The Bowery Boys: New York City History
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
They were all young once: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, in 1963 I swung onto my old guitarGrabbed hold of a subway carAnd after a rocking, reeling, rolling rideI landed up on the downtown sideGreenwich Village— Talkin’ New York, 1962 Bob Dylan was born 70 years ago today in Duluth, Minnesota. Twenty years later, he… Read More
New York 1971 (Courtesy the blog MusicFromTheFilm) Irving Place and the house that Washington Irving never lived in — in 1905. [Shorpy] Did you ever wonder why a playground close Irving Place — at Second Avenue and 19th Street — was named after the prolific sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens? Wonder no more! [Ephemeral New York] Forgotten… Read More
“There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the Earth as the Free Public Library — this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.†–Andrew CarnegieThe doors of the main branch of the New York Public Library (a.k.a. the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building) opened 100 years ago this… Read More
By the middle of May 1861, almost a month into the Civil War, most New Yorkers still swelled with enthusiasm for the Union cause, demonstrated at the great rally in Union Square just a few weeks earlier. Since that historic gathering, the streets were regularly filled with parades, rallies and general cries of support for President… Read More
If Barbarella were an airport terminal, certainly she would be this one. A traveller’s dilemma: what destination could possibly be as exotic as the airport from which you were leaving? Scandals: We had a blast talking about JFK Airport this week, and it’s always funny seeing something we just talked about popping up in a… Read More
PODCAST Come fly with us through a history of New York City’s largest airport, once known as Idlewild (for a former golf course) and called John F. Kennedy International Airport since 1964. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia wanted a new and improved facility to relieve the pressure from that other Queens airport (you know, the one with… Read More
The ultimate terminal for air and sea, if you don’t mind eliminating a few neighborhoods. Goodbye Hell’s Kitchen! (Click image to enlarge) Are you a Manhattan business professional who’s tired of sitting in maddening traffic to get all the way out to John F. Kennedy Airport? Does LaGuardia Airport seem dreary and dismal to you? And Newark Liberty… Read More
Collectors Item! If you lived in rural Illinois in 1887, you might have found one of these flyers on your roof or along the side of the road. Joseph Pulitzer, that icon of late 19th century sensationalistic journalism, did everything imaginable to promote his popular newspaper the New York World. Not everything worked. Pulitzer bought… Read More
Taken during one of its 1936 voyages, with the New York Times building in the foreground. (source: straatis/Flickr) The anniversary of the 1937 explosion of the German passenger airship Hindenburg over Lakehurst, NJ, was last Friday, May 6, and I spent some time this weekend looking up old videos of the famous Zeppelin floating over Manhattan.… Read More