years in the United States drifting from place to place, living on the street, his only companion a faithful dog. Journalism quite literally saved Riis, providing him with both a stable living and a purpose, especially after he became a police reporter for the New York Tribune in 1877.

But it was his fascination with visual media -- magic lantern shows and later flash photography -- which set him apart from other crusading writers of the period like Nellie Bly (who we only wish had a camera with her!)

Jacob Riis' culminating work How The Other Half Lives made him one of America's most famous writers -- his friend Theodore Roosevelt called Riss "the model American citizen" -- but the book has an imperfect legacy today, with Riis’ broad characterizations of the people he was writing about undercutting the book's noble purposes.

PLUS: The legacy of Riis lives in a very popular Queens beach. And Robert Moses chimes in!

Visit the website for more information

FURTHER READING
The Battle with the Slum / Jacob Riis
The Children of the Poor / Jacob Riis
How The Other Half Lives / Jacob Riis
The Making Of An American / Jacob Riis
The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America / Tom Buk-Swienty
Jacob A. Riis and the American City / James B. Lane
Jacob Riis: Reporter and Reformer / Janet B. Pascal
Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York / Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom

After listening to this show, check out these past Bowery Boys episodes with similar themes:

-- The First Ambulance
-- Has Jack the Ripper Come to Town?
-- Case Files of the New York Police Department 1800-1915
-- Women of the Progressive Era

Stories from this website:
"The original IMAX: Jacob Riis and His Magic Lantern"
"The harsh lives of New York City street kids, captured — in a flash — by Jacob Riis"
"Jacob Riis’ Not-so-Rockin’ ‘Sane’ New Years Celebration"
"The legendary police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street"
"Finding Pietro"

To wrap up our 15th anniversary celebration -- and to set up our big 400th episode -- we take a fond look at one corner of New York City which taught us to love local history.

Perhaps you know this area for Seward Park, the first municipal playground in the United States, or for Straus Square, named for Nathan Straus, philanthropist and co-owner (with his brother Isidor) of Macy's Department Store. Today, trendy artists and influencers instead spend their weekends in Dimes Square, just one block (and seemingly one world) away.

In the 19th century, as Rutgers Square, this area became a small portion of a large German immigrant community called Kleindeutschland. In an inconceivable historical moment, a statue was almost raised here -- to William 'Boss' Tweed, leader of Tammany Hall.

By the late 19th century, this place was the center for American Jewish culture, and East Broadway became Yiddish publishers row, hosting newspapers and magazines from a host of perspectives. In the 20th century, thanks to a mid-century housing boom (fueled partially by the labor unions firmly rooted to this place), some also called it Cooperative Village, with hundreds of old, deteriorating tenements replaced with new high rises.

It's a neighborhood that means so much to so many -- and we hope you learn to love it all yourself, no matter what you call it. 

PLUS: We're join by staff members of the Forward, celebrating its 125th year of publication. Forward archivist Chana Pollack joins us along with Ginna Green and Lynn Harris, hosts of the the newspaper column-turned-podcast version A Bintel Brief.

In late December 1954 Marilyn Monroe came to New York City wearing a disguise.

Monroe -- the biggest movie star in the world when she arrived -- came to the East Coast to reinvent herself and her career. The year 1955 would be a turning point in her life and it all played out on the streets of the city. She intended to spend most of her life here.

It was a year of discovery -- exploring the city, working on her craft and being the toast of the town.

She came to New York to become a better actress via the Actors Studio and the influence of Lee Strasberg. But she also  managed to see the most glamorous corners of New York and eventually -- she fell in love.

Contemporary portrayals of her life have focused on the most salacious, most intimate details of her biography. Many tend to rob her of her personal agency. But in this show we hope to show a very different side to Monroe's life. And a deep connection with New York City that never left her.

FEATURING: Hip New York in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich and many others.

PLUS: As an extra treat we’ll be joined by Alicia Malone of TCM (and Tom's co-host on “The Official Gilded Age Podcast”) and author of the 2021 book Girls on Film: Lessons from a Life of Watching Women in Movies

VISIT THE WEBSITE for images and more information

On January 1, 2023, New York City will celebrate a special moment, the 125th anniversary of the formation of Greater New York and the creation of the five boroughs — The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.

In honor of this special moment in New York City history, we are celebrating a bit early, reissuing our episode (originally #150) on the Consolidation and the formation of the boroughs, with a new introduction.

And stay tuned for new episodes of the Bowery Boys Podcast for the rest of the year!

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Here’s the story of how two very big cities and a whole bunch of small towns and villages — completely different in nature, from farmland to skyscraper — became the greatest city in the world.

This is the tale of Greater New York, the forming of the five boroughs into one metropolis, a consolidation of massive civic interests which became official on January 1, 1898. But this is not a story of interested parties, united in a common goal.

In fact, Manhattan (comprising, with some areas north of the Harlem River, the city of New York) was in a bit of a battle with anti-consolidation forces, mostly in Brooklyn, who saw the merging of two biggest cities in America as the end of the noble autonomy for that former Dutch city on the western shore of Long Island. You’ll be stunned to hear how easily it could have all fallen apart!

In this podcast is the story of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island (or Richmond, if you will) and their journey to become one. And how, rather recently in fact, one of those boroughs would grow uncomfortable with the arrangement.

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Other Bowery Boys podcasts to listen to with similar themes:

The Father of Greater New York: The Story of Andrew Haswell Green

The Bronx is Born: Before It Was A Borough

The Staten Island Ferry: Its Story, From Sail To Steam

The History of Astoria and Long Island City

The Story of Brooklyn Heights

Beware! The ghosts and goblins of the Hudson River Valley have been awakened.

In this year's annual celebration of New York urban legends and folktales, Tom and Greg journey up the Hudson River to explore the region's spookiest stories.

Tales of mystery and the supernatural have possessed the villages and towns of the Hudson River Valley since ancient times, when native tribes whispered of strange places and islands one simply didn't visit.

When Dutch settlers arrived in the 17th century, they brought their own mythology, populating the dark mountains with evil, mischievous creatures. These stories have carried over into modern times and continue to fascinate (and terrify) the residents of this beautiful area of New York State.

The Bowery Boys put on their most menacing and spooky voices to tell several stories of the region including:

-- A ghost-filled mansion in Nyack, New York that holds a unique place among all American supernatural sites. The house is legally haunted.

-- The unsettling tale behind those mysterious ruins known as Bannerman Castle

-- A ghastly death in the Colonial-era Catskills leads to a disturbing life sentence and the appearance of several hellish creatures

-- The secrets of Kingston's Old Dutch Church and an entity which may trapped beneath its holy steeple

PLUS: Who is the Heer of Dunderberg? And why should you run shrieking in fright if you happen to see him on a cold, stormy evening?

Check out the entire collection of Bowery Boys ghost story podcasts here. 

boweryboyshistory.com

In honor of an exciting new theater season, we're revisiting our 2011 episode on the history of Sardi's restaurant, updated to cover the trials and triumphs of the past decade.

The famous faces on the walls of Sardi's Restaurant represent the entertainment elite of the 20th Century, and all of them made this place on West 44th Street their unofficial home. Known for its caricatures and its Broadway opening-night traditions, Sardi's fed the stars of the golden age and became a hotspot for producers, directors and writers -- and, of course, those struggling to get their attention.

When Vincent Sardi opened his first restaurant in 1921, Prohibition had begun, and the midtown Broadway tradition was barely a couple decades old. By the time the current place threw open its doors (thanks to the Shuberts) in 1927, Broadway's stages were red hot, and Sardi found himself at the center of New York City show business world.

We have nuggets from the old days -- starring John Barrymore, Tallulah Bankhead, Carol Channing and a cast of thousands -- and the scoop on those famous (and often unflattering) framed caricatures. So sidle up to the Little Bar, order yourself a stiff drink and eavesdrop in on this tale of Broadway's longest dinner party.

Support the show at Patreon.com/BoweryBoys

You may have heard about the messy, chaotic and truly horrible presidential election of 1876 -- pitting Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B Hayes -- but did you know that New York City plays a huge role in this moment in American history?

Tilden, the governor of New York, was a political superstar, a reformer famous for taking down Boss Tweed and the corrupt machinations of Tammany Hall. From his home in Gramercy Park, the extremely wealthy governor could kept himself updated on the election by a personal telegraph line.

In a way, the presidential election came to him -- or at least to his neighborhood. The Democratic national headquarters sat only a few blocks south, while the Republican national headquarters made the Fifth Avenue Hotel (off Madison Square) its home.

All this would have made the 1876 national election somewhat unusual already -- New York City seemed to be at the center of it -- but the strange series of events spawned by a most contentious Election Day would send the entire country into pandemonium.

Not only was democracy itself on the line, but the fate of Reconstruction was also at stake. As were the rights of thousands of Black Southerners.

How did shadowy events which occurred at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in the early morning hours of November 8, 1876, change the course of American history? How did a flurry of telegrams and months of political chicanery cause an end to the country's post-Civil War ambitions?

FEATURING: A visit to Tilden's mansion on Gramercy Park, now the home of the National Arts Club!

PLUS: How was Daniel Sickles involved here?

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

RECOMMENDED READING

In the heart of Greenwich Village sits the Jefferson Market Library, a branch of the New York Public Library, and a beautiful garden which offers a relaxing respite from the busy neighborhood.

But a prison once rose from this very spot -- more than one in fact. While there was indeed a market at Jefferson Market -- dating back to the 1830s -- this space is more notoriously known for America's first night court (at the Jefferson Market Courthouse, site of today's library) and the Women's House of Detention, a facility which cast a gloom over the Village for over 40 years.

Almost immediately after the original courthouse (designed by Frederick Clarke Withers and Calvert Vaux) opened in 1877, it was quickly overburdened with people arrested in the Tenderloin district. By 1910 a women's court opened here, and by the Jazz Age, the adjacent confinement was known as "the women's jail.”

When the Women's House of Detention opened in 1931 -- sometimes referred to as the world's only Art Deco prison -- it was meant to improve the conditions for women who were held there. But the dank and inadequate containment soon became symbol of abuse and injustice.

In this special episode -- recorded live at Caveat on the Lower East Side -- Tom and Greg are joined by Hugh Ryan, author of The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison to explore the detention center's place in both New York City history and LGBT history.

How did the "House of D" figure into the Stonewall Uprising of 1969? And what were the disturbing circumstances surrounding its eventual closure?

FEATURING: Stories of Mae West, Stanford White, Alva Belmont, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin and -- Tupac Shakur?

Visit our website for images of the things we spoke about in this week's show.

Just a few months ago, New York City removed most of the remaining phone booths from the streets, oft neglected, a nostalgic victim of our increasing use of cellphones.

For almost a century public phones have connected regular New Yorkers with the world. Who doesn’t have fond memories of using a payphone with gum on the earpiece and extremely vulgar messages written on the box? Putting in quarters!

Well this news got us thinking about how the telephone has helped change New York overall.

Ever since Alexander Graham Bell brought his first model telephone to Manhattan 145 years ago, the telephone has helped us make plans, share urgent news, and has even allowed people to move away from each other – but still feel close.

This is a national story of course, one of patents and mergers, of Bell Telephone’s monopoly over the business for over 100 years. But it's local too; the tales of sassy operators, big shiny Art Deco towers and the ever-changing New York phone number.

PLUS: We let you in on a little secret. The classic New York City phone booth is not quite gone. We'll tell you where to find one.

In today's episode, Tom discusses the vast span of New York history with filmmakers and authors Ric Burns and James Sanders, creators of "New York: A Documentary Film".

In our episode, we discuss the 8-part documentary (which aired on PBS in installments in 1999, 2001 and 2003) and its newly updated companion book, "New York: An Illustrated History" (Knopf, 2021). We cover the guiding themes of New York's story, the greatest events and characters, and the challenges Burns and Sanders faced as they covered 9/11 and, for the final installments, COVID and other current events.

In honor of the 125th anniversary of the first ELECTRIC CABS hitting the streets of New York, the Bowery Boys are revisiting this episode from 2015, recounting almost 175 years of getting around New York in a private ride. 

The hansom, the romantic rendition of the horse and carriage, took New Yorkers around during the Gilded Age. But unregulated conduct by — nighthawks — and the messy conditions of streets due to horses demanded a solution.

At first it seemed the electric car would save the day but the technology proved inadequate. In 1907 came the first gas-propelled automobile cabs to New York, officially — taxis — due to a French invention installed in the front seat.

By the 1930s the streets were filled with thousands of taxicabs. During the Great Depression, cab drivers fought against plunging fare and even waged a strike in Times Square. In 1937, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia debuted the medallion system as a way to keep the streets regulated.

By the 1970s many cabdrivers faced an upswing of crime that made picking up passengers even more dangerous than bad traffic. Drivers began ignoring certain fares — mainly from African-Americans — which gave rise to the neighborhood livery cab system.

Today New York taxicab fleets face a different threat — Uber and the rise of private app-based transportation services. Will the taxi industry rise to the challenge in time for the debut of their taxi of tomorrow.

Visit the website for images and more information.

Tom and Greg are still off celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Bowery Boys podcast, so this week we're highlighting one of the best shows produced by the Bowery Boys this year -- for The Gilded Gentleman podcast, the spin-off show hosted by Carl Raymond. 

Domestic servants during the Gilded Age did more than simply maintain the mansions of the wealthy. New York City simply could not function with these 'invisible' armies of butlers, housekeepers, footmen, ladies maids, gardeners, cooks, valets and others.

The subject will be familiar to viewers of television shows like Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age and Upstairs, Downstairs. What was life like for a valet, a cook or a scullery maid in the mansions of late 19th century New York? How were houses with large staffs even managed? What were the hardships? And what were the benefits?  

In this episode Carl is joined by Esther Crain, author of The Gilded Age in New York 1870-1914and the website Ephemeral New York, to look at the various roles and responsibilities of domestic staff in grand mansions and even in more modest homes.  

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And after you're finished with this show, subscribe to The Gilded Gentleman on your favorite podcast player to hear Carl's new episode on the mysteries of absinthe, the mysterious elixir that fueled Paris and London’s cafe society and artistic circles in the Belle Epoque and late Victorian and Edwardian worlds. 

Carl is joined by Don Spiro, creator of New York’s Green Fairy Society to discuss and demystify the myths and legends of this most evocative of spirits. 

Let's go back to 2007. Tom and Greg recorded the first episode of the podcast which would become The Bowery Boys: New York City History on June 19, 2007. The location: the Lower East Side. The method of recording: a karaoke microphone and a small white iBook. 

In this special celebration of that anniversary, they set the scene with the ultimate 'situate the listener' --situating the year 2007. What were you up to that year? How has your life changed in the past 15 years? The world was very different in so many ways but in other respects, 2007 is a lot like 2022. 

Then Tom and Greg launch the segment ABBA -- Ask (the) Bowery Boys Anything! Call-in questions and emails from listeners asking questions about the show's past 15 years. You may be surprised by the answers. 

PLUS: What are Greg and Tom favorite episodes? Several good ones are mentioned but they (quite by accident) settle on one show in particular.

Hear all of the Bowery Boys podcasts -- in chronological order by subject -- on the website. 

What wonderful surprises await the Bowery Boys in Little Caribbean? The Brooklyn enclave in Flatbush is one of the central destinations for Caribbean-American life and culture in New York City.

Since the 1960s, thousands of immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean nations have made this historic area of Flatbush (mostly east of Flatbush Avenue) their home. The streets are lined with restaurants and markets that bring the flavors of the islands to Brooklyn.

But the story of Caribbean immigration to New York City begins many decades before.

Tom and Greg are joined on the show today by Dr. Tyesha Maddox, assistant professor of African and African-American Studies at Fordham University, to discuss the history of Caribbean immigration into the United States (and into New York City specifically).

