Publicity still for the broadcast of Cinderella in 1957. The television film was seen by more than 100 million people (or well over half the population of the United States.)
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II are two of the greatest entertainers in New York City history. They have delighted millions of people with their unique and influential take on the Broadway musical — serious, sincere, graceful and poignant. In the process they have helped in elevating New York’s Theater District into a critical destination for American culture.
In this episode, we tell the story of this remarkable duo — from their early years with other creators (Hammerstein with Jerome Kern, Rodgers with Lorenz Hart) to a run-down of all their shows. And almost all of it — from the plains of Oklahoma to the exotic climates of South Pacific — takes place on just two city blocks in Midtown Manhattan!
PLUS: What classic music venue still bears the name of Oscar Hammerstein’s grandfather?
How did the ritzy Plaza Hotel celebrate the fifth anniversary of Oklahoma’s debut?
How is Richard Rodgers associated with Hamilton the Musical?
And what was the final song written by Rodgers and Hammerstein?
LISTEN NOW: RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN
The Bowery Boys Podcast is proud to be sponsored by Founded By NYC, celebrating New York City’s 400th anniversary in 2025 and the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026.
Read about all the exciting events and world-class institutions commemorating the five boroughs’ legacy of groundbreaking achievements, and find ways to celebrate the city that’s always making history at Founded by NYC.
The selection of theater images and memorabilia below are courtesy the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library.
Hammerstein with another musical legend — Jerome Kern — in 1939
NYPL
Andre Kostelanetz, Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers and Jane Froman, 194o
NYPL
Rodgers and Hart, circa 1940
NYPL
The creators, with performers in the background
Museum of the City of New York/NYPL
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II at the opening of The King and I at the St. James Theatre
NYPL
Hammerstein, Rodgers and a young Julie Andrews during rehearsals for the broadcast of Cinderella.
NYPL
No ‘leggy chorus girls’ here. Joan Roberts and the original cast of Oklahoma! transformed the Broadway musical
NYPL
Playbill for the original production of Oklahoma! at the St. James Theatre (1943)
NYPL
Thanks to advance “mail orders,” Rodgers and Hammerstein shows would be sold out months before opening — and months before the reviews came out.
NYPL
NYPL
NYPL
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Mary Martin and the child stars of the original production of The Sound of Music.
Our first ghost stories show was released on October 11, 2007, featuring New York City’s famous haunted tales and urban legends (with historical context). Since that time we have released nineteen Halloween-related shows as well as a recording of our Joe’s Pub live show.
Take a spooky trip down memory lane with a re-listen to all our past Halloween shows.
Listening tip: The episodes do get better with each passing year so start with the newest one and work your way back to 2007.
Creep yourself out while listening to these spooky legends of New York City. From the haunted woods of Van Cortlandt Park to spirits haunting Captain Kidd’s treasure on Liberty Island. Psychics at Carnegie Hall, unsettling spirits in Cobble Hill, undead party animals at Grand Central!
Greg and Tom take a road trip to Long Island to explore the region’s most famous haunted tales from legend and folklore, ‘real’ reported stories of otherworldly encounters that have shaped this historic area of New York state.
Each of New York City’s five boroughs bring their own unique histories and personalities, so we thought we’d give each one the spotlight – or rather the spooklight – to highlight the city’s haunted landscape, from rural escapes to densely populated urban centers.
From a Staten Island cemetery to the Bronx Zoo. From a luxury apartment in Flatbush to the Old Flushing Meeting House in Queens. And what’s the strange light, seen from the Manhattan waterfront, floating in the East River?
The old Furniss mansion, with its dark secrets literally behind a locked door.
Spooky stories from the gaslight era of New York City, the illuminating glow of the 19th century revealing the spirits of another world. Featuring various ghost stories associated with Fordham University, a tale of literary ghosts in Astor Place, a haunted townhouse north of Washington Square Park and a haunted tenement on the East River waterfront.
Featuring a ghost-filled mansion in Nyack, New York that holds a unique place among all American supernatural sites; the unsettling tale behind those mysterious ruins known as Bannerman Castle; a ghastly apparition in the Colonial-era Catskills leads to a disturbing life sentence and the secrets of Kingston’s Old Dutch Church with an entity which may trapped beneath its holy steeple.
Cheryl Crow
2021 Gotham’s Greatest Ghosts
For this 15th annual Bowery Boys Halloween ghost story podcast, Greg and Tom taking a look back at their favorites (and yours), the tales which have stayed with us — which have possessed us — like a persistent phantom who refuses to leave.
We present classic tales of the strange and supernatural written by the most famous horror writers in New York City history.
