150 years ago: ‘Malaeska’, the birth of the dime novel
Today marks a big literary milestone of sorts. Serialized Harlequin romances, comic books, cheap paperbacks and pulp magazines filled with tales of gangsters and spies all…
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History, stories, and deep dives from the Bowery Boys.
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June 15, 1904: Remembering the General Slocum disaster
June 15, 2010
The morning of June 15 -- The steamboat smolders off of North Brother IslandToday 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…
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Mayor Thomas Gilroy: printer’s devil, and Tammany’s, too
KNOW YOUR MAYORS Our modest little series about some of the greatest, notorious, most important, even most useless, mayors of New York City. Other entrants in…
Bowery Boys Bookshelf: New York City writes about itself
No city has been more savaged and disparaged, more exalted and varnished, than New York City -- and this from the very writers who lived here.…
Before CBGB’s, parties at 315 Bowery were for the birds
Above: The first of hundreds of Bowery hotels -- the old Gotham Inn in 1862. The inn, which dated from the 1790s, sat quite close to…
Antoni Gaudi’s grand New York hotel — built by sci-fi
Joshua Jackson, looking down at Gaudi in an alternate universe. Courtesy Fringe FilesI promise, this is my last post on fake New York City history for…
First officer down: Highbinder riots at St Peter’s Church
Broadway and City Hall, in 1809. The mobs of the so-called 'Augustus Street Riot' would have scuffled just to the west of this illustration. (Courtesy NYPL)According…
Detective Mary Shanley, armed and disarming
While perusing through the Library of Congress archive, I found these arresting images from 1937. Caption: "Mary A. Shanley, New York City detective - "pickpockets' captor…
The Limelight – a church, then a nightclub, now a mall!
The sanguine days of the Holy Communion, pictured here over 150 years before it would be reconfigured as a shopping mall (from Booth's History of New…
Amusements and Thrills
Elephantine Colossus: Brooklyn’s most unusual hotel
Visitors to pre-20th century Coney Island would have enjoyed a most unusual site -- Elephantine Colossus , more famously known as 'the Elephant Hotel', an…
Bringing news of King Tut (and his curse) to New York
Howard Carter with his very favorite king (courtesy Life Images)Years after the Steve Martin novelty hit, King Tut mania returns to New York City. The heavily…
Uncategorized
Mark Twain and the long century without him
Above: Mark Twain at Delmonico's Restaurant One hundred years ago today, Mark Twain died of a heart attack in Connecticut, famously the day after Hailey's Comet…
Goldman Sachs: things were much simpler then
The villain du jour of the latest financial scandal is investment firm Goldman Sachs, accused of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading investors…