Then they head out into the streets of Flatbush to join Shelley Worrell, the founder of I am caribBEING who led the effort to designate an official Little Caribbean as a vibrant cultural hub. Listen in on this mini food tour of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues and discover the secrets of this bustling neighborhood.

Stops include: Peppa's  Jerk Chicken (738 Flatbush Ave.), Errol's Caribbean Delights (661 Flatbush), African Record Center (1194 Nostrand Ave), Labay Market (1127 Nostrand Ave), Allan's Bakery (1109 Nostrand Ave), and Rain Eatery and Juice Bar (1166 Nostrand Ave).

This episode is brought to you by the Historic Districts Council.  Funding for this episode is provided by public funds from the  New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and Council Member Benjamin Kallos.

Over 350 years ago today's Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush was an old Dutch village, the dirt path that would one day become Flatbush Avenue, lined with wheat fields and farms.

Contrast that with today's Flatbush, a bustling urban destination diverse in both housing styles and commercial retail shops. It's also an anchor of Brooklyn’s Caribbean community -- Little Caribbean.

There have been many different Flatbushes -- rural, suburban and urban. In today's show we highlight several stories from these phases in this neighborhood's life.

If you are a Brooklynite of a certain age, the first thing that might come to mind is maybe the Brooklyn Dodgers who once played baseball in Ebbets Field here. Or maybe you know of a famous person who was born or grew up there -- Barbra Streisand, Norman Mailer or Bernie Sanders. 

But the story of Flatbush reflects the many transformative changes of New York City itself. And it holds a special place in the identity of Brooklyn -- so much so that it is often considered the heart of Brooklyn.

FEATURING STORIES OF Erasmus Hall, the Kings Theater, Lefferts Historic House, the Flatbush African Burial Ground and the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church.

PLUS We chat with Shelley Worrell of I Am CaribBEING about her work preserving and celebrating the neighborhood's Caribbean community.

This episode is brought to you by the Historic Districts Council.  Funding for this episode is provided by public funds from the  New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and Council Member Benjamin Kallos.

The Renwick Ruin, resembling an ancient castle lost to time, appears along the East River as a crumbling, medieval-like apparition, something not quite believable. Sitting between two new additions on Roosevelt Island -- the campus of Cornell Tech and FDR Four Freedoms Park -- these captivating ruins, enrobed in beautiful ivy, tell the story of a dark period in New York City history.

The island between Manhattan and Queens was once known as Blackwell's Island, a former pastoral escape that transformed into the ominous 'city of asylums', the destination for the poor, the elderly and the criminal during the 19th century.

During this period, the island embodied every outdated idea about human physical and mental health, and vast political corruption ensured that the inmates and patients of the island would suffer.

In 1856 the island added a Smallpox Hospital to its notorious roster, designed by acclaimed architect James Renwick Jr (of St. Patrick's Cathedral fame) in a Gothic Revival style that captivates visitors to this day -- even if the building is in an advanced state of dilapidation.

What makes the Renwick Ruin so entrancing? How did this marvelous bit of architecture manage to survive in any form into present day?

PLUS: The grand story of the island -- from a hideous execution in 1829 to the modern delights of one of New York City's most interesting neighborhoods.

Visit the website

After you've listened to this show, check out these Bowery Boys podcasts with similar themes:

-- North Brother Island: New York's Forbidden Place
-- Nellie Bly: Undercover in the Madhouse

Two landmarks to American art history sit on either side of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge over the Hudson River -- the homes of visionary artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church.

Cole and Church were leaders of the Hudson River School, a collective of 19th century American painters captivated by natural beauty and wide-open spaces. Many of these paintings, often of a massive size, depicted fantastic views of the Hudson River Valley where many of the artists lived.

In this episode, the final part of the Bowery Boys podcast mini-series Road Trip to the Hudson Valley, Greg and Tom head up to the historic towns of Catskill and Hudson to celebrate a pioneering artist and his star pupil, two men who transformed the way we look at nature and revolutionized American art. They're joined on this show by Betsy Jacks on the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and Amy Hausmann and Dan Bigler of the Olana State Historic Site.

For more information on the places we visited today, head over to the websites for the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and the Olana State Historic Site. You can also discover the natural places featured in many famous paintings by hiking the Hudson River Art Trail.

And for images of our trip to Catskill and Hudson, visit our website.

After you've listened to this show, check out the other two parts of this Road Trip to the Hudson Valley mini-series: On the Trail of the Croton Aqueduct and Hyde Park: The Roosevelts on the Hudson

Hyde Park, New York, was the home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States. He was born here, he lived here throughout his life, and he's buried here -- alongside his wife Eleanor Roosevelt. But it was more than just a home.

The Hyde Park presence of the Roosevelts expands outwardly from the Roosevelt ancestral mansion of Springwood, over hundreds of forested acres from former farmlands on the eastern side to the shores of the Hudson River on the west.

FDR was born here in 1882, returning through his life and throughout his storied career -- as a state senator, as a governor of New York, as a four-term president. When diagnosed with polio in 1921, Franklin rehabilitated here along the dirt roads emanating from Springwood.

FDR said of Springwood, “My heart has always been here. It always will be.”

Eleanor raised their family here, alongside FDR's protective mother Sara Delano. She would carve out her own legacy in Hyde Park at a place called Val-Kill Cottage where her political independence and social activism would flourish.

In this episode, Tom and Greg visit both Springwood and Val-Kill, along with two other historic places:

-- Top Cottage where the King and Queen of England met FDR at the dawning of the World War II (and the King enjoyed a certain staple of American cuisine)

-- And the FDR Library and Museum, America's first presidential library, where the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor lives on.

And special thanks to our patrons! Support the Bowery Boys on Patreon.com. 

What 19th century American engineering landmark invites you through nature, past historic sites and into people's backyards? Where can you experience the grandeur of the Hudson Valley in (mostly) secluded peace and tranquility -- while learning something about Old New York?

Welcome to the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, 26.5 miles of dusty pathway through some of the most interesting and beautiful towns and villages in Westchester County.

But this is more than a linear park. The trail runs atop -- and sometimes alongside -- the original Croton Aqueduct, a sloping water system which opened in 1842, inspired by ancient Roman technology which delivered fresh water to the growing metropolis over three dozen miles south.

At its northern end sits the New Croton Dam -- the tallest dam in the world when it was completed in 1906 -- with its breathtaking, cascading spillway (a little Niagara Falls) and its classic steel arch bridge, providing visitors with a view into a still-active source of drinking water.

In the first part of this Road Trip to the Hudson Valley mini-series adventure, Greg and Tom not only trace the history of this colossal engineering project, they literally follow the aqueduct through the village of Westchester County (with some help from Tom Tarnowsky from Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct).

WITH Nineteenth century ruins! Ancient bridges and weirs! Steep hikes and historic houses!

PLUS: How did this elaborate mechanism help revolutionize modern plumbing? And find out how portions of this 180 year old system are still used today to distribute fresh water.

For many historic images and photographs from out adventure, visit our website.

boweryboyshistory.com

And for further listening about the Hudson River and Westchester County, check out these earlier Bowery Boys podcasts:

-- Water For New York: The Croton Aqueduct (our original show on this subject)

-- Henry Hudson and the European Discovery of Mannahatta

-- Literary Horrors of New York City (for the story of Washington Irving and Sleepy Hollow)

-- The George Washington Bridge

We wanted to present to you one of our favorite new podcasts of the year -- and one we think you'll love. It's called History Daily. And yes, it really is history, daily!

Every weekday host Lindsay Graham (American Scandal, American History Tellers) takes you back in time to explore a momentous event that happened ‘on this day’ in history. Whether it’s to remember the tragedy of December 7th, 1941, the day “that will live in infamy,” or to celebrate that 20th day in July, 1969, when mankind reached the moon, History Daily is there to tell you the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world—one day at a time.

Enjoy these two sample episodes of History Daily -- the first on the formation of Barnum & Bailey's Circus, and the second on the opening of the Eiffel Tower.  We love Graham's podcasts and we hope you enjoy them too. And remember to subscribe to History Daily on your favorite podcast player. 

 

Frederick Law Olmsted, America's preeminent landscape architect of the 19th century, designed dozens of parks, parkways and college campuses across the country. With Calvert Vaux, he created two of New York City's greatest parks -- Central Park and Prospect Park.

Yet before Central Park, he had never worked on any significant landscape project and he wasn't formally trained in any kind of architecture.

In fact, Fred was a bit of a wandering soul, drifting from one occupation to the next, looking for fulfillment in farming, traveling and writing.

This is the remarkable story of how Olmsted found his true calling.

The Central Park proposal drafted by Olmsted and Vaux -- called the Greensward Plan -- drew from personal experiences, ideas of social reform and the romance of natural beauty (molded and manipulated, of course, by human imagination).

But for Olmsted, it was also created in the gloom of personal sadness. And for Vaux, in the reverence of a mentor who died much too young.

PLUS: In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Olmsted's birth, Greg is joined on the show by Adrian Benepe, former New York City parks commissioner and president of Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

boweryboyshistory.com

This episode focuses on the special relationship between New York City and Puerto Rico, via the tales of pioneros, the first migrants to make the city their home and the many hundreds of thousands who came to the city during the great migration of the 1950s and 60s. 

Today there are more Puerto Ricans and people of Puerto Rican descent in New York City than in any other city in the nation — save for San Juan, Puerto Rico. And it has been so for decades. 

By the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans lived in New York City, but in a metropolis of deteriorating infrastructure and financial woe, they often found themselves at the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder, in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

Puerto Rican poets and artists associated with the Nuyorican Movement, activated by the needs of their communities, began looking back to their origins, asking questions.

In this special episode Greg is joined by several guests to look at the stories of Puerto Ricans from the 1890s until the early 1970s. With a focus on the origin stories of New York's great barrios -- including East Harlem, the Lower East Side and the South Bronx.

FEATURING The origin of the Puerto Rican flag and the first bodegas in New York City!

WITH Dr. Yarimar Bonilla and Carlos Vargas-Ramos of CUNY's Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO), Kat Lloyd and Pedro Garcia of the Tenement Museum and Angel Hernandez of the Huntington Free Library and Reading Room and the Webby Award winning podcast Go Bronx.

Temple Emanu-El, home to New York's first Reform Jewish congregation and the largest synagogue in the city, sits on the spot of Mrs. Caroline Astor's former Gilded Age mansion. Out with the old, in with the new.

The synagogue shimmers with Jazz Age style from vibrant stained-glass windows to its Art Deco tiles and mosaics. When its doors opened in 1929, the congregation was making a very powerful statement. New York's Jewish community had arrived.

This story begins on the Lower East Side with the first major arrival of German immigrants in the 1830s. New Jewish congregations splintered from old ones, inspired by the Reform movement from Europe and the possibilities of life in America.

Congregation Emanu-El grew rapidly, moving from the Lower East Side to Fifth Avenue in 1868. Their beautiful new synagogue reflected the prosperity of its congregants who were nonetheless excluded from mainstream (Christian oriented, old moneyed) high society.

Why did they move to the spot of the old Astor mansion? What does the current synagogue's architecture say about its congregation? And where in the sanctuary can you find a tribute to the congregation's Lower East Side roots?

PLUS Greg visits Temple Emanu-El and chats with Mark Heutlinger, administrator of the congregation, and Warren Klein of the Herbert and Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica. 

FURTHER READING

Stephen Birmingham / Our Crowd
Stephen Birmingham / The Rest of Us
Michael A. Meyer / Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism
Deborah Dash Moore / Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People
Marc Lee Raphael / Judaism In America
Steven R. Weisman / The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became An American Religion
The Jewish Metropolis: New York City from the 17th Century to the 21st Century / Edited by Daniel Soyer

FURTHER LISTENING

After listening to this week’s episode on Temple Emanu-El, dive back into past episodes which intersect with his story:

The Miracle on Eldridge Street: The Eldridge Street Synagogue

Welcome to Yorkville: German Life on the Upper East Side

The Real Mrs. Astor: Ruler or Rebel?

Richard Morris Hunt was one of the most important architects in American history. His talent and vision brought respect to his profession in the mid-19th century and helped to craft the seductive style of the Gilded Age.

So why are there so few examples of his extraordinary work still standing in New York City today?

You're certainly familiar with the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and the grand entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, two commissions that came late in Hunt's life.

And perhaps you've taken a tour of two luxurious mansions designed by Hunt -- The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, and Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina.

But Hunt was more than just pretty palaces.

He championed the profession of the architect in a period when Americans were more likely to associate the job with construction or carpentry. Hunt brought artistry to the fore and trained the first official class of American architects from his atelier in Greenwich Village.

He promoted certain European styles of design -- collectively known as the Beaux-Arts architecture -- to growing wealthy class of Americans who wished to emulate the grand and regal lifestyles of French aristocracy.

His legacy includes prominent organizations promoting both the field of architecture and the need for effective urban design. Along the way he built hospitals, libraries, newspaper offices, artist studios, churches and even the first American apartment building.

Join us for this look at a true arbiter of American architecture.

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And for more fascinating details about the Gilded Age, listen to our spin-off podcast The Gilded Gentleman, hosted by Carl Raymond.

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New York City has an impressive collection of historic homes, but none as unique and or as joyful as the Louis Armstrong House and Museum, located in Corona, Queens.

What other historic home in the United States has a gift shop in its garage, aqua blue kitchen cabinets, bathroom speakers behind silver wallpaper, mirrored bathrooms and chandeliers over the bed? Elvis Presley's Graceland perhaps comes close, but the Louis Armstrong House has a charming comfort and a genuine grace and modesty to it, befitting its legendary former occupants.

Louis Armstrong is one of the most influential and most popular musicians in American history. Louis, like jazz itself, was born in New Orleans; in 1943, Armstrong moved to this house in Corona, thanks to the influence of his wife Lucille Armstrong, a former Cotton Club dancer and a fascinating personality in her own right.

In this episode Greg charts Armstrong's path to international fame -- and then his journey to becoming a New Yorker. And he pays a visit to the house itself, a magnificent treasure on a quiet street in Queens.

FEATURING audio of Louis and Lucille courtesy the Louis Armstrong House and Museum. And lots of music!

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Dorothy Parker was not only the wittiest writer of the Jazz Age, she was also obsessively morbid.

Her talents rose at a very receptive moment for such a sharp, dour outlook, after the first world war and right as the country went dry. Dorothy Parker’s greatest lines are as bracing and intoxicating as a hard spirit.

Her most successful verse often veers into somber moods, loaded with thoughts of self-destruction or wry despair. In fact, she frequently quipped about the epitaph that would some day grace her tombstone. Excuse my dust is one she suggested in Vanity Fair.

In this episode, Greg pays tribute to the great Mrs. Parker, the most famous member of the Algonquin Round Table, and reveals a side of the writer that you may not know -- a more engaged, politically thoughtful Parker.

Death did not end the story of Dorothy Parker. In fact, due to some unfortunate circumstances (chiefly relating to her frenemy Lillian Hellman), her remains would make a journey to several places before reaching their final home -- Woodlawn Cemetery.

Joining Greg on the show is author and tour guide Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Dorothy Parker Society who has now become a part of Parker's legacy.

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PODCAST What does the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea mean to you? Religion and architecture? Art galleries and gay bars? Shopping and brunch after a stroll on the High Line? Tens of thousands of people, of course, call it home.

But before it was a neighborhood, it was the Colonial-era estate of a British military officer who named his bucolic property after a London veterans hospital.

His descendant Clement Clarke Moore would distinguish himself as a theologian and writer; he invented many aspects of the Christmas season in one very famous poem. But he could no longer preserve his family estate when New York civic planners (and the Commissioners Plan of 1811) came a-calling.