— A celebration of the 200th anniversary of Washington Irving‘s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” featuring the Headless Horseman and the backstory of this classic story’s creation;
— The unsettling nights of H.P. Lovecraft in Brooklyn where his xenophobia, racism and anxiety manifest into a pair of dark, claustrophobic tales, plucked from the waterfront and the West Village;
— A bizarre and allegedly true story (or is it an urban legend?) of an unconventional jewel thief named Fanchon Moncare, made famous by that 20th century purveyor of all things unbelievable — Robert Ripley;
— And a look at the life of Patricia Highsmith — celebrating the 100th anniversary of her birth a bit early — whose nasty little tales of mad murderers have inspired Hollywood and unsettled a new generation of suspense lovers.
A very special Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast presentation, recorded live on Halloween Night 2019 at Joe’s Pub. Prepare to hear new versions of your favorite ghost stories including:
— A Brooklyn house haunting that may be related to the spirits from a colonial-era prison ship;
— A famous murder trial from the year 1800 and a mysterious well which still stands in the neighborhood of SoHo;
— The ghosts (or other supernatural entities) which guard the treasure of the famous Captain Kidd; and
— The mournful secrets of a famed Broadway theater and the inner demons of a Hollywood icon.
With an ALL NEW GHOST STORY — WHO HAUNTS THE FORMER ASTOR LIBRARY?
Near Madison Square Park, an eccentric writer posts a classified ad, hoping to rent out an attic room to a prospective subletter. Unfortunately the room already an occupant — a greenish ghost with a troubling Civil War history.
— The Conference House in Staten Island played an interesting role in the Revolutionary War, and some residents from that period may still wander its ancient hallways.
— On the Upper East Side, a lavish penthouse ballroom may be permanently vexed with the ghost of a testy spirit named Mrs. Spencer. Can a legendary funny lady and a Vodou priestess manage to keep the ghoul under control?
And for the first time in Bowery Boys ghost-stories history, Greg and Tom record a segment of the show — from within an actual haunted house. Merchant’s House docent Carl Raymond joins them for a close look at the life of Gertrude Tredwell and the rooms where she lived and died — and may, to this very day, haunt.
We cautiously approach the dark secrets of Greenwich Village, best known for bohemians, shady and winding streets and a deeply unexpected history. You will never look at its parks and townhouses again after this show!
Featuring: The hidden history of Washington Square Park; the Brittany Residence Hall for New York University students; James Walker Park with its secrets underfoot; and an old Bank Street townhouse with a surprise in its ceiling.
Highlighting haunted tales from the period just after the Civil War when New York City became one of the richest cities in the world — rich in wealth and in ghosts!
— In the Bronx once stood a haunted house in the area of Hunts Point, a mansion of malevolent and disturbing mysteries.
— Then we turn to Manhattan to a rambunctious poltergeist on fashionable East 27th Street.
— Over in Queens, a lonely farmhouse in the area of today’s Calvary Cemetery is witness to not one, but two unsettling and confounding deaths.
— And finally, in Staten Island, we take a visit to the glorious Vanderbilt Mausoleum, a historic landmark and a location with a few strange secrets of its own.
Ghost stories associated with the city’s most popular and recognizable places from baby-faced spooks at the Dakota Apartments to spirited revelers at Grand Central Terminal.
What’s still lurking in the hallways of the Chelsea Hotel? And whatever you do tonight, do not linger too long on the Brooklyn Bridge at night! A figure from the bridge’s past may still be looking for his head.
Four tales of spirits haunting Brooklyn back in the 19th century when it was still an independent city. Featuring an horrific gangly ghost on the railroad tracks, a historic Clinton Hill home with an invisible hand that would not stop knocking, a Coney Island hotel in 1894 with a secret in room 30, and the wacky wraiths of Bushwick’s Evergreens Cemetery.
The scary revelations of a New York medium, married Midtown ghosts who fight beyond the grave, a horrific haunting at a 14th Street boardinghouse, and the creepy tale of New York’s Hart Island.
The secrets of the restless spinster of the Merchants House, the jovial fright of the Gay Street Phantom, the legend of the devil at Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and the spirit of a dead folk singer.
The drunken spirits of the Algonquin, the mysteries of a hidden well in SoHo, the fires of the Witch of Staten Island, and ‘the most haunted brownstone in New York’.
The ghosts of a tragicZiegfeld girl, a scandalous doyenne of old New York, a bossy theater impresario and the ghoulish bell-ringer of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery.
Here are the locations mentioned in all of our New York City ghost podcasts:
Most of the public domain spooky images in this post come from the Internet Book Archive.
On January 3, 1924, 25-year-old George Gershwin was shooting pool in a Manhattan billiard hall when his brother Ira read aloud a shocking newspaper article: “George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto.”
There was just one problem—George had never agreed to write any such piece.
What happened next would change American music forever. In just five weeks, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants raced to compose what would become “Rhapsody in Blue,” breaking down the barriers between popular music and the concert hall.
From that snowy February night at Aeolian Hall to today’s reinterpretations by contemporary artists, this is the story of how a newspaper lie became a masterpiece—and how one young composer captured the sound of Jazz Age New York in music.
