The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Garbo in New York! A story of independence, glamour and melancholy, set at the intersection of classic Hollywood and mid-century New York City. This is 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… Read More
Despite the Academy Awards being a celebration of all things Hollywood, New York has actually hosted the Oscar ceremony on more than one occasion. Or rather, they co-hosted the event — from 1953 to 1957 — in a rare and soon abandoned bicoastal ceremony that taxed the mechanics of television’s earliest production crews. There were… Read More
New York City and Los Angeles may be separated by a few thousand miles — and rivalries between the two cities abound — but they are intimately linked due to the entertainment industry. In fact the American film industry was developed in New York and New Jersey and was a growing medium by the time… Read More
Horror movies normally go for nameless suburbs, dark woods or remote Victorian-style haunted houses for their scary settings, so it’s a wonderful treat when New York City and its recognizable landmarks get to host a few cinematic monsters. Ever since King Kong traipsed up the Empire State Building, filmmakers have used the city’s architecture as… Read More
SIDE STREETS is the new Bowery Boys Patreon-exclusive podcast, available to those who support the show via Patreon at any of the listed levels. New York City was once famed for its cinemas, but habits in watching movies in a post-pandemic world have forced the closure of many of the city’s most interesting and memorable… Read More
In late December 1954 Marilyn Monroe came to New York City wearing a disguise. Monroe — by then the biggest movie star in the world — 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… Read More
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. Tom, Ric and James discuss the 8-part documentary (which aired on PBS in installments in 1999, 2001 and 2003) and its newly updated companion book, “New York:… Read More
Jacob Riis changed the world with “How The Other Half Lives.” By using the new technology of flash photography, Riis was able to capture the squalid conditions of Manhattan tenements in a way no mere paragraph, drawing or sermon could. The startling photographs contained in this book did not originate there, however. Riis debuted them… Read More
New York City (and the surrounding region) was the capital of movie making at the industry’s inception until the major studios moved out to Hollywood in the mid 1910s. By the late 1960s, a creative revolution of independently made film — a “New Hollywood” movement, inspired by European filmmakers and driven by film students will… Read More
The new episode of the Bowery Boys Movie Club explores the new film The French Connection, the gritty action classic employing an astonishing array of on-location shots — from Midtown Manhattan to the streets of Brooklyn. It’s an exclusive podcast for those who support us on Patreon. The French Connection, directed by William Friedkin and… Read More
How do you feel when you see the World Trade Center pop up in a movie from the 1970s and 80s? Sadness? Nostalgia? Or, with so many years gone by, do they just seem unusual to you? Fortunately researcher and movie lover Donna Grunewald had documented every reference you need to revisit all those emotions.… Read More
PODCAST In celebration of 125 years of movie exhibition in New York City — from vaudeville houses to movie palaces, from arthouses to multiplexes. On April 23, 1896 an invention called the Vitascope projected moving images onto a screen at a Midtown Manhattan vaudeville theater named Koster and Bial’s Music Hall. The business of movies… Read More
A ghost hangs over an American media empire. Over one hundred years ago, a Brooklyn-based movie impresario named William Fox helped shape the direction of the nascent motion picture industry, building a film-production empire in New Jersey and New York and operating a string of theaters that would introduce millions to the possibilities of moving… Read More
The Ziegfeld Theater, one of Manhattan’s last single-screen movie theaters, closed for regular film exhibition in 2016.* Its final film was Star Wars: The Force Awakens, an appropriate choice as tens of thousands of movie lovers had gone to the Ziegfeld to see previous films in the series — including the 1977 original. I think… Read More
The Paris Theater, as glamorous and as eccentric as any film it’s ever played, has the benefit of having the Plaza Hotel and Central Park to ensure it never goes out of style. But the history of this romantic and occasionally radical movie house, the longest running single-screen movie theater in New York, is as… Read More