The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Children while away the days in front of 43-49 Willow Place in Brooklyn Heights, 1936. These buildings, known as Colonnade Row, were built over a hundred years before this picture was taken. And they still look pretty much the same today! Photo by Berenice Abbot. (courtesy NYPL) Carded: The evolution of the New York driver’s license,… Read More
The 69th Regiment — aka the Fighting Irish — have always led New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade and have been the heart and soul of New York’s Irish community since the early 19th century. During the Civil War, they were the first to be called, fighting at the battle of Bull Run. The image… Read More
America, as depicted by Freedomland USA pre-opening map — courtesy Viewliner Ltd. WOW. The response to our profile on NPR Morning Edition has been truly overwhelming. It’s been a very wild and exciting couple days. Thanks to everybody who has written us via email, Facebook and Twitter and welcome to our new listeners! One amusing… Read More
The Bowery Boys were featured in a profile this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition! You can give the segment a listen here. You can also download the segment from that site. Our sincere thanks to NPR and to Caitlin Dickerson for featuring us on the show. If you’re interested in any of the particular episodes… Read More
PODCAST A long, long time ago in New York — in the 1730s, back when the city was a holding of the British, with a little over 10,000 inhabitants — a German printer named John Peter Zenger decided to print a four-page newspaper called the New York Weekly Journal. This is pretty remarkable in itself,… Read More
So this random little bolt in a rock may not look like much, but it could be the last remaining on-site evidence of the creation of New York City’s grid plan. Inspired by Marguerite Holloway’s book ‘The Measure of Manhattan‘, I went looking for this unusual object hidden in Central Park, discovered by geographers several… Read More
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 unconventional and different or exposes a previously unseen corner of our city’s complicated past. Then… Read More
The U.S. Sub Treasury Building — today’s Federal Hall — as it appeared in a colorized postcard in the 1900s (courtesy NYPL)“Hey! Getcha buffalo nickels here. Only 15 cents!” On March 1, 1913, the usual bustle of Wall Street was enlivened with the voices of young men — mostly messenger boys, bank runners and peddlers,… Read More
I’ve been out on jury duty yesterday so I haven’t had time to write anything for the blog. However, emerging from the courtroom on the 21st floor of the Kings County courtroom on Jay Street, I was able to take a few pictures of the clouds rolling over Manhattan. It occurs to me how few… Read More
The second film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture was hardly a movie at all. ‘The Broadway Melody’, a frothy Hollywood revue about the mounting of an frothy Broadway revue, was a total celebration of every strength and weakness of the early Broadway stage, and a hopeful sign that the New York… Read More
Millions and millions of hours of television and film have been made within the five boroughs since the invention of the camera. But have you ever wondered where the very first roll of film was ever shot? That distinction most likely goes to a nondescript rooftop studio built atop a building at 1729 St. Marks Avenue… Read More
The future (almost): Edison’s kinetophone system On February 17, 1913, on the day that the Armory Show was preparing to reinvent American art, Thomas Edison was attempting a revolution of his own for the young moving pictures industry. On that date, he debuted a new projection system called the kinetophone in four vaudeville houses in New… Read More
A study in madness: a view inside one room of the 1913 Armory Show This Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the opening of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art — aka, the Armory Show of 1913 — which stunned New Yorkers and revolutionized the direction of American art in the 20th century. So… Read More
In 1922, the New York Tribune envisioned what it would be like if a meteor hit downtown Manhattan. The article is a real scare piece on the potential of meteors destroying life on Earth. It references the American Museum of Natural History‘s own meteor, Ahnighito, brought to the institution by Robert Peary in 1904. As… Read More
In old New York, there was a curious Valentine’s Day custom involving young women running around town whipping men with rope. Yes, you read that correctly. This form of socially acceptable violence was popular in the colonial era and extended well into the early 1800s. It derives from a tradition practiced as part of an… Read More