“Summertime” from the 1935 premiere of “Porgy and Bess”
The Bowery Boys Podcast is proud to be sponsored by Founded By NYC, celebrating New York City’s 400th anniversary in 2025 and the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026.
Read about all the exciting events and world class institutions commemorating the five boroughs legacy of groundbreaking achievements, and find ways to celebrate the city that’s always making history at Founded by NYC.
PODCAST The fascinating story of the Public Theater and Joseph Papp’s efforts to bring Shakespeare to the people. (Episode #88)
What started in a tiny East Village basement grew to become one of New York’s most enduring summer traditions, Shakespeare in the Park, featuring world class actors performing the greatest dramas of the age. But another drama was brewing just as things were getting started. It’s Robert Moses vs. Shakespeare! Joseph Papp vs. the city!
ALSO: Learn how the Public Theater got off the ground and helped save an Astor landmark in the process.
THIS SHOW WAS ORIGINALLY RELEASED ON JUNE 18, 2009 — MANY, MANY YEARS BEFORE LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA AND ‘HAMILTON’ HIT THE PUBLIC STAGE
The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!
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We are now a creator on Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators.
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Detail from the Harper's Weekly cover illustration which ran on December 23, 1876.
On the evening of December 5, 1876, the glorious Brooklyn Theatre caught fire, trapping its audience in a nightmare of flame and smoke. The theater sat near Brooklyn City Hall (today’s Brooklyn Borough Hall), and the blaze which destroyed it could be seen as far away as Prospect Park.
The horrible truth was revealed in the morning -almost 300 people died in this disaster. To this day, it remains the worst disaster in Brooklyn’s history in terms of lives lost. Of individual one-day disasters in New York City, only the attacks on the World Trade Center and the General Slocum disaster have taken more lives.
But you wouldn’t know it from walking through Cadman Plaza today, a bustling public area popular with skateboarders and office workers on lunch breaks. Several historic monuments decorate the plaza today — but none mark this troubling event in Brooklyn’s history.
It’s a tragic story that also gives us a glimpse into daily life in Gilded Age Brooklyn. And this is a story of the theater world as well — of a popular play which took American culture by storm, and of an actress whose reputation would be forever linked with the disaster. Why was star Kate Claxton unfairly called “the fire witch” in the press?
LISTEN NOW: THE BROOKLYN THEATRE FIRE — FORGOTTEN GILDED AGE TRAGEDY
The Bowery Boys Podcast is proud to be sponsored by Founded By NYC, celebrating New York City’s 400th anniversary in 2025 and the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026.
Read about all the exciting events and world class institutions commemorating the five boroughs legacy of groundbreaking achievements, and find ways to celebrate the city that’s always making history at Founded by NYC.
FURTHER LISTENING
Two other recent podcasts about 19th century Brooklyn history:
Other episodes about disasters in New York City history:
This podcast is based on the 2016 article Greg wrote about the Brooklyn Theater Fire, reprinted below:
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 named for and worthy of the city caught fire last night and its interior parts were consumed.
It is a saddening, fearful, most calamitous story which fills the eyes and darkens the homes of the people of Brooklyn, and deposits hundreds of dead within the walls of as many families, whose sorrow becomes, by the right of sympathy, the sorrow of every heart in the town. — Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec 6, 1876
The charred remains of the Brooklyn Theater, courtesy Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper:
One hundred and forty-nine years, nearly a thousand playgoers entered the Brooklyn Theater, at Washington and Johnson streets near City Hall, to enjoy the well-reviewed (and lengthy) production of N. Hart Jackson’s The Two Orphans.
The play already had a fateful history at this theater which opened in 1871. Sarah Crocker Conway, the Brooklyn Theatre’s well-respected manager and operator, died during the first run of The Two Orphans here at the theater. (Her daughter was in the lead role.)
This particular versionsof the play had just come from a successful run in New York. (In 1876, Brooklyn was not yet part of the city across the river.) The scenery and most of the cast was from a run at the Union Square Theater.
Courtesy Brooklyn Public Library
During the show’s final act, stage hands discovered that a set piece backstage had caught fire.
From Frank Leslie’s: “Miss Kate Claxton, attired in the ragged raiment of the poor blind girl, and one of the ‘Orphans’, was lying on a pallet of straw with Pierre, Mr. Henry S. Hitchcock leaning over her. She heard whispers from the wings behind her — ‘The theater is on fire!’
The actors onstage attempted gamely to stay in character, for fear of causing a panic, until fiery bits of wood and flaming parts of the set began raining down upon them.
As the audience leapt to the aisles in terror, the actors tried to calm people to prevent a stampede, to no avail.
An usher forced open a rarely used exit door to free audience members, but the rush of December air only fed the flames, turning the once elegant auditorium, built only five years previous, into an inescapable trap of heat and asphyxiation.
