The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Frank and Al Capone, with Nelson Van Alden (played by Michael Shannon), at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero, although I suspect this was actually filmed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. (Courtesy HBO)BOARDWALK EMPIRE: I’ve been up to my regular Sunday Tweet-alongs with historical-based television shows, this time around following the newest season of Boardwalk… Read More
Stop what you’re doing and go play around with the New York Public Library‘s addictive Stereograminator, which gives you their collection of stereograph photography and the ability to animate them, emulating the ‘3D effect’ audiences who first viewed them would have experienced. Go here for the fun. The originals are below:
Street life at Oak Street and New Chambers Street, 1935. This is in today’s neighborhood of Two Bridges. Neither of these streets exist today, swept away by grand housing projects. Sepiatown has the approximate location of where this photograph was taken. (Pic by Berenice Abbott, courtesy NYPL) The nominations for the 2013 Podcast Awards are… Read More
Due to the temporary shutdown of the federal government,the Library of Congress is closed to the public and researchers beginning October 1, 2013 until further notice. [site] The Library of Congress is my number one source of information for the Bowery Boys, through their newspaper archive and their amazing collection of photographs. Due to the… Read More
The Tree-Mark Shoe Store at 6-8 Delancey Street. You may know this building today as the Bowery Ballroom, a music venue since 1997. (Wurts Brothers, date unknown, both courtesy NYPL) The interior of the shoe store, 1930 (Pic courtesy MCNY) This building has had a rocky history, according to historian Matthew Postal. Using remnants of an old theater… Read More
For several decades, Ben Forman & Sons occupied the three-story, brick-constructed factory at 201 Water Street in today’s neighborhood of DUMBO, an industrial metal plant which produced “ornamental dies, lamp parts, brass sheets, chopsticks, domestic cutlery sets, butter spreaders, flatware sets, domestic serving utensils” and a myriad of other metal objects for the home. [source]… Read More
No amount of studying will prepare you for some of these odd questions. (A girl at Seward Library, photographed by Lewis Hine.)Trivia quizzes are very popular today in bars and pubs throughout the city, but in the past, they’ve had more elitist purposes. In November 1914, a group of possibly insecure ex-New Yorkers in Chicago… Read More
Above: John Purroy Mitchel, the ‘boy mayor’, after his resounding victory. (LOC)PODCAST As New York City enters the final stages of this year’s mayoral election, let’s look back on a decidedly more unusual contest 100 years ago, pitting Tammany Hall and their estranged ally (Mayor William Jay Gaynor) up against a baby-faced newcomer, the (second)… Read More
The Polo Grounds in 1923, the first year of a major expansion to accommodate fans of the New York Giants baseball team and a great many historic boxing matches (LOC) Fifty years ago today, the final game was played at the Polo Grounds, the legendary sports field that had once been home to the New… Read More
An 1864 wood engraving of ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ for Harper’s Magazine (NYPL) The new Fox television show Sleepy Hollow debuted last night. The storyline involves Continental Army soldier Ichabod Crane who confronts a masked Hessian soldier on the battlefields of Westchester County in 1781. He chops off the Hessian’s head but is knocked unconscious.… Read More
New York City, 1953, the setting for Kevin Baker’s The Big Crowd. Photo by Eliot Elisofen, courtesy Life/Google imagesBOWERY BOYS BOOK OF THE MONTH Each month I’ll pick a book — either brand new or old, fiction or non-fiction — that offers an intriguing take on New York City history, something that uses history in… Read More
Mayor William Jay Gaynor’s final appearance at City Hall was at a notification rally, declaring his independent candidacy. He brandishes a shovel as a symbol of a new era of subway construction (the eventual fruits of the so-called ‘dual contracts’ which had finally be agreed to earlier that year.) Today’s mayoral primary falls on a… Read More
New York City Hall and its brand new water fountain, in 1846, courtesy Currier and Ives (LOC)KNOW YOUR MAYORS A modest little series about some of the greatest, notorious, most important, even most useless, mayors of New York City. Other entrants in the Bowery Boys mayoral survey can be found here.Mayor Andrew H. MickleIn office: 1846-1847… Read More
As a follow-up to last month’s list of essential non-fiction books about New York City, here’s my list of 25 favorite historical fiction novels written in the past one hundred years, using the history of the city as a backdrop for drama, mystery, fantasy and romance. There are really two types of historical fiction —… Read More
This was the September 17, 1913 cover of humor journal Puck Magazine, featuring summer symbolized as a lovely mermaid on the back of a sea serpent, departing the Long Island shore. She wasn’t the only female embodiment in Puck that issue. In the illustration below, according to the official caption, “a female figure with wings… Read More