Moore parceled the estate into private lots in the 1820s and 30s, creating both the exclusive development Chelsea Square and the grand, beautiful General Theological Seminary.

Slowly, over the decades, this charming residential district (protected as a historic district today) would be surrounded by a wide variety of urban needs -- from heavy industrial to venues of amusement. One stretch would even become "the Bowery of the West Side."

Further change arrived in the late 20th century as blocks of tenements were replaced with housing projects and emptied warehouses became discotheques and art collectives. Then came the Big Cup.

Join us as we celebrate over 200 years of urban development -- how Chelsea the estate became Chelsea the neighborhood.

Visit the Bowery Boys website for more information on Chelsea.

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The strange, scandalous and sex-filled story of the Ansonia, an Upper West Side architectural gem and a legendary musical landmark.

In the television show Only Murders in the Building, Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez play podcasters attempting to solve a mystery in a building full of eccentric personalities. Their fictional apartment building is called The Arconia, a name partially inspired by The Ansonia, a former residential hotel with a history truly stranger than fiction.

Built by the copper scion W.E.D Stokes, the lavish Ansonia remains one of the grandest buildings on the Upper West Side. But its hallways have seen some truly dramatic events including one of the greatest sports crimes in American history.

Today the Ansonia is still known as the home for great musicians and many of the most famous composers and opera stars have lived here. But it's the music legacy of the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse once in its basement, that may resonate with pop and rock music lovers as the launching pad for one of America's great performers.

PLUS: The hedonistic disco delights of Plato's Retreat.

NOTE: This show feature discussions of adult sex clubs and bathhouses. Although the show does not linger on the specifics, parental guidance is nonetheless suggested.

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Believe it or not, we've got one more brand new Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast for 2021. Look for it on January 31.

But for today we wanted to give you another sampling of our new spin-off podcast called The Gilded Gentleman, a look at America's Gilded Age period, hosted by social and culinary historian Carl Raymond.

In this new episode, Carl looks at one of the most legendary figures of the period – Caroline Astor, or the Mrs Astor, the ruler and creator of New York’s Gilded Age high society in the early 1870s. In collaboration with Southern social climber Ward McAllister, Astor essentially created the rules for who was 'acceptable' in New York social circles.

But she's also known for her battles with family members -- most notably with her nephew (and next door neighbor) William Waldorf Astor. What was behind her unusual motivations? And in what unusual way did she decide to cap her legacy at the end of her life?

Carl is joined by Tom Miller, creator of the website Daytonian in Manhattan, documenting the history of New York City, one building at a time.

Subscribe to the Gilded Gentleman now and you’ll get ANOTHER new episode on the life of Murray Hall, a Tammany Hall politician and operator of an employment agency for domestic help in the late 19th century.

But Murray had a secret – one that he took to his grave. A remarkable story and one we think will move you.

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Steven Spielberg's new version of West Side Story is here -- and it's fantastic -- so we're re-visiting our 2016 show on the story of Lincoln Center, with a new podcast introduction discussing the film and the passing of musical icon Stephen Sondheim.

The fine arts campus assembles some of the city's finest music and theatrical institutions to create the classiest 16.3 acres in New York City. It was created out of an urgent necessity, bringing together the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, the Julliard School and other august fine-arts companies as a way of providing a permanent home for American culture.

However this tale of Robert Moses urban renewal philosophies and the survival of storied institutions has a tragic twist. The campus sits on the site of a former neighborhood named San Juan Hill, home to thousands of African American and Puerto Rican families in the mid 20th century. No trace of this neighborhood exists today.

Or, should we say, ALMOST no trace. San Juan Hill exists, at least briefly, within a part of classic American cinema.

The Oscar-winning film West Side Story, based on the celebrated musical, was partially filmed here. The movie reflects many realities of the neighborhood and involves talents who would be, ahem, instrumental in Lincoln Center's continued successes.

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Originally released as Episode #218, December 9, 2016

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The following is a special presentation — the first episode of brand spin-off podcast called The Gilded Gentleman, hosted by social and culinary historian Carl Raymond.

In this debut episode, recorded at Greenwich Village's Salmagundi Club, Tom and Greg sit with Carl to formally introduce him to listeners and also to discuss the ideas surrounding the Gilded Age, a period of great wealth and great inequality during the late 19th century.

PLUS: Subscribe to The Gilded Gentleman on your favorite podcast player and get the second episode NOW -- on the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera. With many more exciting new episodes arriving in the coming weeks.

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree has brought joy and sparkle to Midtown Manhattan since the early 1930s. The annual festivities may seem steady and timeless but this holiday icon actually has a surprisingly dramatic history.

Millions tune in each year to watch the tree lighting in a music-filled ceremony on NBC, and tens of thousands more will crowd around the tree's massive branches during the holiday season, adjusting their phones for that perfect holiday selfie.

But the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree is more than just decor. The tree has reflected the mood of the United States itself -- through good times and bad.

The first tree at this site in 1931 became a symbol of hope during the Great Depression. With the dedication of the first official Christmas tree two years later, the lighting ceremony was considered a stroke of marketing genius for the grand new "city within a city" funded by JD Rockefeller Jr..

The tree has also been an enduring television star -- from the early years in the 1950s with Howdy Doody to its upgrade to prime time in the 1990s.

Join Greg for this festive holiday history featuring kaleidoscopic lighting displays, painted branches, whirling snowflakes, reindeer and a very tiny owl.

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Presenting a new history podcast produced by Tom Meyers and Greg Young from the Bowery Boys: New York City History.

If you’re a fan of Downton Abbey, The Age of Innocence or Upstairs Downstairs, then we know The Gilded Gentleman podcast will be your cup of tea.

You’re cordially invited to join social and culinary historian Carl Raymond for a look behind the velvet curtains of America’s Gilded Age, Paris’ Belle Époque and England’s Victorian and Edwardian eras. The food, the music, the architecture -- the scandals!

The first two episodes arrive promptly on December 7.

Please RSVP by subscribing to The Gilded Gentleman wherever you get your podcasts -- so you don't miss an episode.

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Presenting a history of the Bowery in the 20th century when this street became known as the most notorious place in America. And the stories of the lonely and desperate men whose experiences have been mostly forgotten.

From the moment that elevated train went up in 1878, the historic Bowery became a street of deteriorating fortunes. And by the 1940s, things had gotten so bad that the Bowery had taken on the nickname Skid Row.

For decades it had become the last resort for men down on their luck, filling the flophouses and the cheap gin mills. For most of the people who found themselves here, these were not the ‘good ole days’.

The only thing holding the Bowery back from total ruin were the rescue missions which began sprouting up here in the late 19th century, providing food and shelter for tens of thousands of people.

The most renown of these places was the Bowery Mission which was founded in 1879. And is still, believe it or not, on the Bowery. Performing pretty much the same function as it did over 140 years ago.

Greg and Tom take you through the dramatic history of the Bowery, then pay a visit to Jason Storbakken at the Bowery Mission to get a look at the rescue mission's current challenges and surprising struggles.

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November 24, 1966. Millions of spectators flood Broadway in New York City to watch the Macy’s Day Parade on Thanksgiving morning.

The iconic floats – Superman, Popeye, Smokey the Bear – are set against a sky that can only be described as noxious. A smog of pollutants is trapped over New York City, and it will ultimately kill nearly 200 people.

How did the 1966 Thanksgiving Smog help usher in a new era of environmental protection? And how have we been thinking about environmental disasters all wrong?

This episode comes from one of our favorite podcasts HISTORY This Week from the History Channel.

You can listen to more episodes of HISTORY This Week on Apple Podcasts

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The thrilling tale of a classic heist from the Gilded Age, perpetrated by a host of wicked and colorful characters from New York's criminal underworld.

Jesse James and Butch Cassidy may be more infamous as American bank robbers, but neither could match the skill or the audacity of George Leonidas Leslie, a mastermind known in his day as the "King of the Bank Robbers".

On October 27, 1878, Leslie's gang broke into the Manhattan Savings Institution and stole almost $3 million in cash and securities (about $71 million in today's money), making it one of the greatest bank robberies in American history.

This epic heist, which took three years to plan, was only the greatest in a string of high-profile robberies planned by Leslie and perpetrated by a rogue's gallery of New York thieves and "fences".

Many details of the crime remain a mystery, and the legend of Leslie has been immortalized -- with some mixture of truth and fiction -- in Herbert Asbury's classic The Gangs of New York.

Who was this suave and mysterious Leslie? And how do you actually go about breaking into a bank in the 1870s? (Hint: Make sure you have a "little joker" handy.)

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What are the greatest ghost stories and haunted legends in New York City history?

Since 2007 -- every October for fourteen years -- the Bowery Boys podcast has shared the city's most notorious and frightening ghost stories and urban legends. Over fifty-five stories and counting -- from malevolent wraiths who walk the avenues to strange spirits forever at home in some of New York's greatest landmarks.

So for this 15th annual Bowery Boys Halloween ghost story podcast, Greg and Tom taking a look back at their favorites (and yours), the tales which have stayed with us -- which have possessed us -- like a persistent phantom who refuses to leave.

Featuring:

-- The Brooklyn poltergeist at the heart of an unsolved 19th century mystery
-- A haunted Hell's Kitchen townhouse tormented by a ravenous spirit
-- An historic tavern with a very famous, very randy ghost
-- A famous apartment building with mysterious people who walk through walls

AND Greg and Tom re-visit and re-tell their favorite ghost story from their very first podcast. Does Olive Thomas still haunt the New Amsterdam Theatre?

Visit the website for a list of all the Bowery Boys ghost story podcasts and a map of all the haunted locations in the city.

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

The following podcast may look like the history of New York City cemeteries -- from the early churchyards of the Colonial era to the monument-filled rural cemeteries of Brooklyn and Queens.

But it's much more than that! This is a story about New York City itself, a tale of real estate, urban growth, class and racial disparity, superstition and architecture.

Cemeteries and burial grounds in New York City are everywhere -- although by design we often don’t see them or interact with them in daily life.

You see them while strolling late night through the East Village or out your taxi window headed to LaGuardia Airport. Some of your favorite parks were even developed upon the sites of old potter’s fields.

Why are there so many cemeteries on the border of the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens? Why are 19th century mausoleums and tombstones so fabulously ornate? And why are there so many old burial grounds next to tenements and apartment buildings in Greenwich Village?

Featuring four tales from New York City history, illustrating the unusual relationship between cemeteries and urban areas.

-- The Doctor's Riot of 1788
-- The tragic monument of Charlotte Canda
-- The shocking grave robbery of a prominent New Yorker
-- The remarkable discovery in 1991 of a long-forgotten burial ground

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There's no business like show business -- thanks to Lee, Sam and J.J. Shubert, the Syracuse brothers who forever changed the American theatrical business in the 20th century.

At last Broadway is back! And the marquees of New York's theater district are again glowing with the excitement of live entertainment.

And many of these theaters were built and operated by the Shubert Brothers, impresarios who helped shape the physical nature of the Broadway theater district itself, creating the close cluster of stages that give Times Square its energy and glamour.

In this show, we'll be visiting the dawn of Times Square itself and the evolution of the American musical -- from coy operettas and flirty song-filled revues filled with chorus girls.

The Shuberts were there almost from the beginning. After fending off their rivals (namely the Syndicate), the Shuberts centered their empire around an alleyway that would quickly take their name -- Shubert Alley.

They were innovative and they were ruthless, generous and often cruel (especially to each other). During the 1950s and 60s, the Shubert empire almost crumbled -- only to rise again in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to A Chorus Line and some very musical felines.

FEATURING A visit to the Shubert Archive above the Lyceum Theatre, a magical trove of historical items from the American stage.

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On the occasion of the 245th anniversary of the Revolutionary War in New York City, we revisit the story of the Great Fire of 1776, the drumbeat of war leading up to the disaster, and the tragic story of the American patriot Nathan Hale.

This is a reedited, remastered version of an episode that we recorded in 2015.

A little after midnight on September 21, 1776, the Fighting Cocks Tavern on Whitehall Street caught on fire. The drunken revelers inside the tavern were unable to stop the blaze, and it soon raged into a dangerous inferno, spreading up the west side of Manhattan.

Some reports state that the fire started accidentally in the tavern fireplace. But was it actually set on purpose -- on the orders of George Washington?

Meanwhile, underneath this sinister story is another, smaller drama -- that of a young man on a spy mission, sent by Washington into enemy territory. His name was Nathan Hale, and his fate would intersect with the disastrous events of that perilous night.

PLUS: The legacy of St. Paul's Chapel, a lasting reminder not only of the Great Fire of 1776 but of an even greater disaster which occurred almost exactly 225 years later.

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Just south of the World Trade Center district sits the location of a forgotten Manhattan immigrant community. Curious outsiders called it "Little Syria" although the residents themselves would have known it as the Syrian Colony.

Starting in the 1880s people from the Middle East began arriving at New York's immigrant processing station -- immigrants from Greater Syria which at that time was a part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Syrians of Old New York were mostly Christians who brought their trades, culture and cuisine to the streets of lower Manhattan. And many headed over to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn as well, creating another district for Middle Eastern American culture which would outlast the older Manhattan area.

Who were these Syrian immigrants who made their home here in New York? Why did they arrive? What were their lives like? And although Little Syria truly is long gone, what buildings remain of this extraordinary district?

PLUS: A visit to Sahadi's, a fine food shop that anchors today's remaining Middle Eastern scene in Brooklyn. Greg and Tom head to their warehouse in Sunset Park to get some insight on the shop's historic connections to the first Syrian immigrants.

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By the time Audrey Munson turned 25 years old, she had became a muse for some of the most famous artists in America, the busiest artist’s model of her day,

She was such a fixture of the Greenwich Village art world in the early 20th century that she was called the Venus of Washington Square, although by 1913 the press had given her a grander nickname — Miss Manhattan.

Her face and figure adorned public sculpture and museum masterpieces. And they do to this day.

But just a few years after working with these great artists, Audrey Munson disappeared from the New York art world, caught up in a murder scandal that would unfairly ruin her reputation.

And on her 40th birthday she would be locked away forever.

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When it opened in 1919, the Hotel Pennsylvania was the largest hotel in the world. Over a hundred years later, its fate remains uncertain. Is it too big to save?

After the Pennsylvania Railroad completed its colossal Pennsylvania Station in 1910, the railroad quickly realized it would need a companion hotel equal to the station's exquisite grandeur. And it would need an uncommonly ambitious hotelier to operate it.

Enter E.M. Statler, the hotel king who made his name at American World's Fairs and brought sophisticated new ideas to this exceptional hotel geared towards middle-class and business travelers.

But the Hotel Pennsylvania would have another claim to fame during the Swing Era. Its restaurants and ballrooms -- particularly the Café Rouge -- would feature some of the greatest names of the Big Band Era.

Glenn Miller played the Cafe Rouge many times at the height of his orchestra's fame. He was so associated with the hotel that one of his biggest hits is a tribute -- "Pennsylvania 6-5000."

The hotel outlived the demolition of the original Penn Station, but it currently sits empty and faces imminent demolition thanks to an ambitious new plan to rehabilitate the neighborhood.

What will be the fate of this landmark to music history? Is this truly the last dance for the Hotel Pennsylvania?

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Listen to the official Bowery Boys playlist inspired by this episode on Spotify.

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Interview with Prof. Ernest Freeberg, author of “A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement”

Today’s show is all about animals in 19th-century New York City. Of course, animals were an incredibly common sight on the streets, market halls, and factories during the Gilded Age, and many of us probably have a quaint image of horse-drawn carriages.

But how often do we think about the actual work that those horses put in every day? The stress of pulling those private carriages -- or, much worse, pulling street trolleys, often overloaded with New Yorkers trying to get to work or home?