From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
Those in the upper tiers of the theater — the ‘family circle’, or cheap seats, filled with men, women and children — were trapped by smoke within darkened foyers and unnavigable stairwells.
The panic at the stairway was caused by the tide of flying people from the auditorium meeting that rushing from the gallery, and, in the conflict between the two bodies, men fell, women fainted, children were trampled underfoot, and the whole spectacle was that of a solid body with a myriad of heads struggling for its life, retarded by its own great weight. — Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
Some fell from balconies to their deaths. Dozens were crushed heading for doorways, and to some of those who survived, it seemed that all respectability had given way to base animal behavior.
Most perished by suffocation or underfoot, while others were lost into the oblivion of belching smoke when weakened floors gave way.
Twenty five minutes after flames were first spotted backstage, one entire wall of the Brooklyn Theater caved backwards into the inferno, the once elegant ceiling fresco nothing but a crumbling scorch now.
Flaming projectiles caught in the wind settled upon surrounding structures, and firefighters scrambled to soak the inferno, now in fear of scattering randomly through one of Brooklyn’s oldest neighborhood.
A map of the interior of the theater.
Most in danger was the hotel on the corner, where some audience members had found momentary safety.
“The streets were filled with a throng of excited people, who ran hither and thither, calling about the names of dear ones whose voices could not be heard in answer. Many were hatless and coatless, their garments having been torn from them by the pushing and jesting of the crowd. — Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
Since 1869, Brooklyn had a paid fire department, and many fought the blaze from the streets. But the rudimentary firefighting implements of the day were unable to combat the inferno.
The Brooklyn Theater burned for several hours more, dying out by early morning. Throughout the night, most could only watch — what to do, plunge into darkness? — and many did watch. Thousands flocked, some to help, others fascinated, horrified.
Inspectors found an unspeakably grisly sight the next morning, heaps of burned bodies in formless masses — people choked or crushed, their remains almost unrecognizable amid blackened debris.
In an eerie parallel to two later disasters (the General Slocum explosion of 1904 and the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911), a make-shift morgue was prepared on nearby Adams Street to accommodate the dozens of unidentifiable corpses.
Nobody is sure exactly how many died that evening — some number between 275 to 300 people. It is certainly among the worst disasters in Brooklyn history and one of the most catastrophic fires in American history.
Screenshot
The place where the theater once stood is now occupied by Cadman Plaza, in the grove of trees just east of the Henry Ward Beecher statue. Many of the bodies (over a hundred) are buried together under a memorial at Green-Wood Cemetery.
Photo by Greg YoungThe gravesite of Kate Claxton at Green-Wood Cemetery
At present there is no memorial of this terrible disaster at the site itself. Nearby a statue to Brooklyn’s great citizen Henry Ward Beecher, placed here in 1959 after the construction of Cadman Plaza
Below: the area of Cadman Plaza where the Brooklyn Theater once stood.
Photo by Greg YoungFor years after the blaze, songwriters attempted to memorialize the disaster. The Brooklyn Public LIbrary has a rundown of its rather stark lyrics.
I’ll be bringing this feature back once in a while, because there are dozens more nightclubs, saloons and speakeasies of the past just waiting to be explored. And what a better choice to restart than the dance hall known as the Moulin Rouge of New York, a lively, brightly lit cabaret with debauchery for everyone — the Haymarket.
The Tenderloin district of Manhattan hosted the city’s biggest assortment of vice industries in the late 19th/early 20th century. Sure, Five Points gets all the press, but this vast area — approximately everything between 23rd and 42nd streets, and 6th and 9th avenues — was the more likely destination for regular New Yorkers who wanted to dally in illicit entertainment.
It was at the edge of more fashionable districts (Broadway to its east, Ladies Mile south) and many of its more successful ventures drew respectable gentlemen looking for respite from Gilded Age propriety.
Haymarket was the Tenderloin jewel, a three-story dance hall illuminated (disguised?) like a legitimate Broadway theatre and named for an even more legitimate British theater district. New York’s chief of police in 1887 described it as “animate with the licentious life of the avenue.”
Briefly, it really was a theater, called the Argyle, originally opening in 1872, before its owner got wise and reopened in 1878 as a saucier and more profitable dance hall. Its location, on 66 West 30th Street at Sixth Avenue, placed it just a few blocks from legitimate society, but its bevy of scintillating options were miles outside New York’s traditional morals.
With bands playing and high kicking saloon girls swirling about the floor, owner Edward Corey maintained his club was legally ‘above board’. In a quote from Timothy Gilfoyle’s A Pickpocket’s Tale, “An innocent man and his wife could have wandered into the Haymarket and been entirely unconscious of what was going on around them.”
In fact, those girls were most often prostitutes. Nicknamed ‘the prostitutes’ market’, the Haymarket was a veritable sin shopping mall, ladies luring men to tables to buy them champagne, shower them with presents and quite often making their way to curtained rooms in the balcony and upper floors.
