Categories
Health and Living

The Strangers Hospital: Your special home on Avenue D, brought to you by Boss Tweed’s plumber king

A genuine survivor: The building to the right was once the Strangers Hospital in the 1870s.  This picture, by Berenice Abbott, was taken many decades later, in 1937.  And the building is still around today! (Picture NYPL) New York used to lump the sick, the poor and the homeless into one mass of needy unwanted.… Read More

Categories
It's Showtime

The Evangelist of Kitsch: Liberace’s final performances, with the Rockettes, at Radio City Music Hall 1986

Liberace is the embodiment of a certain California flamboyance, but New Yorkers were as susceptible to his allure as anyone. In fact, for this brightly-painted musical showman, Radio City Music Hall was a second home.  He continued to smash box office records here year after year as late as the 1980s, well past his prime… Read More

Categories
Sports

Go Thistles! The finest names from old NYC soccer teams

Above: The New York Nationals and the New Bedford Whalers play the Polo Grounds, circa 1928 (Courtesy NYPL) The announcement on Tuesday of a second Major League Soccer team for New York — sponsored by Manchester City FC and the New York Yankees — has sent me down a rabbit hole of soccer history, courtesy this… Read More

Categories
Preservation

History in the Making: Gangster’s Funeral Edition

Mary Help of Christian Church pictured in the 1920s (Courtesy NYPL) Hail Mary:  There’s a rally tomorrow evening at 6pm to save Mary Help of Christian Church in the East Village.  This unique building from 1917, once serving the area’s Italian immigrant population, has been bought by a developer and is slated for demolition. The… Read More

Categories
Health and Living Those Were The Days

Close shave: A century ago, barbers riot through New York, leaving half-shaved men in vacated barber shops

A barber shop at the Hotel de Gink on the Bowery, circa 1910-15 [LOC] The fight for worker’s rights swept through a variety of occupations over a century ago as New York City laborers rebelled against unfair corporate practices and unsafe working conditions. Garment workers marched the avenues in protest following the tragic Triangle Factory… Read More

Categories
Landmarks

Green-Wood Cemetery, Katz’s Deli and The Cloisters: Three great New York institutions, three big anniversaries

Green-Wood Cemetery celebrates its 175th year as Brooklyn’s oldest greenspace, populated with deceased politicians, writers and actors.  It’s the final resting place for some of New York’s most famous and notorious characters — Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, DeWitt Clinton and Boss Tweed among them. The Museum of the City of New York debuts its… Read More

Sign up for “Five Points Weekend,” the new Bowery Boys newsletter!

“Five Points” by George Catlin, painted in 1827, when it was Paradise Square and not yet the ramshackle slum of yore. The Bowery Boys are excited to be embarking on an exciting new project that will bring New York City history closer to you than ever before — with our “Five Points Weekend” newsletter. What’s… Read More

Categories
Queens History

The Corona Ash Dump: Brooklyn’s burden on Queens, a vivid literary inspiration and bleak, rat-filled landscape

Ah, take in the horrid reality of the Corona marshes with their ashes, manure and garbage! (Courtesy CUNY) Outside of probably Hell, there is no literary landscape as forlorn and soul-crushing as the ash dumps of Corona, Queens. “This is the valley of ashes,” writes Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat… Read More

Categories
Queens History

The Corona Ash Dump: Brooklyn’s burden on Queens, a vivid literary inspiration and bleak, rat-filled landscape

Ah, take in the horrid reality of the Corona marshes with their ashes, manure and garbage! (Courtesy CUNY) Outside of probably Hell, there is no literary landscape as forlorn and soul-crushing as the ash dumps of Corona, Queens. “This is the valley of ashes,” writes Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, “a fantastic farm where ashes… Read More

Categories
Bowery Boys Bookshelf

The Great Gatsby’s New York City, in ten different scenes, from the Queensboro Bridge to the Plaza Hotel

BOWERY 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 a way that’s uniquely unconventional or exposes a previously unseen corner of our city’s complicated past.  Then over the… Read More

Categories
Bowery Boys Bookshelf

The Great Gatsby’s New York City, in ten different scenes, from the Queensboro Bridge to the Plaza Hotel

BOWERY BOYS BOOK OF THE MONTH The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald I re-read The Great Gatsby a few weeks ago on purpose, not because I had a school assignment. Unlike my first experience with Gatsby at age 14, I actually read it, without the signposts of a Cliff’s Notes to tell me what… Read More

Categories
Neighborhoods Podcasts

The many lives of the Limelight, aka the facade formerly known as the Church of the Holy Communion

  Above: The Church of the Holy Communion — and once the quite infamous nightclub Limelight — as the less lauded follow-up, called Avalon.  Within a couple years, the club would be transformed again — into a high-end retail experience.  Below: Michael Alig, one of its more notorious nightly residents. (source)PODCAST If you had told… Read More

Categories
Current Events

Jane’s Walk this weekend! Better than a Moses Walk

If you see large clusters of people walking around historic neighborhoods this weekend, drop what you’re doing and join them.  The Municipal Art Society celebrates the May 4th birthday of urban planner Jane Jacobs with dozens of free walking tours this weekend, led by volunteers through a great many corners of New York City.  … Read More

Categories
Those Were The Days

May 1st is Moving Day (or at least it used to be)

May 1st used to be the day that yearly apartment leases ended, resulting in a fury of chaotic furniture relocation known as Moving Day. The April 25, 1897 New York Tribune insert below gently lampoons the event. This was really the worst traffic day in New York each year, as thousands of people shuffled around… Read More

Categories
Mad Men

In Central Park, heated reactions to the assassination of Martin Luther King, while business booms at movie theaters

WARNING The article contains a couple light spoilers about last night’s ‘Mad Men’ on AMC.  If you’re a fan of the show, come back once you’re watched the episode.  But these posts are about a specific element of New York history from the 1960s and can be read even by those who don’t watch the… Read More