In the book, “A Traitor to His Species”, author Ernest Freeberg tells the story of these animals -- and of their protector, Henry Bergh, the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). He ran the organization from the 1860s to the 1880s, and was a celebrity in his day -- widely covered, and widely mocked for his unflinching defense of the humane treatment of all animals, even the lowliest pesky birds or turtles.

His story is full of surprising turns, and offers an inside account of the early fight for animal rights, and engrossing tales of Gilded Age New York from a new perspective -- the animal’s perspective!

Ernest Freeberg is a distinguished professor of humanities and head of the history department at the University of Tennessee.

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New York City on ice — a tribute to the forgotten industry which kept the city cool in the age before refrigeration and air conditioning.

Believe it or not, ice used to be big business.

In 1806 a Boston entrepreneur named Frederic Tudor cut blocks of ice from a pond on his family farm and shipped it to Martinique, a Caribbean county very unfamiliar with frozen water. He was roundly mocked — why would people want ice in areas where they can’t store it? — but the thirst for the frozen luxury soon caught on, especially in southern United States.

New Yorkers really caught the ice craze in the 1830s thanks to an exceptionally clear lake near Nyack. Within two decades, shops and restaurants regularly ordered ice to serve and preserve foods. And with the invention of the icebox, people could even begin buying it up for home use.

The ice business was so successful that — like oil and coal — it became a monopoly. Charles W. Morse and his American Ice Company controlled most of the ice in the northeast United States by the start of the 20th century.

He was known as the Ice King. And he had one surprising secret friend — the Mayor of New York City Robert A. Van Wyck.

PLUS: The 19th century technologies that allowed American to harvest and store ice. The Iceman cometh!

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There are two mysterious islands in the East River with a human population of zero. They are restricted. No human being lives there.

One of these islands has been witness to some of the most dire and dramatic moments in New York City history.

North Brother Island sits near the tidal strait known as Hell Gate, a once-dangerous whirlpool which wrecked hundreds of ships and often deposited the wreckage on the island's quiet shore.

In the 1880s the island was chosen as the new home for Riverside Hospital, a quarantine hospital for New Yorkers with smallpox, tuberculosis and many more contagious illnesses.

Greg takes the reigns in this show and leads you through the following tales featuring North Brother Island:

-- A bizarre incident -- involving a body found in the waters off the island -- which first put the place on the map;

-- The nightmarish city policy of 'forced exile' to battle the spread of disease in the city's poorest quarters;

-- The tragic crash of the General Slocum steamship;

-- The complicated struggles of Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary;

-- The implausible tale of a 1950s rehab center for teenage drug addicts.

Visit the website for images and videos of North Brother Island.

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New York City Hall sits majestically inside a nostalgic, well-manicured park, topped with a beautiful old fountain straight out of gaslight-era New York.

But its serenity belies the frantic pace of government inside City Hall walls and disguises a tumultuous, vibrant history.

There have actually been two other city halls — one an actual tavern, the other a temporary seat of national government — and the one we’re familiar with today is nearing its 210th birthday. And the park it sits in is much, much older!

Join us as we explore the unusual history of this building, through ill-executed fireworks, disgruntled architects, and its near-destruction — to be saved only by a man named Grosvenor Atterbury.

PLUS: We look at the park area itself, a common land that once catered to livestock, British soldiers, almshouses and a big, garish post office.

This is a reedited and remastered version of episode #93 featuring an all-new, very special 'Choose Your Own Adventure' challenge at the end.

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We're sliding into Summer 2021 -- ready for great music, hot dancing and breaking into fire hydrants -- and so we’ve just released an epic summertime episode of Bowery Boys Movie Club to the general Bowery Boys Podcast audience, exploring the 1989 Spike Lee masterpiece Do The Right Thing.

Lee electrified film audiences with Do The Right Thing, documenting a day in the life of one block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn on one of the hottest days of the summer.

Inspired by both Greek tragedy and actual events in 1980s New York, Lee's film observes the racial and ethnic tensions that boil over at an Italian-American owned pizzeria serving a mostly African-American clientele from the neighborhood.

Listen in as Greg and Tom recap the story and explore some of the historical context for the film — the incendiary nature of New York summers, the realistic portrait of everyday life in Brooklyn, and the true-life murders on which Do The Right Thing is based.

PLUS Support the Bowery Boys Podcast on Patreon and get another episode of the Bowery Boys Movie Club, exploring the brand new film In The Heights and its fascinating local angles. Another film with great music, hot dancing -- and breaking into fire hydrants!

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The third and final part of the Bowery Boys Road Trip to Long Island -- the gay history of Fire Island!

Fire Island is one of New York state’s most attractive summer getaways, a thin barrier island on the Atlantic Ocean lined with seaside villages and hamlets, linked by boardwalks, sandy beaches, natural dunes and water taxis. (And, for the most part, no automobiles.)

But Fire Island has a very special place in American LGBT history. It is the site of one of the oldest gay and lesbian communities in the United States, situated within two neighboring hamlets -- Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines.

During the 1930s actors, writers and craftspeople from the New York theatrical world began heading to Cherry Grove, its remote and rustic qualities allowing for gay and lesbians to express themselves freely -- far away from a world that rejected and persecuted them.

Performers at the Grove's Community House and Theater helped define camp culture, paving the way for the modern drag scene.

In this episode, Greg and Tom head to Cherry Grove -- and the Community House and Theater -- to get a closer look at Fire Island's unique role in the American LGBT experience.

And they are joined by Parker Sargent, a documentary filmmaker and one of the curators of Safe Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove, a new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, highlighting photography from the collection of the Cherry Grove Archives Collection.

FEATURING: The Great Hurricane of 1938! The Invasion of the Pines! The indescribable Belvedere! And the surprising origin of Fire Island's name.

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Our new mini-series Road Trip to Long Island featuring tales of historic sites outside of New York City. In the next leg of our journey, we visit Jones Beach State Park, the popular beach paradise created by Robert Moses on Long Island's South Shore.

Well before he transformed New York City with expressways and bridges, Moses was an idealistic public servant working for new governor Al Smith. In 1924 he became president of the Long Island State Parks Commission, tasked with creating new state parks for public enjoyment and the preservation of the region's natural beauty.

But preserving, in the mind of Moses, often meant radical reinvention. The new Jones Beach featured glamorous bathhouses, proper athletic recreations (no roller coasters here!), an endless boardwalk and even new sand, anchored to the coast with newly grown beach grass.

Sometimes called 'the American Riviera', Jones Beach made Moses' reputation and became one of the most popular beach fronts on the East Coast. But more than that, Moses and the Jones Beach project transformed the fate of Long Island's highways (or should we say parkways).

PLUS: Greg and Tom hit the road to give you a tour of Jones Beach up close -- from one end of the boardwalk to the other!

AND The overpass bridges of Southern State Parkway. Did Moses develop them with low clearance to prevent buses (i.e. transportation for low income families) from coming to Jones Beach?

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The first part of our new mini-series Road Trip to Long Island featuring tales of historic sites outside of New York City. In this episode, relive a little Jazz Age luxury by escaping into the colossal castles, manors and chateaus on Long Island's North Shore, the setting for one of America's most famous novels.

The world is perhaps most familiar with Long Island history thanks to the 1925 classic novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a tale of romantic yearning and social status during the Jazz Age -- set specifically in the year 1922, in the grand and opulent manor of its mysterious anti-hero Jay Gatsby.

A house so large and so full of luxury that it doesn't seem like it could even be real.

And yet hundreds of these types of mansions dotted the landscape of Long Island in the early 20th century, particular along the north shore. This area was known as the Gold Coast.

In this episode, we present the origin of the Gold Coast and stories from its most prominent (and unusual) mega-mansions. Lifestyle of the (very old) rich and famous!

PLUS: A road trip to Planting Fields Arboretum, the lavish grounds of the old W.R. Coe estate. Hidden rooms, bizarre murals and curious gardens!

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Coney Island is back! After being closed for 2020 due to the pandemic, the unusual attractions, the thrilling rides and the stands selling delicious beer and hot dogs have finally reopened.

So we are releasing this very special version of our 2018 show called Landmarks of Coney Island — special, because this is an extended version of that show featuring the tales of two more Coney Island landmarks which were left out of the original show.

The Coney Island Boardwalk — officially the Riegelmann Boardwalk — became an official New York City scenic landmark in 2018, and to celebrate, we are headed to Brooklyn’s amusement capital to toast its most famous and long-lasting icons.

Recorded live on location, this week’s show features the backstories of these Coney Island classics:

— The Wonder Wheel, the graceful, eccentric Ferris wheel preparing to celebrate for its 100th year of operation;

— The Spook-o-Rama, a dark ride full of old-school thrills;

— The Cyclone, perhaps America’s most famous roller-coaster with a history that harkens back to Coney Island’s wild coaster craze;

— Nathan’s Famous, the king of hot dogs which has fed millions from the same corner for over a century;

— Coney Island Terminal, a critical transportation hub that ushered in the amusement area’s famous nickname — the Nickel Empire

PLUS: An interview with Dick Zigun, the unofficial mayor of Coney Island and founder of Coney Island USA, who recounts the origin of the Mermaid Parade and the Sideshow by the Seashore.

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Nature and history intertwine in all five boroughs -- from The Bronx River to the shores of Staten Island -- in this special episode about New York City's many botanical gardens.

A botanical garden is more than just a pretty place; it's a collection of plant life for the purposes of preservation, education and study. But in an urban environment like New York City, botanical gardens also must engage with modern life, becoming both a park and natural history museum.

The New York Botanical Garden, established in 1891, became a sort of Gilded Age trophy room for exotic trees, plants and flowers, astride the natural features of The Bronx (and an old tobacco mill).

When the Brooklyn Botanic Garden opened next to the Brooklyn Museum in 1911, its delights included an extraordinary Japanese garden by Takeo Shiota, one of the first of its kind in the United States.

The World's Fair of 1939-40 also brought an international flavor to New York City, and one of its more peculiar exhibitions -- called Gardens on Parade -- stuck around in the form of the Queens Botanical Garden.

PLUS: Gardens help save New York City landmarks -- from an historic estate overlooking the Hudson River to a stately collection of architecture from the early 19th century in Staten Island.

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In celebration of 125 years of movie exhibition in New York City -- from vaudeville houses to movie palaces, from arthouses to multiplexes.

In the spring of 1896 an invention called the Vitascope projected moving images onto a screen at a midtown vaudeville theater. The business of movies was born.

By the late 1910s, the movies were big ... and the theaters were getting bigger! Thanks to creators like architect Thomas Lamb and impresario Samuel 'Roxy' Rothafel, theaters in Times Square, New York's prime entertainment district, grew larger and more opulent.

Even by the 1940s, movie theaters were a mix of film and live acts -- singers, dancers, animal acrobats and even the drama of a Wurlitzer organ.

But a major court case brought a change to American film exhibition and diversity to the screen -- both low brow (grind house) and high brow (foreign films and 'art' movies).

Today's greatest arthouse cinemas trace their lineage back to the late 1960s/early 1970s and the new conception of movies as an art form.

Can these theaters survive the perennial villain of the movies (i.e. television) AND the current challenges of a pandemic?

FEATURING: The origin story of all your favorite New York City movie theaters.

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TOGETHER AGAIN! In 1984, Jim Henson brought his world-famous Muppets to New York for a wacky musical comedy that satirized the gritty, jaded environment of 1980s Manhattan while providing fascinating views of some of its most glamorous landmarks.

On this springtime episode of the Bowery Boys Movie Club, listen in as Greg and Tom recap the story and explore the many real New York City settings of the film — from the Empire State Building and Central Park to the corner booth at Sardi’s Restaurant and certain luncheonette in the area of today’s Hudson Square.

The Muppets Take Manhattan expresses an unfiltered enthusiasm for the promise of New York City at a time when national headlines were filled with tales of the city’s high crime and budget problems.

Can Kermit and Miss Piggy (and their roster of guest stars like Art Carney and Joan Rivers) bring magic back to the Big Apple?

To get BRAND NEW episodes of the Bowery Boys Movie Club, support the Bowery Boys Podcast on Patreon.

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New York's upper class families of the late 19th century lived lives of old-money pursuits and rigid, self-maintained social restrictions -- from the opera boxes to the carriages, from the well-appointed parlors to the table settings. It was leisure without relaxation.

In this episode we examine the story of Edith Wharton -- the acclaimed American novelist who was born in New York City and raised inside this very Gilded Age social world that she would bring to life in her prose.

She was a true "insider" of New York's wealthy class -- giving the reader an honest look at what it was like to live in the mansions of Fifth Avenue, to attend an elite dinner soiree featuring tableaux vivants and to carry forth an exhausting agenda of travels to Hudson River estates, grand Newport manors and gardened European villas.

We can read her works today and enjoy them simply as wonderful fiction -- and incredible character studies -- but as lovers of New York City history, we can also read her New York-based works for these recreations of another era.

Is it possible to glimpse a bit of Edith Wharton's New York in the modern city today?

Tom and Greg are joined by Wharton lecturer and tour guide Carl Raymond, a historian who has traced her footsteps many times on the streets of New York (and through the halls of her country home The Mount in Lenox, MA.)

Also: Join us on April 13, 2013 for a virtual celebration of Gilded Age dining, hosted by Carl, Greg and Tom.

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The story of a true Brooklyn 'start up' -- Charles Pfizer and Co, who went from developing intestinal worm medication in 1849 to being a leader of COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution in the 21st century.

The origin of Pfizer is one of German immigration in the mid 19th century and of early medical practices and concoctions that might seem alien to us today.

But this company's biography is also a celebration of Brooklyn — the City of Brooklyn in the mid 19th century, developing into an economic force in the United States and in opposition to the city of New York across the East River.

PLUS You can't tell the Pfizer story without looking at the world of apothecaries and early drug stores in New York City in the 19th century.

FEATURING Duane Reade, Keihl's, C.O. Bigelow, E. R. Squibb and Johnson & Johnson

ALSO What important American figure today grew up delivering parcels for his family drugstore in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn?

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Welcome to your tour of New York City nightlife in the 1890s, to a fantasia of debauchery, to a "saturnalia of crime," your journey to a life of delicious, amoral delights!

Courtesy a private detective, a blond-headed naif nicknamed Sunbeam and -- a prominent Presbyterian minister.

In this episode, we're going to Sin City, the New York underworld of the Gilded Age -- the saloons, dance halls, opium dens, prostitution houses and groggeries of Old New York. Depicted in the sensationalist media of the day as a sort of urban Hades, a hellish landscape of vice and debauchery.

So you might be surprised that our tour guide into this debauched landscape is the respected minister Dr. Charles Parkhurst of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church.

The point of Parkhurst's sacrilegious voyage was to expose police corruption and New York law enforcement’s willingness to look the other way at illegal behavior and decrepit social situations.

This two-week dive into New York’s most sinful establishments was meant to expose the hold of corrupt law enforcement over the powerless. But did it also expose the cravings and hypocrisy of its ringleader?

What you may hear in this episode may genuinely shock you -- and change your opinion about New York City nightlife forever.

FEATURING: Stale beer dives, tight houses, a most sinful game of leap frog and something called "the French Circus."

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One of America's most important books was published 225 years ago this year.

You won't find it on a shelf of great American literature. It was not written by a great man of letters, but somebody who described herself simply as 'an American orphan.'

In 1796 a mysterious woman named Amelia Simmons published American Cookery, the first compilation of recipes (or receipts) using such previously unknown items as corn, pumpkins and "pearl ash" (similar to baking powder).

This book changed the direction of fine eating in the newly established United States of America.

But Amelia herself remains an elusive creator. Who was this person who would have so much influence over the American diet?