If you preferred male prostitutes, you simply made your way to the back entrance. And although girls and boys were strictly forbidden by management to rob their clientele, the Haymarket nonetheless became a paradise for thievery.
Below: the crowded late night streets of the Tenderloin (picture courtesy Ephemeral NY)
Even still, its reputation grew as New York’s liveliest party in the 1890s, a flashy, fleshy dive thumbing its nose at society. Women drank for free and were allowed to carouse and drink freely with men, who paid a one-quarter entrance fee for the privilege of joining them.
Respectable gentlemen joined riff-raff from local opium dens on the dance floor, their arms around painted, corseted ladies. Naturally, the Haymarket thrived with the help of police corruption and bribery: $250 a week greased the palms of law enforcement who looked the other way. When it actually was closed during rare moments of police reform, it simply re-opened under different names. Its abandon inspired writers like Stephen Crane and even Eugene O’Neill, who wrote of the club:
The music blares into a rag-time tune — The dancers while around the polished floor; Each powdered face a set expression wore Of dull satiety, and wan smiles swoon
John Sloan painted the Haymarket in 1907, still lively in his depiction though in its waning days by the time he put paint to canvas. (The painting currently hangs at the Brooklyn Museum). The hall even became the subject of a 1903 silent film A Night At The Tenderloin.
The Haymarket finally shut down for good in 1911, just as the neighborhood was itself transforming, with the construction of Penn Station and the development of Times Square clearing away much of the Tenderloin’s vice.
Standing at Sixth Avenue and 30th Street today, you’d have no idea that one of New York City’s biggest parties once raged here.
PODCASTA history of the comic book industry in New York City, how the energy and diversity of the city influenced the burgeoning medium in the 1930s and 40s and how New York’s history reflects out from the origins of its most popular characters.
In the 1890s a newspaper rivalry between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer helped bring about the birth of the comic strip and, a few decades later, the comic book.
Today, comic book superheroes are bigger than ever — in blockbuster summer movies and television shows — and most of them still have an inseparable bond with New York City.
What’s Spider-Man without a tall building from which to swing? But not only are the comics often set here; the creators were often born here too.
Many of the greatest writers and artists actually came from Jewish communities in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn or the Bronx.
For many decades, nearly all of America’s comic books were produced here. Unfortunately that meant they were in certain danger of being eliminated entirely during a 1950s witch hunt by a crusading psychiatrist from Bellevue Hospital named Frederic Wertham.
FEATURING: The Yellow Kid, Little Orphan Annie, Batman, Doctor Strange, the Watchmen and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!
To get this week’s episode, download it for free from your preferred podcast player.
Or listen to it straight from here:
AND after you’re done listening to this history on comic books in New York City, check out Greg’s appearance on an episode of This Week In Marvel, the official Marvel Comics podcast hosted by Ryan “Agent M” Penagos, James Monroe Iglehart, and Lorraine Cink.
In this episode, Greg actually speaks about the Bowery Boys episode about comics and shares his own experiences with reading comic books as a kid.
Find this show here or on your favorite podcast player.
Tom and Greg from their 2014 visit to the Marvel Comics offices in Midtown.
The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!
We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every two weeks. We’re also looking to improve the show in other ways and expand in other ways as well — through publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!
We are now a member of Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for as little as a $1 a month.
Please visitour page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans. If you’d like to help out, there are five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). Check them out and consider being a sponsor.
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A young New York boy enjoys his comic book on the Bowery. Photo taken in 1940 by Andrew Herman.
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
And here’s the comic book he’s reading from March 1940, illustrated by George Papp.
Courtesy Comic Vine
In this 1947 photograph taken by Stanley Kubrick, a boy watches his baby sister and enjoys a Superman comic book while his mother shops inside.
Courtesy the Museum of the City of New York
An issue of DC Comics’ Superman from March 1947, with a cover by George Roussos and Jack Burnley
Courtesy DC Comics / Comic Vine
A girl takes a peek at some of the comic book offerings at Woolworth’s. Photograph by Stanley Kubrick taken in 1947.
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
An issue of More Fun Comics from June 1947, produced by DC Comics:
The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, published in 1842, is considered by many to be the wellspring from which the comic medium derives. You can read the entire issue over at the Darmouth College Library website.
Courtesy Dartmouth College Library
A Yellow Kid adventure which would have sprung out from the newspaper due to its vivid colors.
Image courtesy Comix Takoma; art by Richard Outcault
Both Hearst and Pulitzer ran versions of the Yellow Kid comic strip during the years that they were drumming up propaganda which lead to the Spanish-American War.
The unscrupulous nature of their efforts earned them the phrase ‘yellow journalism’, inspired by their war of the popular comic strip by Richard Outcault.
