The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Robert Allerton lived without a care thanks to his family’s Gilded Age fortune, built from the stockyards of Chicago’s meat processing district. As a young man, Allerton used his inherited wealth to maintain the family estate near Monticello, Illinois, cultivating a garden escape where he could be left to his own devices. And then, in… Read More
PODCAST For the first part in our New York City in the Roaring Twenties summer mini-series, we’re hitting the town with “Beau James,” New York’s lively and fun-loving mayor Jimmy Walker. And the king of it all was Jimmy Walker, elected mayor of New York City just as its prospects were at their highest. The… Read More
The Bowery Boys are heading to the speakeasy and kicking back with some bathtub gin this August — with a brand new summer series focusing on New York City in the Jazz Age. The 1920s were a transformational decade for New York, evolving from a Gilded Age capital to the ideal of the modern international… Read More
PODCAST The enduring legacy of the Algonquin Round Table and the brilliant (and sometimes forgotten) people who made it famous. One June afternoon in the spring of 1919, a group of writers and theatrical folk got together at the Algonquin Hotel to roast the inimitable Alexander Woollcott, the trenchant theater critic for the New York… Read More
Josephine Baker is a spellbinding icon. Her persona is magnetic, mysterious, intangible, taking inspiration from Sophie Tucker and Bessie Smith, the divas of the silent screen and the flappers of Harlem and Greenwich Village. And yet this most alluring figure of the Jazz Age was born 110 years ago today in St. Louis, Missouri. Barely 15 years… Read More
Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers & Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair Various authors Edited by Graydon Carter with David Friend Penguin Press BOOK REVIEW  Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers & Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair sounds like a soirée in book form, but it’s a lot more than that.  If anything, the book’s title is a… Read More
PODCAST It’s our fourth annual Halloween history special, and we’ve got four bloodcurdling stories for the season. The first three are spooky ghost tales — a haunted boardinghouse on 14th street with violent, vain spirits; a short history of New York’s seance craze and a man tormented by the spirit of a dead painter; and… Read More