The Bowery Boys: New York City History
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
Above: Outside the Greenpoint Avenue station, Brooklyn I’m giving a shout out to my old dear friend Lisa Gidley, an accomplished photographer currently living in Portland, OR, who has recently re-introduced her fascinating photography series entitled Station to Station. Since it was a collection done between 2002-2004, it’s now technically an intriguing window into recent… Read More
Broadway and City Hall, in 1809. The mobs of the so-called ‘Augustus Street Riot’ would have scuffled just to the west of this illustration. (Courtesy NYPL) According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, there have been 778 New York law enforcement officers who have died in the course of duty. Fourteen of the last fifteen… Read More
Uniformly chic: Law enforcement officers of the New York Metropolitan Police from 1871 show off their fancy blue threads. Twenty years previous, they weren’t even required to wear standardized apparel. (Courtesy NYPL Digital Library) PODCAST We’re playing Good Cop / Bad Cop this week, as we take a close look at four events from the… Read More
While perusing through the Library of Congress archive, I found these arresting images from 1937. Caption: “Mary A. Shanley, New York City detective – “pickpockets’ captor fears that she might look tough” “Detective Mary Shanley is a sure shot, as two pickpockets who tried to get away from her know to their sorrow. Here she… Read More
Above: Lena Horne at the Copacabana, October 1948 Lena Horne, the Brooklyn-born entertainer who broke color barriers in the New York nightclub scene as well as in Hollywood, died in a New York hospital yesterday at age 92. She would make history in Harlem, in segregated hotspots like The Cotton Club, where the entertainment was… Read More
The sanguine days of the Holy Communion, pictured here over 150 years before it would be reconfigured as a shopping mall (from Booth’s History of New York, mid 19th century, courtesy NYPL) On Friday afternoon, yet another completely implausible transformation will overtake Holy Communion Episcopal Church when it reopens as the Limelight Marketplace, a spacious… Read More