Courtesy the Library of Congress
A section of the colorful comics section of the New York Journal, 1898.
“Familiar Sights of a Great City—No. 1 The Cop is Coming!†by Walt McDougall, New York Journal, Sunday, January 9, 1898 via New York Review of Books
Little Orphan Annie became the biggest crossover star of the early comic strip era. Long before there was a musical, Annie starred in this 1932 melodrama, one of the earliest comic-to-movie crossovers.
New Fun Comics #1, the very first comic book to contain all new material, and not merely reprints of newspaper comic strips.
The Batman debuted in Detective Comics in 1939, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. The city features in these adventures was Gotham City, startlingly similar to the city outside the creators’ windows.
Courtesy DC Comics
Gotham City, aka New York City, in 1939
Courtesy U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation
Vault of Horror, one of an assortment of shocking comic books produced by EC Comics in the early 1950s. The cover art is by Johnny Craig.
Courtesy EC Comics
Bill Gaines, publisher of EC Comics, at his offices at 225 Lafayette Street.
Courtesy Tebeosfera
Dr. Fredrick Wertham, the writer of Seduction of the Innocent, who lead a charge against the comic book industry.
A young Stan Lee during the war as a member of the US Army’s Signal Corps. He even managed to do a bit of illustration for the cause!
The Thing from the Fantastic Four with the Yancy Street Gang, a variation on Delancey Street in the Lower East Side.
Courtesy Marvel Comics via Comic Viine
Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum is located on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village
Courtesy Marvel Comics
The adventures of Luke Cage, who debuted in his own Marvel Comics series in 1972, could be found mostly in Harlem. But he wasn’t the first African-American superhero from the neighborhood; in 1947 a character named Ace Harlem first appeared in a Philadelphia-published comic book called All-Negro Comics.
What would Spider-Man be without New York City? The image of the Brooklyn Bridge (called the George Washington Bridge in the story) is featured in a classic tale involving the death of his girlfriend Gwen Stacey, written by Gerry Conway and drawn by Gil Kane, John Romita and Tony Mortellaro.
Courtesy Marvel Comics
And — oddly enough — Staten Island in the world of Marvel Comics has become Monster Island, ruled by Deadpool. Yes, Deadpool. Haven’t they suffered enough? (Check here for more information.)
A page from Maus by Art Spiegelman, the graphic novel that brought the medium to a new level of respectability in literary circles.
Courtesy Art Spiegelman
The comic book/graphic novel continues to evolve and reach new heights of success and respectability. Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, published last year, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best autobiography.
Courtesy Roz Chast/Bloomsbury
The Avengers defended New York during an alien attack in their blockbuster film in 2012
Courtesy Film Frame/Marvel
All images on this website are owned by the original comic book companies which produced them. Â Please see individual companies for more information.
RECOMMENDED READING:
If you’re into digging more into this subject, here are a few sources that I used for this podcast:
Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of An American Art Form, with written contributions by Paul Buhle
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hadju
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangster and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones
Comic Book Century: Â The History of American Comic Books by Stephen Krensky
Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution by Ronin Ro
The Marvel Comics Guide to New York City by Peter Sanderson
Listen to our podcast on the General Slocum Disaster:
TheGeneral 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 Zimm, the fountain’s sculptor whose creation presents two children in idyllic profile, next to an engraving: “They were Earth’s purest children, young and fair.”
Its left side unveils its more tragic context: “In memory of those who lost their lives in the disaster to the steamer General Slocum, June XV MCMIV.”
The fountain, while charming and tranquil, is inadequate in expressing the grief and horror that filled New Yorkers on June 15, 1904, when, during a church-sponsored day trip headed for the Long Island Sound, the General Slocum steamboat caught fire and sank in the East River, killing more than a thousand passengers, mostly women and children.
This tragedy was the single deadliest event in New York City history until September 11, 2001.
This disaster virtually wiped out the German presence on the Lower East Side—entire families perished, many of whom had just gotten a foothold in New York a generation before. In a single morning the lights of Kleindeutschland, New York’s Little Germany, permanently faded.
The boat had been chartered by St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church* for their yearly day trip excursion to the Long Island Sound. The East River was filled with excursion steamers such as the General Slocum and its sister ship the Grand Republic (a vessel with a doomed story of its own).
It was a chance for the congregation to briefly break out of the crowded Lower East Side to enjoy a day in the sun. Among the passengers was the Liebenow family, which consisted of parents and their three daughters, Anna, Helen, and Adella, along with several aunts and cousins.
The Slocum left the pier shortly before 9 a.m. and began its slow crawl up the East River.
Captain William Van Schaick had been principally concerned that morning with one turbulent spot up the East River, a dangerous confluence of waters known as the Hell Gate. It had already sunk hundreds of vessels as far back as the seventeenth century. By 1904 it was still a dangerous pass, but on this day, the Hell Gate would not be the problem.
