The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Above: Quite a fancy looking team of baseball players! Note the pavilion in the background. Picture courtesy Brooklyn Ball Parks I love finding out where very basic, everyday, take-for-granted concepts were invented. For instance, there is some place on the planet I’m sure that heralds as the first place somebody put a straw in a… Read More
Pic courtesy New York City Department of Parks & Recreation “About half way between West Egg** and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic… Read More
Some New York neighborhoods are simply named for their location on a map (East Village, Midtown). Others are given prefabricated designations (SoHo, DUMBO). But a few retain names that link them intimately with their pasts. Other entries in this series can be found here. I have a friend of Jamaican descent that lives in Jamaica,… Read More
Today it’s the Met Life Building. It’s been called the ugliest building in New York City. It sits like a monolith behind one of the city’s most enduring icons Grand Central Terminal. But it’s got some secrets you may not know about. In this podcast, we scale the heights of this misunderstood marvel of modern… Read More
In 1962, Minoru Yamasaki was given an improbable, totally ridiculous task. Yamasaki, a Japanese-American architect best known at the time for his modernist designs of airports, university buildings and synagogues, won the World Trade Center job in 1962 over more internationally famous architects. He was paired with the prolific Emery Roth and Sons, who had… Read More
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. Democrats and Republicans in this year’s election who think they can roll into office on the mantel of “change” may want to look at the… Read More
A stubborn group of good-looking, well-meaning squatters were finally evicted last night as the hit Broadway musical ‘Rent’ closed after 5,124 performances. The show had become the most peculiar historical time capture on Broadway, freezing forever a musical variation of late 80s/early 90s, pre-Guiliani East Village underground, recalling a time when Avenue B had far… Read More
Astroland is once again closing for the final time at the end of this weekend, making way for Thor Equities to begin their new development of the area. The park’s main attraction, the legendary Cyclone, isn’t going away however. A functioning roller-coaster since 1927 — and built on the spot of the world’s very first… Read More
If all this talk of Jacob Riis has whet your appetite at all for some nostalgic images of Manhattan, you must check out the New York Historical Society‘s display of some really, really, really old photographs, the early work of photography pioneer Victor Prevost. Provost’s early experiments in the 1850s with calotypes (negatives on wax)… Read More
Above: Another local gang of the Lower East Side, the Shirt Tails of Corlear’s Hook, most likely fought with the Cherry Hill gang, the Batavia Street gang, or maybe even both (circa 1889 pic from courtesy of Irishinnyc) We’re finally stepping away from the grime of the late 19th century, but not before giving a… Read More
Part two of our “Five Points” podcast. Join us as we explore the “wicked” neighborhood’s clean up, fall from grace, and eventual destruction. Listen to it for free on iTunes or other podcasting services. Or you can download or listen to it HERE Sleeping quarters An Italian family newly arrived in New York. An Italian… Read More
“Street Arabs,” as they called them, as photographed by Jacob Riis Sorry, it’s been a crazy week! Our second-part podcast on the history of Five Points will be up by this evening or early tomorrow morning.
I know that the native cuisine of New York City is officially pizza or hot dogs, but on a daily basis, perhaps nothing is consumed more in this city than Chinese food. There are hundreds of Chinese restaurants in this city; I’ve got four within a block of my apartment. Its probably impossible to identify… Read More
An excerpt from “Lights And Shadows of New York Life; or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City” by James D McCabe Jr, published in 1872, quantifying the gang element of New York under the quaint sobriquet ‘the Roughs’: “Another class of those who live in open defiance of the law consists of the… Read More
The Bowery Boys-Dead Rabbits kerfluffle: it definitely happened, but not how you think it did In one of the sources we used for this week’s podcast — Tyler Anbinder’s wonderful and sober history on Five Points — the author throws out a theory that’s truly devastating for lovers of New York history, one that flies… Read More