The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Happy first day of summer! Who doesn’t want to run down a street, streaking through bursts of water emanating from old-style fire hydrants? Although I’m pretty sure nobody has ever tried to guess the identity of the very first ragamuffins to break into a fire hydrant, common sense and a rote knowledge of teenage behavior can… Read More
A century-old party: ghoulish revelers from the 1911 parade An even larger collection of freaks and aquatic oddities than Coney Island’s everyday normal assortment will come slithering down Surf Avenue this Saturday with the 29th annual Mermaid Parade. The parade is the heart of Coney’s modern freak-show aesthetic, Christmastime for the tattooed and glittery. Most… Read More
If you love perusing lists of books that you’ll never get a chance to read in your lifetime, please check out the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest non-fiction books ever written. And when they say ever, they mean it. (The oldest entrant is dated c400 BC.) The works on their list cover the entire… Read More
Capital of the World: A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring 20sBy David WallaceLyons Press REVIEW ‘Capital of the World’ is a delicious but high-calorie Whitman’s sampler of New York City delights during the 1920s. It is no surprise to find that it is authored by journalist David Wallace, whose publishing career is… Read More
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born two hundred years ago today in Litchfield, Connecticut. Although I don’t believe she ever lived in New York for any significant length of time, her younger brother Henry Ward Beecher was the city of Brooklyn’s most famous resident, a towering religious figure who came to exemplify the dignified society of… Read More
Above: Brooke Shields admires her caricature, 1995 (courtesy Google LIFE images)Thanks for listening to our breezy, kind of giddy tale of Sardi’s Restaurant. We might sound a little strange at a couple points, as we were recording it in 95 degree weather, and our studio isn’t adequately air conditioned! A little delirium might be evident.… Read More
The answer to the question in the headline is absolutely, without a doubt, yes. This story begins with a Minnesotan named Leo Shull, who moved to New York in the 1930s to become a playwright. He never wrote anything of note for the stage, but he wrote plenty about the stage, various guides to playwriting,… Read More
Trafalgar Square, by way of Park Row, in an imagined universe of American domination “If London Were Like New York” — as this 1902 article from Harmsworth’s Magazine imagines — it would be twenty times more spectacular. [Lubin] (Thanks to Chris Perriman for sending this via Twitter) A walk down Jamaica Avenue in Queens. I… Read More
Above: Eleventh Avenue in 1911, pre-High Line. This photo disturbs me greatly. This is courtesy, of course, of Shorpy, so click in to admire (and cringe) at the detail. One loose horseshoe on a train track, and it’s no longer pretty! The High Line, an experimental and highly successful park using the elevated train tracks… Read More
A special illustrated version of our podcast on Green-Wood Cemetery (Episode #64) is now available on our NYC History Archive feed. Just hit play and images of our topic will appear on any compatible media player. If you’re looking for a beautiful landscape of shaded hills and meandering paths, filled with classical architecture and populated with… Read More
At some point in the next month or so, we will be celebrating the two millionth download of our Bowery Boys: New York History podcast. This is roughly speaking, as our first podcast host from 2007 (when we began) was a little non-specific with its stats. We’ve grown to have thousands of regular listeners, and… Read More
I found this advertisement in an issue of the New York Tribune from one hundred years ago: Although the famous Underwood Typewriter Company had principal manufacturing plants in Hartford, it was a New York company through and through. Its founder John Thomas Underwood became so wealthy that he built a stately home in the neighborhood of Clinton… Read More
Nothing underscores the harshness of early New Amsterdam more than the notion that the Dutch settlement, which first formed at the tip of Manhattan in 1625, didn’t actually have a trained physician for almost twelve years. Most likely, in these earliest years, medical emergencies were handled by ship surgeons and non-professionals skilled in a set… Read More
At the helm of yet another watery craft, a visiting sailor on shore leave charts a course through Central Park with a new friend. Taken 1943, by Peter Stackpole, courtesy LIFE Images Cue the Leonard Bernstein!
Dreamland’s heavenly glow, felled by a hellish fire Tomorrow (May 27) will mark the 100th anniversary of a very unusual tragedy upon the landscape of Coney Island, a terrible blaze that consumed one of its most popular attractions — Dreamland amusement park. The swift and destructive fire, occuring just two months after another horrifying conflagration… Read More