About 30 minutes into the voyage, a child noticed that a small fire had started in the lamp room below the main deck.
A crewman tried to stamp it out, throwing charcoal on it in an effort to contain it. But the flames only grew larger.
Crew members grabbed a firehose—only to find it rotten to the point that it burst wide open. These were not men trained for emergency situations; once they realized the hoses were useless, they simply gave up.
from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Civilized behavior soon gave way to panic as the flames quickly spread through the lower levels of the steamer, fire jumping from passengers’ clothing to hair.
Families moved away from the flames only to find themselves pressed up against the boat’s railings as panicked crowds pushed forward in search of fresh air. Children lost hold of their parents, never to see them again.
Crowds surged toward the Slocum’s six lifeboats and attempted to hoist them down. But they wouldn’t budge—somebody had wired them to the wall.
The life preservers, never properly inspected, were filled with rotten cork, and several exploded into dust. They were not only useless—they were actually dangerous. Panicked parents strapped preservers to their children and tossed them overboard, only to watch in horror as they sank from sight.
Below deck, passengers were burned to death—huddled in groups and trapped in corners. Smoke choked many, causing unconsciousness; many were trampled underfoot.
Some jumped into the violent waves. “There was little hope that any of the children who jumped overboard could be saved,” reported the New York Evening World. “The current all along the course taken is on a section of the river where not even a strong swimmer can breast the currents. Scores of little ones were sucked in by the whirlpools in Hell Gate.”
Greenwich Village Society of Historic Preservation
Crowds formed along the shores, and their attention was drawn by the billowing smoke, fire, and horrifying spectacle before them. The captain managed to steer the boat toward North Brother Island, where nurses, doctors, and even patients from the smallpox hospital ran to the water to rescue and attempt to revive those who had washed ashore.
Bodies on the shore of North Brother Island
The Slocum eventually floated out into the Long Island Sound, puffing clouds of cork dust into the air, while leaving a trail of tragedy in its wake.
Just after noon, the burning vessel sank, a single paddle box and a smokestack jutting out of the water.
By the final count, 1,021 people perished in the General Slocum disaster that day, making it the deadliest single event in the city’s history up to that date. In the weeks following the disaster, the streets of Kleindeutschland—today’s East Village—were filled with mourners. The community attended funerals in the homes of those who had perished and held solemn processions through the streets.
A mass funeral through the streets of the Lower East Side — “burial of the unidentified”
New York Public Library
The Liebenow family was hit particularly hard. The entire Liebenow family died in the disaster—all except baby Adella (pictured below), just six months old at the time of the tragedy.
Two years later, now only two-and-a-half years old, Adella was hoisted to a podium here in Tompkins Square Park. She stood before a community that hadn’t yet fully recovered—would they ever?—as she tugged at a cloth to unveil the General Slocum Memorial Fountain.
NYHS
No, the fountain is not perfect. How could it be?
But why hasn’t this tragedy been better memorialized? It’s such an important event in the city’s history, and yet so many don’t know its whole story. There are a few theories about this, many having to do with the anti-German sentiment that cropped up a decade later at the beginning of World War I.
Or was it the social class of the victims that caused it to recede from memory? Adella, who died in 2004, 100 years after the disaster, believed that this might be the case. To a crowd at a 1999 commemoration of the tragedy, she said, “The Titanic had a great many famous people on it. This was just a family picnic.”
*St. Mark’s is located on East 6th Street, between First and Second Avenues, in the heart of New York’s first and largest German neighborhood. A plaque honoring the victims hangs in front.
A long, long time ago in New York — in the 1730s, back when the city was a holding of the British, with a little over 10,000 inhabitants — a German printer named John Peter Zenger decided to print a four-page newspaper called the New York Weekly Journal.
This is pretty remarkable in itself, as there was only one other newspaper in town called the New York Gazette, an organ of the British crown and the governor of the colony. (Equally remarkable: Benjamin Franklin almost worked there!)
But Zenger’s paper would call to question the actions of that governor, a virtual despot named William Cosby (at right), and in so doing, set in motion an historic trial that marked a triumph for liberty and modern democratic rights, including freedom of the press and the power of jury nullification.
This entire story takes place in lower Manhattan, and most of it on a couple floors of old New York City Hall at Wall Street and Nassau Street. Many years later, this spot would see the first American government and the inauguration of George Washington.
But many could argue that the trial that occurs here on August 4, 1735, is equally important to the causes of democracy and a free press.
LISTEN NOW: THE TRIAL OF JOHN PETER ZENGER
CORRECTION: I can’t read my Olde English very well. In reading from a page of the New-York Weekly Journal, I inadvertently say ‘Fulgom Panagenics’ instead of ‘Fulsom Panagenics’. Fulgom is not a word, fulsom(e) is, meaning very complimentary or flattering.
The burning of John Peter Zenger’s ‘New York Weekly Journal’ in Wall Street on November 6, 1734.