Join Greg through a tour of 70 years of early American eating, identifying the true melting pot of delicious flavors — Dutch, Native American, Spanish, Caribbean and African — that transformed early English colonial cooking into something uniquely American.

FEATURING early American recipes for johnnycakes, slapjacks and gazpacho!

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“If we were to offer a symbol of what Harlem has come to mean in a short span of twenty years, it would be another statue of liberty on the landward side of New York. Harlem represents the Negro’s latest thrust towards Democracy.” -- Alain Locke

This is Part Two of our two-part look at the birth of Black Harlem, a look at the era BEFORE the 1920s, when the soul and spirit of this legendary neighborhood was just beginning to form.

The Harlem Renaissance is a cultural movement which describes the flowering of the arts and political thought which occurred mostly within the Black community of Harlem between 1920 and the 1940s. In particular the 1920s were described by writer Langston Hughes as “the period when the Negro was in vogue.” The moment when the white mainstream turned its attention to black culture.

But how Harlem become a mecca of Black culture and "the Capital of Black America"?

This is the story of constructing a cultural movement on the streets of Upper Manhattan in the 1910s. From the stages of the Lafayette Theater to the soapboxes of Speakers Corner. From the pulpits to the salons (both hair and literary)!

WITH stories of Marcus Garvey, Madam C.J. Walker, Arturo Schomburg and many more.

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The Hotel Theresa is considered a genuine (if under-appreciated) Harlem gem, both for its unique architecture and its special place in history as the hub for African-American life in the 1940s and 50s.

The luxurious apartment hotel was built by a German lace manufacturer to cater to a wealthy white clientele. But almost as soon as the final brick was laid, Harlem itself changed, thanks to the arrival of thousands of new black residents from the South.

Harlem, renown the world over for the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance and its burgeoning music scene, was soon home to New York’s most thriving black community. But many of the businesses here refused to serve black patrons, or at least certainly made them unwelcome.

The Theresa changed its policy in 1940 and soon its lobby was filled with famous athletes, actresses and politicians, many choosing to live at the Hotel Theresa over other hotels in Manhattan. The hotel’s relative small size made it an interesting concentration of America’s most renown black celebrities.

In this podcast, Greg gives you a tour of this glamorous scene, from the corner bar to the penthouse, from the breakfast table of Joe Louis to the crazy parties of Dinah Washington.

WITH: Martin Luther King Jr, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Fidel Castro. And music by Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine and Duke Ellington

ALSO: Who is this mysterious Theresa? What current Congressman was a former desk clerk? And what was Joe Louis’ favorite breakfast food?

The first half of this show was originally released in 2013 (as Episode #158) but has been newly edited for this release. The second half of this show is ALL NEW.

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MUSIC FEATURED: "Sophisticated Lady" by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra and "Dedicated To You" by Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan.

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How did Harlem become Harlem, the historic center of Black culture, politics and identity in American life? This is the story of revolutionary ideas -- and radical real estate.

By the 1920s, Harlem had become the capital of Black America, where so many African-American thinkers, artists, writers, musicians and entrepreneurs would live and work that it would spawn -- a Harlem Renaissance.

But in an era of so much institutional racism -- the oppression of Jim Crow, an ever-present reality in New York -- how did Black Harlem come to be?

The story of Harlem begins more than three and a half centuries ago with the small Dutch village of Nieuw Haarlem (New Haarlem).

During the late 19th century Harlem became the home of many different immigrant groups -- white immigrant groups, Irish and German, Italian and Eastern European Jews -- staking their claim of the American dream in newly developed housing here.

But then an extraorindary shift occurs beginning in the first decade of the 20th century, a very specific set of circumstances that allowed, really for the very first time, African-American New Yorkers to stake out a piece of that same American dream for themselves.

This is a story of real estate -- and realtors! But not just any realtor, but the story of the man who earned the nickname the Father of Harlem.

Part one of a two-part show on the origins of Harlem.

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In the latest episode of the Bowery Boys Movie Club, Tom and Greg celebrate wild and fabulous Auntie Mame, the outrageous comedy masterpiece starring Rosalind Russell that’s mostly set on Beekman Place, the pocket enclave of New York wealth that transforms into a haven for oddballs and bohemian eccentrics.

Auntie Mame cleverly uses historical events — the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Great Depression — as a backdrop to Mame’s own financial woes, and her progressive-minded care of nephew Patrick introduces some rather avant garde philosophies to movie-going audiences.

Listen in as the Bowery Boys set up the film’s history, then give a rollicking synopsis through the zany plot line.

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To listen to future episodes of the Bowery Boys Movie Club, support the Bowery Boys podcast on Patreon! For those who support us there already, check your emails or head over to your Patreon page for a new episode -- on the 1961 classic Breakfast At Tiffany's.

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The World Trade Center opened its distinctive towers during one of New York City's most difficult decades, a beacon of modernity in a city beleaguered by debt and urban decay. Welcome to the 1970s.

This year, believe it or not, marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Today there’s an entire generation that only knows the World Trade Center as an emblem of tragedy.

But people sometimes forget that the World Trade Center, designed by Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki, was a very complicated addition to the New York skyline when it officially opened in 1973.

While it might be fun to think of New York City in the 1970s through the lens of places like Studio 54 or CBGB, it was really the Twin Towers that redefined New York.

The journey to build the world's tallest building and its expansive complex of office towers and underground shops began in an effort by David Rockefeller to stimulate development in Manhattan's fading Financial District.

By the time Port Authority got onboard to fund the project, the Twin Towers were bonded together with another vital project -- a commuter train from New Jersey.

The World Trade Center inspired strong opinions from critics and the public alike, but eventually many grew to admire the strange towers which marked the skyline.

And some, the Twin Towers became objects of obsession.

FEATURING: The insane, completely outlandish and ultimately successful feat of acrobatics by a very bold French tightrope walker.

PLUS: An interview with with Kate Monaghan Connolly of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum about how that institution memorializes those lost in the tragedy while still celebrating the technological marvels that once stood there.

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PODCAST REWIND Stories of outrageous hoaxes perpetrated upon New Yorkers in the early 19th century.

In the 1820s, the Erie Canal would completely change the fortunes of the young United States, turning the port city of New York into one of the most important in the world. But an even greater engineering challenge was necessary to prevent the entire southern part of Manhattan from sinking into the harbor!

That is, if you believed a certain charlatan hanging out at the market…..

One decade later, the burgeoning penny press would give birth to another tremendous fabrication and kick off an uneasy association between the media and the truth. In the summer of 1835 the New York Sun reported on startling discoveries from one of the world’s most famous astronomers. Life on the moon!

Indeed, vivid moon forests populated with a menagerie of bizarre creatures and winged men with behaviors similar those of men on Earth.

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A version of this show was originally released on July 8, 2016.

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“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)

This is the story of a borough with great potential and the curious brown-tannish cantilever bridge which helped it achieve greatness.

The Queensboro Bridge connects Manhattan with Queens by lifting over the East River and Roosevelt Island, an impressive landmark that changed the fate of the borough enshrined in its curious name.

In 1898, before the Consolidation of 1898, which created Greater New York and the five boroughs, much of Queens was sparsely populated -- a farm haven connected by dusty roads -- with most residents living in a few key towns, villages and one actual city -- Long Island City.

With Brooklyn and Manhattan already well developed (and overcrowded in some sectors) by the early 20th century, developers and civic leader looked to Queens as a new place for expansion. But in 1900 it had no quick and convenient connections to areas off of Long Island.

With the opening of the bridge in 1909, rich new opportunities for Queens awaited. Communities from Astoria to Bayside, Jackson Heights, Flushing and Jamaica all experienced an unprecedented burst of new development.

Thanks in small part to the bridge so famous that it inspired a classic folk song!

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To celebrate the opening of Moynihan Train Hall, a new commuters' wing at Penn Station catering to both Amtrak and Long Island Railroad train passengers, we’re going to tell the entire story of Pennsylvania Station and Pennsylvania Railroad over two episodes, using a couple older shows from our back catalog. This is PART TWO.

Why did they knock down old Pennsylvania Station?

The original Penn Station, constructed in 1910 and designed by New York’s greatest Gilded Age architectural firm, was more than just a building. Since its destruction in the 1960s, the station has become something mythic, a sacrificial lamb to the cause of historic preservation.

As Vincent Scully once said, “Through Pennsylvania Station one entered the city like a god. Perhaps it was really too much. One scuttles in now like a rat.”

In this show we rebuild the grand, original structure in our minds — the fourth largest building in the world when it was constructed — and marvel at an opulence now gone.

PLUS: We show you where you can still find remnants of old Penn Station by going on a walking tour with Untapped Cities tour guide Justin Rivers.

THIS SHOW WAS ORIGINALLY RELEASED AS EPISODE 254 — FEBRUARY 16, 2018

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On January 1, 2021 Moynihan Train Hall officially opens to the public, a new commuters' wing catering to both Amtrak and Long Island Railroad train passengers at New York's underground (and mostly unloved) Penn Station.

To celebrate this big moment in New York City transportation history, we’re going to tell the entire story of Pennsylvania Station and Pennsylvania Railroad over two episodes, using a couple older shows from our back catalog.

The story of Pennsylvania Station involves more than just nostalgia for the long-gone temple of transportation as designed by the great McKim, Mead and White. It's a tale of incredible tunnels, political haggling and big visions.

Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest railroad in the world by the 1880s, but thanks to Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroad, one prize was strategically out of their grasp -- direct access to Manhattan.

An ambitious plan to link New Jersey to New York via a gigantic bridge fell apart, and it looked like Pennsylvania passengers would have to forever disembark in Jersey City.

But Penn Railroad president Alexander Cassatt was not satisfied. Visiting his sister Mary Cassatt -- the exquisite Impressionist painter -- in Paris, Cassatt observed the use of electrically run trains in underground tunnels. Why couldn't Penn Railroad build something similar?

One problem -- the mile-wide Hudson River (or in historical parlance, the North River).

This is the tale of an engineering miracle, the construction of miles of underground tunnels and the idea of an ambitious train station to rival the world's greatest architectural marvels.

ORIGINALLY RELEASED AS EPISODE 80 -- APRIL 10, 2009

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It's the happiest of hours! The tales of four fabulous cocktails invented or made famous in New York City's saloons, cocktail lounges, restaurants and hotels.

Cocktails are more than alcoholic beverages; over the decades, they’ve been status signifiers, indulgences that show off exotic ingredients or elixirs displaying a bit of showmanship behind the bar.

In this podcast, we recount the beginning days of four iconic alcoholic drinks:

-- The Manhattan: How an elite Gilded Age social club may have invented the cocktail for a new governor of New York;

-- The Bloody Mary: A Parisian delight, enjoyed by the leading lights of the Jazz Age, makes it way to one of New York's most famous hotels;

-- The Martini: A drink of mysterious origin and potency becomes New York City's most popular drink -- and a curious lunchtime companion;

-- The Cosmopolitan: Tracing the history of a new cocktail classic from Provincetown to San Francisco -- and into two of New York's most famous 1980s hangouts

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We released the following show on the history of vaccines back in early April 2020 when the idea of a COVID 19 vaccine seemed little more than distant fantasy.

Just this past Monday, on December 14, Sandra Lindsay, the director of critical care at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens became the first American to receive the Pfizer COVID 19 vaccine in a non-trial setting. And so this week we’re re-releasing this show — in a much more hopeful context this time around.

This is the story of the polio vaccines developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin -- and then a look at the origin of the vaccine itself, first developed to combat smallpox almost 225 years ago, thanks to Edward Jenner and a cow named Blossom.

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In 1916 New York City became the epicenter of one of America’s very first polio epidemics.

The scourge of infantile paralysis infected thousands of Americans that year, most under the age of five. But in New York City it was especially bad. The Department of Health took drastic measures, barring children from going out in public and even labeling home with polio sufferers, urging others to stay away.

That same year, up in the Bronx, a young couple named Daniel and Dora Salk — the children of Eastern European immigrants — were themselves raising their young son named Jonas. As an adult, Jonas Salk would spend his life combating the poliovirus in the laboratory, creating a vaccine that would change the world.

In 1921 a young lawyer and politician named Franklin Delano Roosevelt would contract what was believed at the time to be polio. He would use his connections and power — first as governor of New York, then as president of the United States — to guide the nation’s response to the virus.

----

AND THEN: The second half of the show is devoted to the question — who came up the first vaccine anyway?

Once upon a time there was a country doctor with a love of birds, a milkmaid with translucent skin, an eight-year-old boy with no idea what he's in for and a wonderful cow that holds the secret to human immunity.

This is the story of the first vaccine, perhaps one of the greatest inventions in modern human history. Come listen to this remarkable story of risk and bravery which led to the eradication of one of the deadliest diseases in human history.

And hear the words of Dr. Edward Jenner himself, written in the first weeks of his experiments!

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It's HOT in the city even during the coldest winter months, thanks to the most elemental of resources -- steam heat.

This is the story of the innovative heating plan first introduced on a grand scale here in New York City in the 1880s, a plan which today heats many of Manhattan's most famous -- and tallest -- landmarks.

While most buildings in Manhattan derive heat from a private source (most often furnaces, boilers and radiators), some of the largest structures actually get heat from the city.

If you've worked in a large Midtown office building, visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art or had your clothes dry cleaned in Manhattan, you've experienced steam distributed through ConEd's steam service through a system known as district heating.

Because of steam, the city's skyline isn't filled with thousands of chimneys, belching black smoke into the sky.

FEATURING An interview with Frank Cuomo, the director of steam operations at ConEd, who will help explain to us how the city produces steam today and how customers use it.

PLUS We answer some pressing questions about city heat. Why is there no steam service in the other four boroughs? Why does your radiator clang loudly at night? And what's the function of those orange and white chimneys in the streets?

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

PODCAST This month marks the 185th anniversary of one of the most devastating disasters in New York City history -- The Great Fire of 1835.

This massive fire, among the worst in American history, devastated the city during one freezing December evening, destroying hundreds of buildings and changing the face of Manhattan forever.

It underscored the city's need for a functioning water system and permanent fire department.

So why were there so many people drinking champagne in the street? And how did the son of Alexander Hamilton save the day?

FEATURING Such Old New York sites as the Tontine Coffee House, Stone Street, Hanover Square and Delmonico's.

PLUS: A newly recorded segment about a sequel of sorts to the 1835 fire. The Great Fire of 1845 (or really The Great Explosion of 1845) would once again imperil the lives of New Yorkers. But this time, they were prepared.

This show was originally released on March 13, 2009

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How Beatlemania both energized and paralyzed New York City in the mid 1960s as told by the women who screamed their hearts out and helped build a phenomenon.

Before BTS, before One Direction, before the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, before Menudo and the Jackson 5 -- you had Paul, John, George and Ringo.

The Beatles were already an international phenomenon by February 9, 1964. when they first arrived at JFK Airport. During their visits to the city between 1964 and 1966, the Fab Four were seen by thousands of screaming fans and millions of television audiences in some of New York’s greatest landmarks.

And each time they came through here, the city — and America itself — was a little bit different.

In this show, we present a little re-introduction to the Beatles and how New York City became a key component in the Beatlemania phenomenon, a part of their mythology — from the classic concert venues (Shea Stadium, Carnegie Hall) to the luxury hotels (The Plaza, The Warwick).

We’ll also be focusing on the post-Beatles career of John Lennon who truly fell in love with New York City in the 1970s. And we'll visit that tragic moment in American history which united the world 40 years ago — on December 8, 1980

But we are not telling this story alone. Helping us tell this story are recollections from listeners, the women who were once the young fans of the Beatles here in New York, the women who helped built Beatlemania.

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An account of a mysterious typhoid fever outbreak from the early 20th century and the woman — Mary Mallon, the so-called Typhoid Mary — at the center of the strange epidemic.

