The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Not sure why this took me forever to set up, but you can finally read our blog on your mobile devices without any awkward scrolling or squinting your eyes. Just visit www.boweryboyspodcast.com (www.theboweryboys.blogspot.com) on your phones to check it out! I’m also in the planning stages of creating an actual mobile app, but until that… Read More
You’ll still find a few free-standing homes on the far western end of Astoria — traditionally called Hallet’s Cove — but you won’t find the one above, a veritable (if ramshackle) plantation getaway as photographed by Berenice Abbott in 1937. The caption of this picture places this house in the hands of Joseph Blackwell, an ancestor… Read More
No, these children have not gotten their calendars confused. One early American Thanksgiving tradition amongst rascals and rowdies involved goofy costumes and disguised faces. Sometimes called ‘Thanksgiving masking’, the strange practice stemmed from a satirical perversion of poverty and an ancient tradition of ‘mumming’, where men in costumes floated from door to door, asking for… Read More
The Stuyvesant Apartments in 1934, already being dwarfed with a newer structure on the right. Please note the ornate entrance to the Third Avenue elevated train to the left of the picture, as well as the streetcar tracks, no longer in use along East 18th Street in 1934, running down the cobblestone street. And I’m fairly sure… Read More
I hope you all caught part one of PBS’s Woody Allen documentary last night. Part of the American Masters series, it was a beautiful tribute, not just to the filmmaker, but to 70s New York, and in particular, Woody’s old neighborhood — Midwood, Brooklyn. The second part concludes this evening at 9pm EST. I’ll be… Read More
The creation of ‘acceptable’ communal living: The Stuyvesant Flats, at 142 East 18th Street, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, photographed by Berenice Abbott. PODCAST Well, we’re movin’ on up….to the first New York apartment building ever constructed. New Yorkers of the emerging middle classes needed a place to live situated between the townhouse and the… Read More
The Navarro Flats, once at Seventh Avenue and 59th Street, was an early pioneer of luxury apartment living along Central Park South. Although this stunner, by Spanish architect José Francisco de Navarro, is long gone, it set the pace for acceptable living on the park’s outskirts. Tomorrow, I’ll present another vanished classic of the apartment… Read More
Anchors Aweigh: A museum finally opens in one of Brooklyn’s most restricted outposts The Brooklyn Navy Yard finally got the museum it deserves this past weekend with the opening of BLDG 92: Brooklyn Navy Yard Center, a badly needed introduction to this long-restricted yet important component of New York history. The environmentally-friendly new center is affixed… Read More
Work hard, play hard: The FBI director in his early days There are at least three scenes in the new Clint Eastwood-directed J. Edgar Hoover biopic ‘J. Edgar’ set in New York, one of which might surprise you. The first features Hoover on Ellis Island, but he’s hardly there to greet new arrivals. The FBI… Read More
Above: a typical scene during the Garbage Strike of 1911 New York street cleaners and garbage workers (sometimes referred to as ‘ashcart men’) went on strike on November 8, 1911, over 2,000 men walking off their jobs in protest over staffing and work conditions. More importantly, that April, the city relegated garbage pickup to nighttime… Read More
I interrupt this blog to insert an endorsement for one of my favorite New York City resources. We got our start here at The Bowery Boys: NYC History over five years ago, and the folks over at Forgotten New York were the first to provide links to our website and podcasts. We are continually grateful for their support. Hopefully, if… Read More
It might have saturated the media with mountains of preemptive hype (such as the spectular Life Magazine cover above), but few would argue that the ‘Fight of the Century’ at Madison Square Garden didn’t live up to its high expectations. On the date of that much anticipated battle, a packed Garden watched as Joe Frazier become the first man… Read More
How about a little music for your Monday? I was flipping through some old photographs in the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts/Billy Rose Theatre Division archive and came across some striking images from the musical ‘The Band Wagon’, which opened on Broadway eighty years ago. The stage musical inspired a more famous Vincent Minnelli… Read More
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, several feet from the galleries that once held the museum’s colossally successful Alexander McQueen show, sits a fascinating new show that could be described as a hard sell. While exploring the galleries, I had many rooms to myself, a far cry from being sandwiched into the McQueen rooms with… Read More
You’ve probably heard by now that Oliver Stone is preparing to make a film version of Robert Caro’s ‘The Power Broker’, the iconic biography of New York’s influential city planner Robert Moses. Several people have emailed us for our reaction to Moses’s big-screen debut. (Well, small screen actually. It’s an HBO film.) The ‘master builder’… Read More