The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Have you ever walked down a New York sidewalk and thought, “I’m wasting so much energy creating my own forward motion. Why can’t the sidewalk do some of the work?” In one vision of the future, city sidewalks operated as a conveyor belt, whisking people to their destination in a steady stream of moving seats.… Read More
Here’s a listing of all the podcasts we recorded in 2011. This year we followed New York’s contribution to electricity and film, bridged the Narrows and took to the sky, revisited the Revolutionary War via the city’s most influential tavern, and spent the summer surviving riots and conspiracies cooked up during the Civil War. If… Read More
Francis Guy hangs in good company at the Crystal Bridges Museum. Wal-Mart is aggressively lobbying to bring its chain of big box stores to the New York City region. In the meantime, a member of the Walton family is buying up bits of New York and taking it back to Bentonville, Arkansas, the headquarters of Wal-Mart located… Read More
A Bill Murray holiday classic is closely linked to a forgotten 1955 teleplay Tracing itself back to one of America’s first television broadcast station, New York’s local WCBS-TV can claim a host of significant achievements, including the first regular broadcasts in color and the first baseball game in color (with the Brooklyn Dodgers, naturally). Their… Read More
Early news reporting on the celebration of Hanukkah (or Chanukah, as it was popularly referred then) in New York usually took a arms-length approach, as most of their readership knew little about the celebration 100 years ago. More than one old Tribune or World carried a variant of the headline ‘Jews Celebrate Chanukah’ , as though there… Read More
I’m not 100% sure on the date of this photo, but I’ll place it in the late 1940s, as Life photographer Nina Leen did a great many photoshoots for the magazine in this period. The statue of Horace Greeley sits astride the big Christmas tree as perfect afternoon light casts shadows upon the corner of 33rd and… Read More
 Manhattan grid illuminated, taken from the Metropolitan Life Tower in Madison Square, looking downtown. I’m not sure when this photo was taken, but a reasonable guess might be the late 1910s. The caption says ‘New York Edison Company, Photographic Bureau.’ (Photo courtesy NYPL)FOR MORE INFORMATION: We just scratched the surface on the ‘war of… Read More
A new podcast will be ready for download later this evening! The film ‘Edison, The Man‘ was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, which is appropriate because most of the movie is entirely fictional, including this re-imagining of Edison’s Pearl Street Station and the first blocks cast in the glow of incandescent lights. In truth, the ‘switch’ was flipped from… Read More
Williamsburg(h)’s Union Pond, one of the finest destinations for ice skating in the city, 1863. It later became America’s first enclosed baseball field. The nation was at war one hundred and fifty years ago, but that didn’t stop the austere celebrations in the ‘borough of churches’. But while thousands of Brooklyn residents attended church that… Read More
The gritty image of the scrappy 19th century newsboy, the can-do kid slinging newspapers from the street corner, full of vinegar and character, was an encouraging invention of the newspapers themselves. Children were cheap labor, willing to sling stacks of freshly printed papers to corners across the city. Many kids preferred the profession to that… Read More
Charlie Wagner (seen above, in the sombrero) was New York’s most skilled and revolutionary tattoo artist of his day, plying his ink trade behind the partition of a “five-chair barber shop” on the Bowery, according to a 1943 New York Times article. His shop was at 11 Chatham Square (pictured below), unsurprisingly located beneath the elevated… Read More
The 24 States: playing field for America’s first board game HOW NEW YORK SAVED CHRISTMAS My yearly roundup of little events in New York history that actually helped establish the standard Christmas traditions many Americans celebrate today. Not just New York-centric events like the Rockefeller Christmas Tree or the Rockettes, but actual components of the festivities… Read More
It is difficult to discuss calmly the frightful disaster which happened in Brooklyn on Tuesday night. No such awful sacrifice of human life has ever been known in this country shipwreck and the casualties of war alone being excepted. — New York Times editorial, Dec. 7, 1876 One hundred and thirty-five years this evening,… Read More
A charming family enjoys its insulated beverages — just as they like it, just as they need it — in an ad from 1909. The invention of the vacuum flask in 1892 (by Scottish chemist Sir James Dewar) does not rank high among mankind’s most remarkable inventions, but its longevity relies on being a steady… Read More
Last year at this time, I did a podcast on Mark Twain in New York and featured this map of notable places Twain worked, lectured, lived and played. Today is the author’s birthday — he was born 176 years ago — so I thought I’d reprint the map in case you wanted to revisit a… Read More