The tale of Typhoid Mary is a harrowing detective story and a chilling tale of disease and death.

Why are whole healthy families suddenly getting sick with typhoid fever — from the languid mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast to the gracious homes of Park Avenue?

Can an intrepid researcher and investigator named George Soper locate a mysterious woman who may be unwittingly spreading this dire illness?

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This show was originally broadcast on September 18, 2015

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Once upon a time, the streets of the Lower East Side were lined with pushcarts and salespeople haggling with customers over the price of fruits, fish and pickles. Whatever became of them?

New York's earliest marketplaces were large and surprisingly well regulated hubs for commerce that kept the city fed. When the city was small, they served the hungry population well.

But by the mid-19th century, massive waves of immigration and the necessary expansion of the city meant a lack of affordable food options for the city's poorest residents in overcrowded tenement districts.

Then along came the peddler, pushcart vendors who brought bargains of all types -- edible and non-edible -- to neighborhood streets throughout the city. In particular, on the Lower East Side, the pushcarts created bustling makeshift marketplaces.

Many shoppers loved the set-up! But not a certain mayor -- Fiorello LaGuardia, who promised to sweep away these old-fashioned pushcarts that packed the streets -- and instead house some of those vendors in new municipal market buildings.

For those immigrant peddlers, the Essex Street Market -- in sight of the Williamsburg Bridge -- would provide a diverse shopping experience representing a swirl of various cultures: Eastern European, Puerto Rican, Italian and more.

But could these markets survive competition from supermarkets? Or the many economic changes of life in New York City?

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The discovery of radio changed the world, and New York City was often front and center for its creation and development as America’s prime entertainment source during the 1930s and 40s.

In this show, we take you on a 50-year journey, from Marconi’s news making tests aboard a yacht in New York Harbor to remarkable experiments atop the Empire State Building.

Two of the medium’s great innovators grew up on the streets of New York, one a fearless inventor born in the neighborhood of Chelsea, the other an immigrant’s son from the Lower East Side who grew up to run America’s first radio broadcasting company (RCA).

Another pioneer with a more complicated history made the first broadcasts that featured the human voice, the ‘angelic’ tones of a Swedish soprano heard by a wireless operator at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

What indispensable station got its start as a department-store radio channel? What borough was touted in the very first radio advertisement? What former Ziegfeld Follies star strapped on a bonnet to become Baby Snooks?

Featuring tales of the Titanic, the rogue adventures of amateur operators, and a truly scary invasion from outer space!

MINOR CORRECTION: The radio show of yore was obviously called Everready Hour, not Everready House!

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To wrap up this month's series of spooky-themed shows, we're releasing this 2018 episode of our "Bowery Boys Movie Club", in which we conjure up New York City in the early 1980s in Ivan Reitman's box-office smash Ghostbusters.

How does this zany horror comedy use the plight of New York City as a backdrop for its grab bag of goofy ghosts? How do the histories of the New York Public Library, Columbia University, Central Park and the Upper West Side become entangled in its strange and hilarious plot? And why is the Tribeca location of Ghostbusters headquarters -- in an abandoned firehouse -- so important to the story?

Enjoy the show -- and be sure to join us on patreon.com/boweryboys to support the show and hear all episodes of the Movie Club!

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In the 14th annual Bowery Boys Halloween podcast, we celebrate some classic strange and supernatural terrors written by the most famous horror writers in New York City history.

Since 2020 is already a year full of absurd twists and frights, we thought we'd celebrate the season in a slightly different way. Don't worry! Tom and Greg are delivering a new batch of frightening stories. But this time the selected stories have been made famous by great writers who have lived and worked in New York City.

Included in this year's terrors:

-- A celebration of the 200th anniversary of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," featuring the Headless Horseman and the backstory of this classic story's creation;

-- The unsettling days of H.P. Lovecraft in Brooklyn where his xenophobia, racism and anxiety manifest into a pair of dark, claustrophobic tales, plucked from the waterfront and the West Village;

-- A bizarre and allegedly true story (or is it an urban legend?) of an unconventional jewel thief, made famous by that 20th century purveyor of all things unbelievable -- Robert Ripley;

-- And a look at the life of Patricia Highsmith -- celebrating the 100th anniversary of her birth a bit early -- whose nasty little tales of mad murderers have inspired Hollywood and unsettled a new generation of suspense lovers.

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Prepare to hear a few spirited stories in a whole new way.

For the past couple years hosts Tom Meyers and Greg Young have also done a LIVE cabaret version of their annual ghost story show at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. For reasons related to the fact that it’s the hellish year of 2020, we cannot bring you a live performance this year.

But we miss the wonderful Joe’s Pub so much – and we miss being with our listeners in a cabaret setting with cocktails – that we’re presenting to you a live recording of our last show at the storied venue, recorded on Halloween night 2019, featuring pianist and composer Andrew Austin and vocalist Bessie D Smith.

Prepare to hear new versions of your favorite ghost stories including:

-- A Brooklyn house haunting that may be related to the spectres from a colonial-era prison ship;

-- A famous murder trial from the year 1800 and a mysterious well that still stands in the neighborhood of SoHo;

-- The ghosts (or other supernatural entities) which guard the treasure of the famous Captain Kidd; and

-- The mournful secrets of a famed Broadway theater and the inner demons of a Hollywood icon.

With an all new ghostly tale -- WHO HAUNTS THE FORMER ASTOR LIBRARY?

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Celebrating the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 150th year since its founding -- and certainly one of the strangest years in its extraordinary existence.

The Met is really the king of New York attractions, with visitors heading up to Central Park and streaming through the doors by the millions to gasp at the latest blockbuster exhibitions and priceless works of art and history.

And who doesn’t love getting lost at the Met for a rainy afternoon — wandering from the Greek and Roman galleries to the imposing artifacts within the Arms and Armor collection and the treasures of the Asian Art rooms?

But this museum has some surprising secrets in its history -- and more than a few skeletons (or are those mummies?) in its closet.

WITH Ancient temples, fabulous fashions, classical relics, Dutch masters, controversial exhibitions and the decorative trappings of the Gilded Age.

AND Find out how the museum building has evolved over the years, employing some of the greatest architects in American history.

PLUS An interview with the Met's Andrea Bayer, Deputy Director for Collections and Administration, on the museum's celebratory exhibition Making the Met 1870-2020. How do you launch an anniversary celebration during a pandemic and lockdown?

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Cleopatra’s Needle is the name given to the ancient Egyptian obelisk that sits in Central Park, right behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is the bizarre tale of how it arrived in New York and the unusual forces that went behind its transportation from Alexandra to a hill called Greywacke Knoll.

FEATURING The secrets of the Freemasons, a mysterious and controversial fraternity who have been involved in several critical moments in American history (including the inauguration of fellow Mason George Washington.)

PLUS A newly recorded tale about another ancient landmark that has made its way to New York City -- a column from the ancient city of Jerash, brought here because of ... Robert Moses?

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This is a re-presentation of a show originally released on June 26, 2014 with new 2020 bonus material recorded for this episode.

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Charles Stratton, who would become world famous as “Tom Thumb” in the mid-19th century, was born in Bridgeport, CT on January 4, 1838 to parents of average height, and he grew normally during the first six months of his life -- to about 25 inches or so. And then, surprisingly, he just stopped growing.

When P.T. Barnum, the master showman, would meet Charles and his parents, Charlie was 4, and he’d be signed on the spot to play the part of “General Tom Thumb” at Barnum’s American Museum. He’d be given a fancy new wardrobe, a new nationality (British), and a new age -- 11 years old.

Charles would perform for the rest of his life as “Tom Thumb”. He’d enchant European royalty and American presidents, and sell out crowds around the world. And in 1863, during the darkest days of the Civil War, he’d be married in New York’s Grace Church to Lavinia Warren, another Barnum employee and another performer of short stature. Their wedding would be a sensation, and would actually knock news from the battlefields off the front page of the New York Times for three days.

We're joined in today’s show by four guests:

Dr. Michael Mark Chemers is a Professor of Dramatic Literature and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He’s the author of Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2008, in which he looks into the career and reception of Charles Stratton.

Eric Lehman is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Bridgeport and the author of 18 books, including Becoming Tom Thumb, published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press.

Kathy Maher is the Executive Director of the Barnum Museum and is celebrating her 22nd year with the Museum. Located an hour out of New York City, P.T. Barnum's last museum continues to stand on Main Street in the heart of downtown Bridgeport, CT, his adopted home. Although the Barnum Museum is currently closed due to covid-19 regulations, the Museum remains active with social media, virtual programming and a major historic restoration and re-envisioning https://barnum-museum.org/

Robert Wilson has been the editor of The American Scholar magazine since 2004. Before that, he edited Preservation magazine and was the book editor and columnist for USA Today. His previous books include The Explorer King (2006), about the 19th-century scientist, explorer, and writer Clarence King, and Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation (2013), about the Civil War photographer. His most recent book, Barnum: An American Life (from 2019), has just been published in paperback.

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Fraunces Tavern is one of America’s most important historical sites of the Revolutionary War and a reminder of the great importance of taverns on the New York way of life during the Colonial era.

This revered building at the corner of Pearl and Broad street was the location of George Washington‘s farewell address to his Continental Army officers and one of the first government buildings of the young United States of America. John Jay and Alexander Hamilton both used Fraunces as an office.

As with many places connected to the country’s birth — where fact and legend intermingle — many mysteries still remain.

Was the tavern owner Samuel Fraunces one of America’s first great black patriots? Did Samuel use his position here to spy upon the British during the years of occupation between 1776 and 1783? Was his daughter on hand to prevent an assassination attempt on the life of George Washington? And is it possible that the basement of Fraunces Tavern could have once housed a dungeon?

ALSO: Learn about the two deadly attacks on Fraunces Tavern — one by a British war vessel in the 1770s, and another, more violent act of terror that occurred in its doorway 200 years later!

PLUS: Where to find the ruins of Lovelace's Tavern, dating back to the days of New Amsterdam.

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This is a re-presentation of a show originally released on March 18, 2011 with new 2020 bonus material recorded for this episode.

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Interview with author Eric K. Washington, author of “Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal”.

The Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal were a workforce of hundreds of African-American men who were an essential part of the long-distance railroad experience. Passengers relied on Red caps for more than simply grabbing their bags -- they were navigators, they helped with taxis, offered advice, and provided a warm greeting.

In his 2019 book, “Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal”, author Eric K. Washington tells the remarkable story of Williams, “The Chief” of the Grand Central Red Caps. He was a boss to many, a friend to thousands of passengers, and a confidant to celebrities, politicians… even occupants of the White House.

He also tells the story of Grand Central Terminal, and specifically, of the Red Caps who worked here, especially during the Terminal’s heyday in the first half of the 20th century. And along the way, the book chronicles how New York’s African-American enclaves and communities developed and moved around the city.

That huge story is told through the lens of this one, often underappreciated, and yet instrumental man -- James Williams. He was the chief of the Red Caps, but also an under-reported figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

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Ancient space rocks, dinosaur fossils, anthropological artifacts and biological specimens are housed in New York's world famous natural history complex on the Upper West Side -- the American Museum of Natural History!

Throughout the 19th century, New Yorkers tried to establish a legitimate natural history venue in the city, including an aborted plan for a Central Park dinosaur pavilion. With the creation of the American Museum of Natural History, the city finally had a premier institution that celebrated science and sent expeditions to the four corners of the earth.

Tune in to hear the stories of some of the museum's most treasured artifacts and the origins of its collection. But there's also a dark side to the museum's history, one that includes the tragic tale of Minik the Inughuit child, subject by museum directors to a bizarre and cruel lie.

PLUS: How exactly do you display a 68,100 lb meteorite?

AND: What will be the fate of that controversial Theodore Roosevelt monument? A 2020 update!

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This is a re-presentation of a show originally released on November 24, 2010 with bonus material recorded in 2020.

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PART 2 of our two-part podcast series, "A NEW DEAL FOR NEW YORK"

In this episode, we look at how one aspect of FDR's New Deal -- the WPA's Federal Project Number One -- was used to put the country's creative community back to work and lift the spirits of downtrodden Americans.

Federal Project Number One -- the "artistic wing" of the Works Progress Administration -- inspired one of the most important and lasting cultural revolutions in the United States, an infusion of funds that put musicians, painters, writers and the theater community back to work, creating works that would promote and celebrate the American experience.

The already-rich creative communities of New York City thrived during the program in several unique ways -- from the stages of Broadway to the art studios of Harlem.

In this episode we present several tales from the four main units of Federal One -- the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Art Project and the Federal Writers' Project

Including the stories of these WPA creators --

-- Juanita Hall: A future Tony-winning actress whose WPA-funded gospel chorus performed more than 5,000 times

-- Orson Welles: A brilliant stage producer (not yet a filmmaker) whose bold stage inventions pressed the limits of government censorship.

-- Jackson Pollock: A budding painter just finding his artistic voice, making a living working on murals and canvas

-- Zora Neale Hurston: The Harlem Renaissance anthropologist and novelist who used the WPA program to explore folklore and traditions in Florida.

PLUS: The mural program, the WPA Guides and the contributions of WNYC and the New York Public Library

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PART ONE of a two-part podcast series A NEW DEAL FOR NEW YORK. For Part One, we look at the impact FDR and New Deal funding had in shaping New York City's bridges and parks -- thanks to an especially tenacious parks commissioner!

New York City during the 1930s was defined by massive unemployment, long lines at the soup kitchens, Hoovervilles in Central Park.

But this was also the decade of the Triborough Bridge and Orchard Beach, new swimming pools and playgrounds

Faced with the nationwide financial crisis, newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose to boldly take the crisis on a series of transformative actions by the government that became known as the New Deal.

No other American city would benefit more from the New Deal that New York City. At one point, one out of every seven dollars from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was being spent in New York.

And the two men responsible for funneling federal funding to the city was Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and his new parks commissioner Robert Moses.

Moses amassed a great amount of unchecked power, generating thousands of projects through out the city -- revitalizing the city landscape.

How did Moses acquire so much power? And how did manage to funnel so much federal assistance into his own projects?

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The Serbian immigrant Nikola Tesla was among the Gilded Age's brightest minds, a visionary thinker and inventor who gave the world innovations in electricity, radio and wireless communication.

So why has Tesla garnered the mantle of cult status among many?

Part of that has to do with his life in New York City, his shifting fortunes as he made his way (counting every step) along the city streets.

Tesla lived in Manhattan for more than 50 years, and although he hated it when he first arrived, he quickly understood its importance to the development of his inventions.

Travel with us to the many places Tesla worked and lived in Manhattan -- from the Little Italy roost where the Tesla Coil may have been invented to his doomed Greenwich Village laboratory. From his first job in the Lower East Side to his final home in one of Midtown Manhattan's most famous hotels.

Nikola Tesla, thank you for bringing your genius to New York City.

PLUS: The marvelous demonstration at Madison Square Garden in 1898 that proves that Tesla invented the drone!

Visit our website for more images illustrating the events from this week's show:

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This episode was originally released on April 29, 2016. Now including newly recorded bonus material for 2020! (And you might hear from David Bowie.)

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The newspapers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst -- the New York World and the New York Journal -- were locked in a fierce competition for readers in the mid 1890s. New Yorkers loved it. The paper's sensational style was so shocking that it became known as "yellow journalism".

So what happens when those flamboyant publications are given an international conflict to write about?

On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine mysteriously exploded while stationed in Havana Harbor in Cuba. While President McKinley urged calm and patience, two New York newspapers jumped to a hasty conclusion -- Spain had destroyed the ship!

The Spanish-American War allowed Hearst (with Pulitzer playing catch up) fresh opportunities to sell newspapers using exaggerated reports, melodramatic illustration and even outlandish stunts. (Think Hearst on a yacht, barreling into conflicts where he didn't belong.)

