The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Looking for a healthy assortment of fireworks to ignite for the Fourth of July holiday? In New York, from the late 19th century until the 1930s, one needed to look no further than one of the city’s most heavily trafficked areas near City Hall. Firecracker Lane was a short row of fireworks dealerships that sat… Read More
PODCAST The history of African-American settlements and neighborhoods which once existed in New York City Today we sometimes define New York City’s African-American identity by the places where thriving black culture developed – Harlem, of course, and also Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, neighborhoods that developed for groups of black residents in the 20th century. But… Read More
While traipsing through Red Hook a couple months ago, I happened upon a family of raccoons camped out underneath a pick-up truck. New York City is actually a bit of a zoo — if you open your mind to what constitutes a star attraction. Sure, we don’t have lions wandering around (thankfully), but what zoo… Read More
One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Henrietta Wood sued the man who kidnapped her and sold her back into slavery. In his lifetime, that man — a prison warden and general scoundrel named Zebulon Ward — often bragged about losing the case, saying “he was the last American ever to pay for a… Read More
EPISODE 331 During the Gilded Age, New York City had one form of rapid transit — the elevated railroad. The city’s population had massively grown by the 1870s thanks to large waves of immigration from Ireland and Germany. Yet its transportation options — mostly horse-drawn streetcars — were slow and cumbersome. As a result, people… Read More
One hundred and fifty-five years ago (on July 13, 1865), New York City lost one of its most famous, most imaginative and most politically incorrect attractions. When P.T. Barnum opened his museum in 1841, the kooky curiosities contained within the building at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street — at the foot of Park… Read More
Ask any New Yorker at random where the site of Fort Washington once stood, and chances are your query will be met with a furrowed brow, followed by frantic tapping on a smartphone. (ANSWER: It was located on the site of today’s Bennett Park in Washington Heights.) But ask about Fort Tryon, and chances are… Read More
EPISODE 329 Did you know that the first modern urban ambulance — the ‘mobile hospital’ — was invented in New York City? On June 4, 1869, America’s first ambulance service went into operation from Bellevue Hospital with a driver, a surgeon, a horse and equipment including a stretcher, a stomach pump, bandages and sponges, handcuffs,… Read More
EPISODE 328 New Yorkers eat a LOT of Chinese food and have enjoyed Chinese cuisine – either in a restaurant or as takeout – for well over 130 years. Chinese food entered the regular diet of the city LONG before the bagel, the hot dog and even pizza. In this episode, Greg explores the history… Read More
EPISODE 326/327 Two special episodes featuring the listeners of the Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast! What makes New York feel like home — whether you live here or not? What is that indefinable connection that people make with the city? Why do so many people feel a city as large as New York… Read More
There is no place in New York City quite like the converted factory building at 538 Johnson Avenue in Bushwick*, Brooklyn. At the same time, it evokes in mysterious ways a compelling truth about this city — that every building has a story, if only it had a storyteller to share it. For 538 Johnson, that storyteller is Bryan Sears,… Read More
Nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale was born 200 years ago today in Florence, Italy. And it got me thinking about my favorite Nightingale-related landmark in New York. Just locate the remnant of little Cannon Street in the Lower East Side (it’s between Delancey and Broome Streets) and you’ll find a building most fowl—or rather, most owl.… Read More
EPISODE 325 In 1858, during two terrible nights of violence, the needs of the few outweighed the needs of the many when a community, endangered for decades and ignored by the state, finally reached its breaking point. In Staten Island, just south the spot of today’s St. George Ferry Terminal, where thousands board and disembark… Read More
There’s no new episode of the Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast today, so why not catch up on a past show? We’ve released thirteen* episodes since March 20. Shows that are designed to both speak to our present moment (episodes on Hart Island and the New York polio outbreak) and others meant to… Read More
Ever wonder what the very first movie ever shot in Manhattan was? It also happens to be the first American film ever shown to a paying movie audience.Woodville Latham and his sons Otway and Gray Latham had invented the Eidoloscope projector (also called the Pantoptikon), running very crudely like a film projector today. However its… Read More