The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Two wee newspersons prepare to disturb the air with their shrill, violent cries of commerce. Photo by Alice Austen[NYPL] Those newsboys — always causing trouble! Over 150 years ago in Brooklyn, it wasn’t a strike that caused consternation with readers of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle; it was the mere sound of their harsh little voices.… Read More
Are you tough enough to mess with them? PODCAST Extra! Extra! Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst vs. the newsboys! Pandemonium in the streets! One hot summer in July 1899, thousands of corner newsboys went on strike against the New York Journal and the New York World. Throngs filled the streets of downtown Manhattan for… Read More
A very different Puerto Rican Day parade, in 1966 The Puerto Rican Day Parade returns to Manhattan boulevards this Sunday, so I thought I would reprint my old article from 2008 to celebrate: Manhattan’s largest parade happens this Sunday, June 13th: the annual National Puerto Rican Day Parade, an event that yearly brings national pride,… Read More
Journalists Harold Ross and Jane Grant founded the New Yorker magazine in 1925, but another weekly journal with that same name debuted on the streets of the city over 90 years earlier. It was a short-lived publication, existing not more than a few years, but it helped sharpen the talents of its young publisher, Horace… Read More
Today marks a big literary milestone of sorts. Serialized Harlequin romances, comic books, cheap paperbacks and pulp magazines filled with tales of gangsters and spies all trace themselves to the ‘dime novel’, a cheaply produced, cheaply bought publication of the mid and late 19th century, introducing breezy, far-flung tales to readers of lower classes. Although… Read More
The Museum of the City of New York building, circa 1940s, photography by Wurts Brothers (courtesy NYPL)Free art: The institutions along Museum Mile are free today at 6 pm. Go early: the crowds are notoriously insane. Definitely check out the Museum of the City of New York, including its exhibit on the quirky art stylings… Read More
KNOW YOUR MAYORS Our modest little series about some of the greatest, notorious, most important, even most useless, mayors of New York City. Other entrants in our mayoral survey can be found here.Mayor Thomas Francis GilroyIn office: one term 1893-1894 When it comes to corruption, you can’t get more front and center than Thomas Francis… Read More
Above: Drawing of Governor’s Island 185 years ago (courtesy NYPL) New York’s island getaway reopens for the summer with free live concerts, art shows, bike rentals, family activities and something by the art collective No Longer Empty called ‘The Sixth Borough’. But you don’t even need to have a reason to go out there; it’s… Read More
No city has been more savaged and disparaged, more exalted and varnished, than New York City — and this from the very writers who lived here. The man who exclaimed “Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!” also wrote, “Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with… Read More
Above: The first of hundreds of Bowery hotels — the old Gotham Inn in 1862. The inn, which dated from the 1790s, sat quite close to where 315 Bowery is today, just north of Houston Street. (Pic courtesy NYPL) The early history of buildings at 315 Bowery — the address that would later become the… Read More
Photo courtesy araceli.g, Flickr PODCAST Modern American rock music would have been a whole lot different without the rundown dive mecca CBGB’s, a beat-up former flophouse bar that made stars out of young musicians and helped shape the musical edge of downtown Manhattan. Owner Hilly Kristal may have initially envisioned a place for ‘Country Blue… Read More
Above: New York’s westside, 1945, by Andreas Feininger (Courtesy Google Life images) No, that’s not a touring revival of ‘On The Town.’ Those are actual sailors. [Fleet Week schedule] It’s the 60th anniversary of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Enjoy one of Robert Moses’s more controversial creations and be thankful it’s not a Brooklyn-Battery bridge. [Gothamist] Were… Read More
Joshua Jackson, looking down at Gaudi in an alternate universe. Courtesy Fringe Files I promise, this is my last post on fake New York City history for awhile, but I couldn’t let the season finale of the FOX sci-fi series Fringe pass without comment. A running scientific theory running through the series is the notion… Read More
How did the city’s worst neighborhood become this park?A special illustrated version of our podcast ‘Five Points Part 2: The Fate of Five Points” is now available on our NYC History Archive feed. In our second podcast on the notorious Five Points neighborhood, we see how the district changed with the influx of new immigrants… Read More
Another day older (seven or eight years old, to be exact) and deeper in debt: the daily grind of the young bootblack at City Hall Park, photos by Lewis Wickes Hine, dated July 25, 1924. (Courtesy LOC) Hine was a social reformer, similar to Jacob Riis, who used photography to illustrate the reality of poverty… Read More