But by 1899, with the war only a recent memory, the publishers faced a very different battle -- one with their own newsboys, united against the paper's unfair pricing practices. It's a face-off so dramatic, they wrote a musical about it!

PLUS: How have the legacies of Pulitzer and Hearst influenced our world to this day? And where can you find the remnants of their respective empires in New York City today?

This is Part Two of our two-part series on Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Listen to Episode 335 (Pulitzer vs. Hearst: The Rise of Yellow Journalism) before listening to this show.

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In the 1890s, powerful New York publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst engaged in an all-out battle for readers of their respective newspapers, developing a flamboyant, sensational style of coverage today referred to as "yellow journalism".

This battle between the New York World and the New York Journal would determine the direction of the American media landscape and today we still feel its aftermath -- from melodramatic headlines to the birth of eyewitness reporting and so-called "fake news".

The two men come from very different backgrounds. Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant who started his publishing empire in St. Louis, used the World to highlight injustices upon the working class and to promote worthy civic projects (like the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty).

Hearst, himself the wealthy publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, entered the New York publishing world, specifically aimed at competing with Pulitzer. In many ways, he "out-Pulitzered" Pulitzer, creating extraordinary daily publications which appealed to all types of New Yorkers. (Even children!)

In Part One of this two-part series, we introduce you to the two publishers and meet them on a battlefield of newsprint and full-page headlines -- located on just a couple short blocks south of the Brooklyn Bridge.

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Support the Bowery Boys Podcast on Patreon, the patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for just a small contribution. Visit patreon.com/boweryboys for more information.

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The story of the Lenape, the native people of New York Harbor region and their experiences with the first European arrivals — the explorers, the fur traders, the residents of New Amsterdam.

Before New York, before New Amsterdam — there was Lenapehoking, the land of the Lenape, the original inhabitants of the places we call Manhattan, Westchester, northern New Jersey and western Long Island.

This is the story of their first contact with European explorers and settlers and their gradual banishment from their ancestral land.

Fur trading changed the lifestyles of the Lenape well before any permanent European settlers stepped foot in this region. Early explorers had a series of mostly positive experiences with early native people.

With the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, the Lenape entered into various land deals, “selling" the land of Manhattan at a location in the area of today’s Inwood Hill Park.

But relations between New Amsterdam and the surrounding native population worsened with the arrival of Director-General William Kieft, leading to bloody attacks and vicious reprisals, killing hundreds of Lenape and colonists alike.

Peter Stuyvesant arrives to salvage the situation, but further attacks threatened any treaties of peace. But the time of English occupation, the Lenape were decimated and without their land.

And yet, descendants of the Lenape live on today in various parts of the United States and Canada. All that and more in this tragic but important tale of New York City history.

Visit our website for more images illustrating the events from this week's show:

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This episode was originally released in June 2016.

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It's summer in the city, so we're re-issuing our Bowery Boys Movie Club podcast devoted to Midnight Cowboy, the 1969 buddy film starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.

There are few time capsules of New York’s darker days quite as pleasurable as Midnight Cowboy. It’s hardly as provocative as when it was released in May 1969, but its ragged edges have only become more remarkable to view as a piece of history, paying tribute to an era often romanticized today.

If you’ve never seen the film — don’t worry, we’ll walk you through it, scene by scene, with some history and bad jokes thrown in. Or you could stop and watch it now, and then listen — it’s up to you!

Be sure to check out our blog post about Midnight Cowboy, which includes filming locations around the city.

This episode is made possible by our supporters on Patreon, and is part of our patron-only podcast series "Bowery Boys Movie Club". Join us on Patreon to access all Movie Club episodes, along with other patron-only audio.

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A history of the comic book industry in New York City, how the energy and diversity of the city influenced the burgeoning medium in the 1930s and 40s and how New York’s history reflects out from the origins of its most popular characters.

In the 1890s a newspaper rivalry between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzee helped bring about the birth of the comic strip and, a few decades later, the comic book.

Today, comic book superheroes are bigger than ever — in blockbuster summer movies and television shows — and most of them still have an inseparable bond with New York City.

What’s Spider-Man without a tall building from which to swing? But not only are the comics often set here; the creators were often born here too.

Many of the greatest writers and artists actually came from Jewish communities in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn or the Bronx.

For many decades, nearly all of America’s comic books were produced here. Unfortunately that meant they were in certain danger of being eliminated entirely during a 1950s witch hunt by a crusading psychiatrist from Bellevue Hospital named Frederic Wertham.

FEATURING a special chat with comics historian Peter Sandersonabout the unique New York City connections of Marvel Comics’ most famous characters. Sanderson is the author of The Marvel Comics Guide to New York City and The Marvel Encyclopedia.

WITH: The Yellow Kid, Little Orphan Annie, Batman, Doctor Strange and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

The episode is a rebroadcast of a show which first aired on July 24, 2015.

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In New York City, during the tumultuous summer of 1776, the King of England lost his head.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Colonial New York received a monumental statue of King George III on horseback, an ostentatious and rather awkward display which once sat in Bowling Green park at the tip of Manhattan.

On July 9, 1776, angry New Yorkers violently tore down that statue of King George and, as the story goes, rendered his body into bullets used in the battles of the Revolutionary War.

Flash forward to 2020 — cities across the United States today are reevaluating the meaning of their own public monuments. Critics say that removing memorials to the Confederacy, for instance, work to ‘erase history’.

But a monument itself is not history lesson, but a time capsule of the motivations of the culture who created them.

And that’s why this story from 1776 resonates so strongly today. Public statues do have meaning. And for New Yorkers — in the run up to American independence — one statue represented oppression, servitude and annihilation.

In this episode, take a trip back to the city right before the war, when New York was split into those sympathetic to the Tories and those to the Sons of Liberty, an early organization dedicated to the liberty of the American colonies.

PLUS: The story lives on! Find out where you can locate artifacts from this story throughout the city today.

FEATURING A young Alexander Hamilton, that rascal Cadwallader Colden and an unsung hero named William Pitt

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EPISODE 332 The Manhattan neighborhood of Yorkville has a rich immigrant history that often gets overlooked because of its location on the Upper East Side, a destination usually associated with wealth and high society.

But Yorkville, for over 170 years, has been defined by waves of immigrant communities which have settled here, particular those cultures from Central and Eastern Europe -- Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks.

The neighborhood developed thanks to its location to various streetcar and train lines, but that proximity insured that Yorkville would evolve in quite a different way from the more luxurious Fifth Avenue just a few blocks away.

Yorkville's German cultural identity was centered around East 86th Street -- aka "Sauerkraut Boulevard" -- where cafes and dance halls catered to the amusements of German Americans. The Yorkville Casino was a 'German Madison Square Garden', featuring cabaret, film, ballroom dancing and even political rallies.

Does the spirit of old Yorkville still exist today? While events in the early 20th century brought dramatic change to this ethnic enclave, those events didn't entirely erase the German spirit from the city streets.

In this show, we tell you where can still find the most interesting cultural artifacts of this often overlooked historical gem.

This episode is brought to you by the Historic Districts Council. Funding for this episode is provided by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and Council Member Benjamin Kallos.

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The history of black and African-American settlements and neighborhoods which once existed in New York City in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Today we sometimes define New York City's African-American identity by the places where thriving black culture developed -- Harlem, of course, and also Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, neighborhoods that developed for groups of black residents in the 20th century.

But by no means were these the first in New York City. Other centers of black and African-American life existed long before then. In many cases, they were obliterated by the growth of the city, sometimes built over without a single marker, without recognition.

This is the story of a few of those places. From the 'land of the blacks' -- the home to New Amsterdam and British New York's early black population -- to Seneca Village, a haven for freed people of color in the early 19th century that was wiped away by the need for a city park.

From Little Africa -- the Greenwich Village sector for the black working class in the mid 19th century -- to Sandy Ground, a rural escape in Staten Island with deep roots in the neighborhood today.

And then there's Weeksville, Brooklyn, the visionary village built to bond a community and to develop a political foothold.

In this collection of short historical stories, Greg welcomes Kamau Ware (of the Black Gotham Experience) and Tia Powell Harris (formerly of the Weeksville Heritage Center) to the show.

The episode is a rebroadcast of a show which first aired on June 9, 2017. Stay tuned to the end of this show for some newly written material and an update on the Black Gotham Experience and the Weeksville Heritage Center.

Visit our website for more images and information.

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During the Gilded Age, New York City had one form of rapid transit -- the elevated railroad.

The city's population had massively grown by the 1870s thanks to large waves of immigration from Ireland and Germany. Yet its transportation options -- mostly horse-drawn streetcars -- were slow and cumbersome.

As a result, people rarely lived far from where they worked. And in the case of most working class New Yorkers, that meant staying in overcrowded neighborhoods like the Lower East Side.

In the 1870s, New York hoped to alleviate the population pressure by constructing four elevated railroad lines -- along 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 9th Avenues -- in the hopes that people would begin inhabiting Upper Manhattan and the newly acquired portion of Westchester County known as the Annexed District (today's South Bronx).

In this show, we focus on the two eastern-most lines and their effects on the city's growth. Take a ride with us -- through Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, Midtown Manhattan, Yorkville, East Harlem and Mott Haven!

FEATURING an interview with elevated expert and tour guide Michael Morgenthal.

This episode is brought to you by the Historic Districts Council. Funding for this episode is provided by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and Council Member Benjamin Kallos.

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"To the beat of muffled drums 8,000 negro men, women and children marched down Fifth Avenue yesterday in a parade of 'silent protest against acts of discrimination and oppression' inflicted upon them in this country." -- New York Times, July 29, 1917

EPISODE 330 The Silent Parade of July 28, 1917, was unlike anything ever seen in New York City -- thousands of black men, women and children marching down Fifth Avenue. Today it is considered New York's (and most likely America's) first African-American civil rights march.

The march was organized by the NAACP in direct response to a horrible plague of violence against black Americans in the 1910s, culminating in the East St. Louis Riots, a massacre involving white mobs storming black neighborhoods in sheer racial animus.

There were no chants or rallying cries. The women were dressed all in white, the men in black. Thousands of onlookers had lined the parade route that day out of curiosity, amusement, pride, anger and joy.

How did this unusual protest come to be? How did New Yorkers really react? And why has the Silent Parade gone mostly forgotten for most Americans?

FEATURING: W.E.B. Du Bois, Madam C.J. Walker, James Weldon Johnson, Lillian Wald and more

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EPISODE 329 Did you know that the first modern ambulance -- as in a 'mobile hospital' -- was invented in New York City?

On June 4, 1869, America’s first ambulance service went into operation from Bellevue Hospital with a driver, a surgeon, two horses and equipment including a stretcher, a stomach pump, bandages and sponges, handcuffs, a straight-jacket, and a quart of brandy.

Within just a couple years, the ambulance became an invaluable feature of New York health, saving the lives of those who might otherwise die on the streets of the city. They proved especially helpful in a riot -- of which there were many in the 19th century!

In this show, you'll be introduced to a new way of thinking about urgent injuries and emergency care. True emergency medicine was not a serious factor in major hospitals until the 1960s. Yet on-the-job injuries and terrible trauma from violent crime was a perpetual problem in New York.

What was life like in the city before the advent of the ambulance? How did ambulances work in the era before the telephone?

PLUS: A tribute to the ambulance workers -- the EMTs, paramedics and drivers -- who have risked their lives to save those of other New Yorkers.

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EPISODE 328 New Yorkers eat a LOT of Chinese food and have enjoyed Chinese cuisine – either in a restaurant or as takeout – for well over 130 years. Chinese food entered the regular diet of the city before the bagel, the hot dog and even the pizza slice.

In this episode, Greg explores the history of Chinese food in New York City -- from the first Mott Street kitchens in Manhattan's Chinatown to the sleek 20th century eateries of Midtown.

We have one particular dish to thank for the mainstreaming of Chinese food -- chop suey. By the 1920s, chop suey had taken New York by storm, a cuisine perfect for the Jazz Age.

Through the next several decades, Chinese food would be transformed into something truly American and the Chinese dining experience would incorporate neon signs, fabulous cocktails and even glamorous floor shows by the 1940s.

FEATURING: Such classics as the Port Arthur Restaurant, the Chinese Tuxedo, Ruby Foo's Den, Tao, Lucky Cheng's and the eateries of 'Szechuan Valley'.

PLUS: Bernstein-on-Essex and the love affair between Chinese food and Jewish New Yorkers.

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EPISODE 327 This is Part Two of a special Bowery Boys podcast event featuring the voices of our listeners.

What makes New York feel like home — whether you live here or not? Why do people feel comfortable in New York City -- even in troubling times? When do you officially become a New Yorker?

In this episode, we focus on a few tales from New York transplants, those who were born here and moved to the city in search of employment, adventure, love -- or purpose. And stories from those native New Yorkers who have moved away but keep a part of the city with them always (and in a couple cases, we mean this literally.)

ALSO: How the residents of New York City come together in crisis times.

Featuring the 'origin stories' of both Tom and Greg, both of whom moved to New York City in the early 1990s. It took both the simple pleasures of urban living and major traumatic events to turn them into New Yorkers.

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EPISODE 326 A special episode featuring the listeners of the Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast.

What makes New York feel like home -- whether you live here or not?

What is that indefinable connection that people make with the city? Why do so many people feel a city as large as New York speaks to them personally?

We asked our listeners to tell us about feeling “at home in New York," about that feeling of familiarity and nostalgia that one can feel here. Thanks to the presence of New York City in so many films, books and television shows, it's an emotion that can be felt even by those who live elsewhere.

Well the listeners delivered -- in a wonderful abundance of voicemails and emails. In this episode we hear from three groups of New York City lovers: the native New Yorkers, the commuters and the frequent visitors. (In part two, we'll hear the tales of the transplants, those who, in the words of E.B. White, "came to New York in quest of something.")

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EPISODE 325 In 1858, during two terrible nights of violence in September, the needs of the few outweighed the needs of the many when a community, endangered for decades and ignored by the state, finally reached its breaking point.

In Staten Island, near the spot of today’s St. George Ferry Terminal, where thousands board and disembark the Staten Island Ferry everyday, was once America’s largest quarantine station – 30 acres of hospitals, medical facilities, shanties and doctors' homes, surrounded by a six-foot-tall brick wall.

Since its construction in the year 1799, Staten Islanders had fought for the removal of the Quarantine Ground, considered a menacing danger to the health of residents and a blight upon any possible development.

Yet the need for such an extensive facility at the Narrows -- the gateway to the New York Upper Bay and the Hudson River -- was so important that the state of New York mostly turned a blind eye to their wishes.

And so the residents of Staten Island took matters into their own hands.

Was this a case of righteous revolution in the service of safety and well-being against a tyrannical state? Or a grave and malicious act of terror?

FEATURING: Cornelius Vanderbilt and two American vice presidents. And origins of New York neighborhoods, Tompkinsville, St. George and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn!

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EPISODE 324 At last! The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast looks at one of the strangest traditions in this city's long history -- that curious custom known as Moving Day.

Every May 1st, for well over two centuries, from the colonial era to World War II, rental leases would expire simultaneously, and thousands of New Yorkers would pack their possessions into carts or wagons and move to new homes or apartments. (Later on, October 1st would become the second ‘moving day’.)

Of course, for the rest of the world May 1 would mean all different things – a celebration of spring or moment of political protest. And it would mean those things here in New York – but on a backdrop of just unbelievable mayhem in the streets.

There are a few theories about the origin of Moving Day but most of them trace back the Dutch colony of New Netherlands. So why did New Yorkers continue the custom for centuries?

FEATURING Davy Crockett, The Jeffersons, Mickey Mouse and an amazing New Yorker named Amy Armstrong with a really stubborn husband.

