Listen to our podcast on the General Slocum Disaster: The General Slocum Memorial Fountain is one of the sole reminders of one of New York City’s darkest days, and it’s not a very awe-inspiring memorial. This is no dig at the custodians of Tompkins Square Park, where the memorial has been on display since 1906, nor at Bruno Louis… Read More
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Above: The Grand Republic steamship. As you can see from its paddlewheel, it was a twin to the General Slocum [source] This could not have made New Yorkers feel very safe about even the briefest of river excursions. Days after the General Slocum excursion steamer caught fire and sank in the East River, killing over 1,000 people,… Read More
PODCAST On June 15, 1904, hundreds of residents of Kleindeutschland, the Lower East Side’s thriving German community, boarded the General Slocum excursion steamer to enjoy a day trip outside the city. Most of them would never return home. The General Slocum disaster is, simply put, one of the greatest tragedies in American history. Before September… 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
Today marks the 113th anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire. For information on commemorations and other activities, visit Remember the Triangle Coalition. For stories of the struggles faced by employees of the shirtwaist industry, check out our 2020 show on the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909: And for more information on the Triangle Factory Fire itself,… Read More
Sixteen years ago (officially on June 19, 2007) we recorded the very first Bowery Boys podcast, appropriately about Canal Street, the street just outside the window of Tom’s apartment on the Lower East Side. That’s right! If our podcast were a person, it could now legally drive in the state of New York. (For more information,… Read More
In the 1850s, New York City had become the third largest German-speaking capital in the world, topped only by Berlin and Vienna. In just thirty years — since the first significant influx of immigrants in the 1820s — Germans had helped to transform the city’s cultural life. But today, even as we celebrate a tapestry… 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 This is a black-letter day in Brooklyn. The theatre… Read More
PODCAST There are two mysterious islands in the East River with a human population of zero. North Brother Island and the smaller South Brother Island sit near the tidal strait known as Hell Gate, a once-dangerous whirlpool which wrecked hundreds of ships and often deposited the wreckage on the island’s quiet shore. In the 1880s… Read More
This article is an excerpt of an entire mini-podcast on the history of South Brother Island, available to those who support the Bowery Boys Podcast on Patreon (at the Five Points level and above). Join us on Patreon to listen today! This week’s latest podcast explores the dark and dramatic history of North Brother Island,… Read More
Arbuckle’s Deep Sea Hotel was neither in the deep sea, nor was it a hotel. But for hundreds of young, single women at the end of the Gilded Age, it was home. The Challenges of Living Single Accommodations were indeed limited for the thousands of young single women who arrived in New York City at… Read More
On a usual day, lunchtime down on Wall Street today is chaotic mess of brokers and bankers on cell phones, tour groups, messengers on bikes, police officers, construction workers, people delivering lunch and perhaps a stray older lady walking her dog. One hundred years ago today, in 1920, it would have practically been the same, sans… Read More
EPISODE 332 The Manhattan neighborhood of Yorkville has a rich immigrant history that often gets overlooked because of its location on the Upper East Side, a destination usually associated with wealth and high society. But Yorkville, for over 170 years, has been defined by waves of immigrant communities which have settled here, particular those cultures… Read More
Pictured: The New York Herald newspaper office (in Herald Square, natch) in a flamboyantly colored postcard from 1907. Â The lights of Broadway theaters — many still below 42nd Street — blaze in the background. Well, our book Adventures In Old New York is finally out, and we’ve been blessed to have it featured in several… Read More
PODCAST The mysterious disappearance of a young woman becomes one of the most talked-about events over one hundred years ago. The young socialite Dorothy Arnold seemingly led a charmed and privileged life. The niece of a Supreme Court justice, Dorothy was the belle of 1900s New York, an attractive and vibrant young woman living on… Read More