The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Horror movies normally go for nameless suburbs, dark woods or remote Victorian-style haunted houses for their scary settings, so it’s a wonderful treat when New York City and its recognizable landmarks get to host a few cinematic monsters. Ever since King Kong traipsed up the Empire State Building, filmmakers have used the city’s architecture as… Read More
The Renwick Ruin, resembling an ancient castle lost to time, appears along the East River as a crumbling, medieval-like apparition, something not quite believable. Sitting between two new additions on Roosevelt Island — the campus of Cornell Tech and FDR Four Freedoms Park — these captivating ruins, enrobed in beautiful ivy, tell the story of… Read More
Welfare Island (once the more enticingly named Blackwell’s Island) was New York’s depository of human services, once a dour place of horrifying asylums and miserable workhouses. In the 1960s Mayor John Lindsay was preparing to revitalize the East River island with new housing and increased support for the hospitals there. Architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee… Read More
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald EPISODE 349 This is the story of a borough with great potential and the curious brown-tannish cantilever bridge which helped… Read More
The story of New York World reporter Nellie Bly as she poses as a mental patient to report on the abuses of Blackwell’s Island’s Lunatic Asylum. PODCAST Nellie Bly was a determined and fearless journalist ahead of her time, known for the spectacular lengths she would go to get a good story. Her reputation was… Read More
PODCAST Grab your fedora and take a trip with the Bowery Boys into the heart of New York City’s jazz scene — late nights, smoky bars, neon signs — through the eyes of one of the greatest American vocalists who ever lived here — Billie Holiday. Eleanora Fagan walked out of Pennsylvania Station in 1929… Read More
In this weekend’s New York Times Travel section, I chat with Emily Brennan about three places outside the borough of Manhattan that would make ideal destinations for tourists if the lines get too long at the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. You can read the interview here, but the places I discuss… Read More
A genuine survivor: The building to the right was once the Strangers Hospital in the 1870s. This picture, by Berenice Abbott, was taken many decades later, in 1937. And the building is still around today! (Picture NYPL) New York used to lump the sick, the poor and the homeless into one mass of needy unwanted.… Read More
In 1973, the sliver of land in the East River called Welfare Island was given a more lofty name — Roosevelt Island — in anticipation of a grand monument to Franklin Delano Roosevelt designed by premier architect Louis Kahn. But Kahn died in 1974 after designing the somber, angular granite memorial, set to be placed on… Read More
Park Slope, snow and Volkswagen, January 1978, photo by Dinandi Nooney (courtesy Google Life images) Why was Park Slope named the best neighborhood in New York City? Being one of the city’s largest landmarked districts probably helps. [New York Daily News] Say it’s 1900, you’re injured and you happen to be at the Brooklyn Navy… Read More
This post will definitely require you to click on the picture below to give it a closer look, and it’s a fairly large picture. This is the Hammonds 1910 map of “New York City and vicinity.” Give it a close look and observe the things the mapmaker thought worthwhile to highlight. — It’s clear that… Read More
Relive the 1964 World’s Fair this weekend — from a trolley Open House New York, a weekend-long celebration of city-wide architecture, history and habitation, rolls out this weekend at a varied host of locales. If you’re like me, you completely forgot to make reservations to any of the hottest tours. So if you’re interested in… Read More
The original Smallpox Hospital, designed by James Renwick, still stands today thanks to diligent restoration. (Click pic for detailed view) Looking north over Roosevelt Island, which cleanly splits the East River. Picture the buildings gone, the bridges wiped away, replaced with fruit trees and a small farm. The island has adopted several names over the… Read More
The charming structure above, depicted as though it were a rest stop on the road to Eden, sits on land now occupied by Columbia University in Morningside Heights. Students driven mad by their studies can find cold comfort knowing that the former occupants of this acreage were also mostly certifiably insane. Welcome to Bloomingdale Insane… Read More
I have a special place in my heart for Roosevelt Island, that narrow land in the East River once known by such welcoming names as Welfare Island and Blackwell’s Island. Until the urban development experiments here during the 1970s, I never thought it particularly a family friendly place, unless your family happened to be criminal,… Read More