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EPISODE 323 Two tales from New York’s incredible history with tattooing.

The art of tattooing is as old as written language but it would require the contributions of a few 19th century New York tattoo artists — and a young inventor with no tattoos whatsoever — to take this ancient art to the next level.

The first documented tattoo parlor (or atelier) in the United States was a small second-floor place near the East River waterfront and close to the site of the Brooklyn Bridge.

But as more sailors and seamen — the principal customers for tattoo purveyors — came to New York, more would-be tattoo artists opened shops. By the 1880s, there were a great number of professional tattooists, scattered along the waterfront and up along the Bowery.

Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn, sailors in need of a fresh tattoo could head to small shops in Coney Island or near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

In this episode, Greg shares two tales from New York City tattoo history:

— An unsuccessful Thomas Edison invention becomes a revolutionary device for tattoo artists. The electric tattoo machine was first perfected in a tiny tattoo parlor underneath a New York elevated train in Chatham Square.

— Believe it or not, tattooing was outlawed in New York City in 1961! And would remain so for 36 years. How is that even possible in a city with a vibrant music scene and iconic venues like CBGB just steps from the heart of Manhattan’s old tattooing industry?

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EPISODE 322 The historic movie studio Kaufman Astoria Studios opened 100 years ago this year in Astoria, Queens. It remains a vital part of New York City's entertainment industry with both film and television shows still made there to this day. The Museum of the Moving Image resides next door in a former studio building.

To honor this anniversary, we are re-issuing a new version of one of our favorite shows from the back catalog -- New York City and the birth of the film industry.

New York City inspires cinema, but it has also consistently manufactured it. Long before anybody had heard of Hollywood, New York and the surrounding region was a capital for movies, the home to the earliest American film studios and the inventors who revolutionized the medium.

It began with Thomas Edison's invention of the Kinetoscope out in his New Jersey laboratory. Soon his former employees would spread out through New York, evolving the inventor's work into entertainments that could be projected in front of audiences.

By the mid 1900s, New Yorkers fell in love with nickelodeons and gasped as their first look at moving pictures. Along the way, films were made in locations all throughout the city -- from the rooftop of Madison Square Garden to a special super-studio in the Bronx.

This is a special 'director's cut' of a podcast we first released on February 18, 2011.

For more information, visit our website.

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EPISODE 321 The Hollywood icon and Broadway star Lauren Bacall lived at the Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side for 53 years. Her story is intertwined the Dakota, a revolutionary apartment complex built in 1884. In this episode, we tell both their stories.

Bacall, born Betty Joan Perske, the daughter of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, worked her way from theater usher to cover model at a young age, then became a movie star before she was 20 years old. Her film pairings with husband Humphrey Bogart define the classic Hollywood era.

After Bogart died, she returned to New York City to reinvent her career, her sights aimed at the Broadway stage. And she chose the Dakota as her home.

Built by Singer Sewing Machine president Edward Clark, the Dakota was a pioneer of both apartment-style living and of living, generally speaking, on the Upper West Side.

This is the story of second and third acts -- both for an woman of grit and independent spirit and for a landmark with a million stories to tell (and a million more to come).

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Few people are allowed to go onto Hart Island, the quiet, narrow island in the Long Island Sound, a lonely place in sight of the bustling community of City Island.

For more than 150 years, Hart Island has been New York's potter's field, the burial site for more than one million people -- unclaimed bodies, stillborn babies, those who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 90s, and, in 2020, the location of burials of those who have died of COVID-19 coronavirus.

Hart Island's appearance in the international press this past week has drawn attention to the severity of the pandemic in New York City, but it has also drawn attention to the island itself.

By the early 19th century, this peaceful place -- most likely named for deer which may have called it home -- had already developed a violent reputation as a renegade site for boxing matches. During the Civil War, black Union troops trained here and later Confederate soldiers were imprisoned in refitted prison barracks.

But in the late 1860s the city prepared the island for its eventual and longest lasting purpose. Today it is the world's largest potter's field. And thanks to groups like the Hart Island Project, New Yorkers may finally get a glimpse at this strange, forlorn place and the previously forgotten people buried here.

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EPISODE 319 In simpler times, thousands of tourists would flock to the northern tip of Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan to take a picture with a rather unconventional New Yorker -- the bronze sculpture Charging Bull by Italian-American artist Arturo Di Modica.

Bull is a product of the 1980s New York art scene, delivered as a gift to the New York Stock Exchange (and to the American people, according to the artist) one late night in December 1989.

Nobody may have asked for this particular gift, but soon New Yorkers fell in love with the bull, and the sculpture was soon placed near Bowling Green, one of New York City's oldest public spaces.

By the early 1990s, Charging Bull had become one of the most photographed pieces of art in America, beloved as both work of sculpture and a genuine, photo-friendly curiosity.

But in 2017, the bull faced down an unusual new neighbor -- another bronze named Fearless Girl by Kristen Visbal. Girl soon became very popular with budding selfie-takers, but her proximity to Bull changed its fundamental meaning. An art scandal in lower Manhattan was brewing!

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EPISODE 318 Moonstruck, the 1987 comedy starring Cher and Nicolas Cage, not only celebrates that crazy little thing called love, but also pays tribute to the Italian working class residents of the old "South Brooklyn" neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens.

Listen in as Greg and Tom recap the story and explore the many real New York City settings of the film -- from the glamorous Lincoln Center to the still-gritty streets of 1980s Little Italy.

While the film's most recognizable location (the townhouse on Cranberry Street) is still with us, other places like the Cammareri Bros. Bakery are no longer with in business.

This podcast can be enjoyed both by those who have seen the film and those who’ve never even heard of it.

We think our take on Moonstruck might inspire you to look for the film’s many fascinating (but easy to overlook) historical details, so if you don’t mind being spoiled on the plot, give it a listen first, then watch the movie! Otherwise, come back to the show after you’ve watched it.

Also: Announcing the Bowery Boys "Safe At Home" Listener Challenge

Take part in a future Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast! We're looking for stories about feeling at home in New York City.

As we discuss at the beginning of the show, we're looking for stories about "home in New York" from native New Yorkers, those who have moved to New York, and those who only visit New York.

Just call our Bowery Boys hotline and record a message. Our number is (844) 4-BOWERY.

Messages can be up to one minute long. Be sure to leave your first name and the city you’re calling from. And we’ll include as many stories as we can in our upcoming show. Thank you!

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EPISODE 317 In 1916 New York City became the epicenter of one of America's very first polio epidemics.

The scourge of infantile paralysis infected thousands of Americans that year, most under the age of five. But in New York City it was especially bad. The Department of Health took drastic measures, barring children from going out in public and even labeling home with polio sufferers, urging others to stay away.

That same year, up in the Bronx, a young couple named Daniel and Dora Salk -- the children of Eastern European immigrants -- were themselves raising their young son named Jonas. As an adult, Jonas Salk would spend his life combating the poliovirus in the laboratory, creating a vaccine that would change the world.

In 1921 a young lawyer and politician named Franklin Delano Roosevelt would contract what was believed at the time to be polio. He would use his connections and power -- first as governor of New York, then as president of the United States -- to guide the nation's response to the virus.

FEATURING: The story of Albert Sabin and the origin of the March of Dimes.

ALSO: The second half of the show is devoted to the question -- who came up the first vaccine anyway? Presenting the story of Edward Jenner -- and a cow named Blossom.

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EPISODE 316 What happens when P. T. Barnum, America's savviest supplier of both humbug and hoax, decides it's time to go legit? Only one of the greatest concert tours in American history.

If you've seen the film musical The Greatest Showman, you've been introduced to Jenny Lind, the opera superstar dubbed "The Swedish Nightingale". And you also know that Barnum, taken with the Swedish songstress, brings her to New York to begin a heavily promoted American debut.

But the film sidesteps many of the more fascinating details. Lind was greeted like a queen and rock star when she arrived at the Canal Street dock despite most New Yorkers having never heard her sing.

Her stage was Castle Garden, the former fort turned performance venue that sat in New York harbor, connected to the Battery by a small bridge.

The concert proved legendary. And Lind proved herself an enterprising businesswoman, bending even the will of a profiteer like Barnum. Her financial arrangement for the tour would influence 170 years of musical performances and cement her reputation as one of the greatest vocalists of the 19th century.

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EPISODE 315 The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, founded in 1900, was a precursor to the Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a vaunted tribute to those who have contributed greatly to the development the United States of America.

Located on the campus of Bronx Community College in the University Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, the Hall of Fame features the sculpted bronze busts of 96 individuals considered worthy of renown in their day, arranged along a columned arcade designed by Stanford White.

It was so important in the early 20th century that the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Hollywood Walk of Fame derive from its example. The Hall of Fame for Great Americans even pops up in The Wizard of Oz!

But today it is virtually forgotten. And no person has been elected to the Hall of Fame since the 1970s.

This is the story of a university with lofty intentions, a snapshot of early 20th century optimism, and a look at a few questionable considerations of 'greatness'.

*There were once 98 busts but two were removed in 2017.

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London Terrace, an English-inspired apartment complex, is a jewel of apartment living in the neighborhood of Chelsea. In 1929, a set of historic townhouses -- also named London Terrace -- were demolished to construct this spectacular set of buildings.

That is, all townhouses but one -- the home of Mrs. Tillie Hart, a tenacious tenant who refused to leave.

In a real-life example of the movie Up, Hart's tale is a battle between urban development and an individual's right to their longtime home -- a genuine David vs. Goliath tale on the landscape of New York City real estate.

In her favor -- the support of the public and the regular attention of the New York Daily News. Will Hart prevail?

PLUS: A history of the Chelsea neighborhood and its "godfather" Clement Clarke Moore.

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EPISODE 313 "No man likes to have his hat snatched from his head by somebody he has not yet been introduced to."

During the month of September 1922, as summer passed into autumn, large groups of rowdy 'hoodlums' swarmed the streets of New York City, grabbing straw hats off the heads of men, leaving the gutters filled with thousands of smashed lids.

Why in the world would so many people become outraged at the sight of a straw hat?

This is the story of the ultimate fashion faux pas, Jazz Age style, and a look at the dangers of men's wear uniformity.

NOTE: As this is our first remotely recorded episode, we're a bit more slap-happy than usual. Expect an extra dosage of puns.

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Special thanks to Newspapers.com

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EPISODE 312 The Whitechapel murders of 1888 -- perpetrated by the killer known as Jack the Ripper -- inspired one of the greatest cultural hysterias of the Victorian era. The idea that the Ripper could appear anywhere -- even in New York City.

The usual vicious crimes of gang members and roughs on the Bowery were not only compared to those of the Ripper, they were often framed as though they were the Ripper himself, an omnipresent specter of evil. The sordid misdeeds of other criminals were elevated by the press in comparisons to Jack the Ripper.

But then, in April of 1891, a crime was committed on the East River waterfront that was so brutal, so garish, that comparisons to the London killer were inevitable.
The victim was named Carrie Brown. But people along the waterfront knew her by her nickname Shakespeare (or Old Shakespeare).

This is also the story of a man named Ameer Ben Ali, an Algerian immigrant who also became a victim -- of one of the greatest instances of criminal injustice in New York City history.

This is a tale of an infamous crime, a controversial detective and an unjust conviction. And hovering over it all -- a devil, a specter of fear and violence.

Who killed Old Shakespeare?

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EPISODE 311 Nobody had seen anything quite like it. In late November 1909, tens of thousands of workers went on strike, angered by poor work conditions and unfair wages within the city's largest industry.

New York City had seen labor strikes before, but this one would change the city forever.

The industry in question was the garment industry, the manufacture of clothing -- and, in the case of this strike, the manufacture of shirtwaists, the fashionable blouse worn by many American women.

The strikers in question were mostly young women and girls, mostly Eastern European Jewish and Italian immigrants who were tired of being taken advantage of by their male employers.

Leading the charge were labor leaders and activists, and in particular, a young woman named Clara Lemlich who would incite a crowd of thousands at Cooper Union with a rousing speech that would forever echo as a cry of solidarity for an underpaid and abused workforce.

PLUS: A visit to the New-York Historical Society's new exhibition Women March and an interview with Valerie Paley, co-curator and director at the Historical Society's Center for Women's History.

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On February 17, 1919, in the waning months of World War I, the Harlem Hellfighters – officially the 369th Infantry Regiment, originally a New York National Guard division that had just come from intense battle in France – marched up Fifth Avenue to an unbelievable show of support and love.

The Hellfighters were comprised of young African-American men from New York City and the surrounding area, its enthusiastic recruits made up of those who had arrived in the city during a significant period of population migration from the Reconstruction South to (only slightly) more tolerant Northern cities.

They were not able to serve in regular American military units because of segregation, but because of an unusual series of events, the regiment instead fought alongside the French in the trenches, for 191 days in the year 1918, more than any other American unit during the war.

They became legends. They were known around the world for their valor, ferocity and bravery. This is the story of New York musicians, red caps, budding painters, chauffeurs and teenagers just out of school, serving their country in a way that would become legendary.

FEATURING the voices of World War I veterans telling their own stories. PLUS some brilliant music and a story from Barack Obama (okay it’s just a clip of the former president but still.)

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They're tearing down your favorite old building and putting up a condo in its place. How can this be?

Before you plunge into fits of despair, you should know more about the tools of preservation that New Yorkers possess in their efforts to preserve the spirit and personality of the city.

In the 1960s, in the wake of the demolition of Pennsylvania Station and other beloved historic structures, the New York City Landmarks Law was enacted, granting the city powers to protect its most precious endangered places.

Walking down the beautiful street and see a brown street sign instead of the usual green? You're in a historic district.

But preservation can be a tricky business; after all, the city is basically imposing rules about how someone else’s private property, in most cases, should look and be maintained. How do you preserve the past amid a rapidly changing metropolis

In this episode, we present a sort of "landmarking 101", mapping the history of the New York City preservation movement and looking at the surprising and sometimes mysterious process of landmarking. It's everything you’ve wanted to know about landmarks (but were afraid to ask)!

FEATURING SPECIAL GUESTS

— Simeon Bankoff, Executive Director, Historic Districts Council
— Peg Breen, President, New York Landmarks Conservancy
— Anthony C. Wood, Board Member, New York Preservation Archive Project and author of Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmark

This show was recorded live at the Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn, as part of the Brooklyn Podcast Festival

Visit our website for more information and images from this show.

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EPISODE 308 In the final decades of his life, steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie -- one of the richest Americans to ever live -- began giving his money away.

The Scots American had worked his way up from a railroad telegraph office to amass an unimaginable fortune, acquired in a variety of industries -- railroads, bridge building, iron and steel.

In the age of the monopoly, Gilded Age moguls often made their money in ways we might consider unethical and illegal today. But Carnegie's view of his wealth was quite different than that of his rarefied clubhouse peers

Carnegie devoted his latter years to philanthropy, primarily devoting his energies to the creation of libraries across the country.

By the late 19th century, the New York City area already had dozens of libraries and reading rooms throughout the future five boroughs. But they were certainly not welcoming to every person. And those circulating libraries that were available were limited and woefully overburdened.

Carnegie's unprecedented financial gift to the city would jump start the city's nascent library systems (the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Public Library) and broaden their reach into communities with the development of dozens of new branch libraries.

In this episode, we are joined by Adwoa Adusei and Krissa Corbett Cavouras, hosts of the Brooklyn Public Library podcast Borrowed, who give the Bowery Boys a tour of one of Carnegie's most popular New York City libraries.

In the winter of 1908, thousands stood in line to visit the new Brownsville branch library. How do treasured structures like Brownsville continue to serve the needs of the neighborhood in the 21st century? Are Carnegie libraries, most of which still stand, prepared for the future?

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