The Bowery Boys: New York City History
ABOVE: A detail from an illustration of the northern points of the New Amsterdam colony, 1640. The year 1642 saw the very first regular ferry service in New York Harbor, between the two small villages of Breuckelen and New Amsterdam. The populations of both areas numbered less than 1,000 at most, combined, and most were… Read More
PODCAST The Staten Island Ferry is one of the last remaining vestiges of an entire ferry system in New York, taking people between Manhattan and its future boroughs long before any bridges were built. In Staten Island, the northern shores were spiked in piers, competing ferry operators braving the busy waters of New York harbor.… Read More
Wheels converge: Motor buggies, horse drawn carriages and other conveyances glide and to and from the railroad terminal ferry station at West 23rd Street (i.e. Chelsea Piers) Pic courtesy NYPL Tomorrow we begin our first official summer blockbuster: a set of several podcasts in a row, themed BOWERY BOYS ON THE GO. Every two weeks,… Read More
Above: Karyl Norman welcomes you to the Pansy Club!FRIDAY NIGHT FEVER To get you in the mood for the weekend, on occasional Fridays we’ll be featuring an old New York nightlife haunt, from the dance halls of 19th Century Bowery, to the massive warehouse clubs of the mid-1990s. Past entries can be found here. LOCATION:… Read More
The morning of June 15 — The steamboat smolders off of North Brother Island Today is the anniversary of undoubtedly one of New York’s most tragic events, a disaster that famously eradicated a neighborhood and became the city’s single largest loss of life in the 20th century — the explosion of the steamboat General Slocum.… Read More
Are you tough enough to mess with them? PODCAST Extra! Extra! Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst vs. the newsboys! Pandemonium in the streets! One hot summer in July 1899, thousands of corner newsboys went on strike against the New York Journal and the New York World. Throngs filled the streets of downtown Manhattan for… Read More
Today marks a big literary milestone of sorts. Serialized Harlequin romances, comic books, cheap paperbacks and pulp magazines filled with tales of gangsters and spies all trace themselves to the ‘dime novel’, a cheaply produced, cheaply bought publication of the mid and late 19th century, introducing breezy, far-flung tales to readers of lower classes. Although… Read More
KNOW YOUR MAYORS 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.Mayor Thomas Francis GilroyIn office: one term 1893-1894 When it comes to corruption, you can’t get more front and center than Thomas Francis… Read More
No city has been more savaged and disparaged, more exalted and varnished, than New York City — and this from the very writers who lived here. The man who exclaimed “Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!” also wrote, “Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with… Read More
Above: The first of hundreds of Bowery hotels — the old Gotham Inn in 1862. The inn, which dated from the 1790s, sat quite close to where 315 Bowery is today, just north of Houston Street. (Pic courtesy NYPL) The early history of buildings at 315 Bowery — the address that would later become the… Read More
Photo courtesy araceli.g, Flickr PODCAST Modern American rock music would have been a whole lot different without the rundown dive mecca CBGB’s, a beat-up former flophouse bar that made stars out of young musicians and helped shape the musical edge of downtown Manhattan. Owner Hilly Kristal may have initially envisioned a place for ‘Country Blue… Read More
Joshua Jackson, looking down at Gaudi in an alternate universe. Courtesy Fringe Files I promise, this is my last post on fake New York City history for awhile, but I couldn’t let the season finale of the FOX sci-fi series Fringe pass without comment. A running scientific theory running through the series is the notion… Read More
Broadway and City Hall, in 1809. The mobs of the so-called ‘Augustus Street Riot’ would have scuffled just to the west of this illustration. (Courtesy NYPL) According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, there have been 778 New York law enforcement officers who have died in the course of duty. Fourteen of the last fifteen… Read More
Uniformly chic: Law enforcement officers of the New York Metropolitan Police from 1871 show off their fancy blue threads. Twenty years previous, they weren’t even required to wear standardized apparel. (Courtesy NYPL Digital Library) PODCAST We’re playing Good Cop / Bad Cop this week, as we take a close look at four events from the… Read More
While perusing through the Library of Congress archive, I found these arresting images from 1937. Caption: “Mary A. Shanley, New York City detective – “pickpockets’ captor fears that she might look tough” “Detective Mary Shanley is a sure shot, as two pickpockets who tried to get away from her know to their sorrow. Here she… Read More