A stained copy of the New-York Weekly Journal from 1733
Andrew Hamilton, the lawyer who saved the day in the John Peter Zenger trial. His eloquence and command of language helped win the day for lovers of free press.
Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller – Portrait of Andrew Hamilton (1808).
Here’s a fun article I wrote back in 2012 that may find new meaning for many of baseball fans this week. Again, happy to take any corrections on any particular sports statistics! – Greg
When again we see New York Knicks face off against the Boston Celtics this weekend, the beast of an old rivalry will continue to roar, the latest configuration of a fierce competition between two of America’s greatest cities.
While the rivalry between Boston and New York primarily manifests within the world of sports — the venue of modern warfare — it echos a spirit of competition that has existed between the coastal cities for over two centuries. But how did it begin?
The cultures of the cities which would become Boston and New York were drastically different from the very start. Boston, after all, was founded in 1630 by Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a society based on specific religious values, with little tolerance for variation. New Amsterdam, New York’s pre-cursor, developed as a company town in the 1620s and was quite renown for being notoriously value-less, relatively speaking.
The Puritans, with a moral superiority that paralleled national antagonisms, believed a distasteful mix of cultures, an abhorrent godless mixture festered there in New Amsterdam. As a secular development, New Amsterdam fostered a policy of religious freedom far more in keeping with modern American ethics than the stringent, finger-pointing Puritans. Many so-called heretics fled the Puritans and were granted haven by the Dutch.
The Puritans were fortified by their connection to England, while New Amsterdam was a rowdy outpost of a faltering world power. By 1644, Massachusetts had created a powerful alliance with other colonies, allowing England a stronghold in the New World.
New Amsterdam, meanwhile, deteriorated as the Dutch focused on warfare with the Lenape and encroaching colonies such as Swedish. Peter Stuyvesant arrived in 1647 to shape up the Dutch town, but by then motions were already in place to drive them out entirely.
By 1664, the Dutch were thrown out of New Amsterdam and the defeated city was renamed New York, part of a larger British colony named for the Duke of York. Boston, for its part, became the premier British bastion, capital of the Dominion of New England, and a place many believed chosen by God (the storied ‘City Upon a Hill’) as a shining beacon of humanity. Boston was right to have an attitude.
Even as New York and Boston became competing ports in the British era, the Massachusetts city always had the edge.
America has benefited from Boston pride. The opening salvos of American independence were born from clashes between Boston citizens and British soldiers, rebellion in the form of bloody clashes (the Boston Massacre) and economic unrest (the Boston Tea Party).
As colonists rose up against British oppression during the Revolutionary War, they could look to the Boston battle at Bunker Hill as an example of victory and perseverance.
Bostonians celebrated Evacuation Day on March 17 because the British were booted from there in 1776 and never returned. New Yorkers celebrated the same holiday on November 25 because the British kept that city for most of the war and weren’t expelled from it until 1783.
Both cities struggled for economic footing after the war. Both had sophisticated ports and bustling harbors ready to send and receive shipping vessels, manufacturing plants rivaling anything overseas, and a growing class of wealthy old-family elites. In Boston, they were the Brahmins and went to Harvard. In New York, they were Knickerbockers and turned to Yale or Princeton. (Columbia was not quite in their league yet.)
Below: Boston in 1873
But only one city had access to a river inland, a point made explicit with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Suddenly, New York became a gateway into the expanding American west. Not only would New York traders and merchants grow rich and form a nouveau upper-crust (thriving in the wake of men like John Jacob Astor), the canal would siphon away much of Boston’s livelihood, one ship at a time.
Bostonians were not pleased. The founder of Boston’s first daily newspaper saw a diversion of goods to New York as ‘evil‘ and recommended the city jump on a newfangled transportation idea just debuting in England — the steam-powered railroad. Within a few years, train tracks stretched down the old Boston Post Road (almost, but not quite, to New York) in an effort to connect Boston to the waters of the Hudson River.
Or as author Eric Jaffe observes: “…the goal of everyone involved in Boston’s railroad system at the time was clear: to move Manhattan toward the [Massachusetts] Bay along the highways of the future.”
The two cities remained locked in quiet, but stiff, competition throughout the 19th century, not only in industry and trade, but in intelligentsia, literature, politics and social ‘quality’.
The dynamics of both cities changed with the immigration boom that began in the late 1840s. Soon, one fifth of the populations of both cities would be Irish.
The culture of Boston was greatly affected, perhaps more that any American city, by these new Irish arrivals, but it was New York that felt the most weight. By 1860, with New York as the biggest city in America, even the city of Brooklyn had a greater population than Boston.
Bostonians had their legendary, steely pride for their city — in many ways, America’s first, greatest city — but New York was a powerful, untouchable metropolis by the time of the Gilded Age. Despite its grime and squalor, despite its sinful and corrupt reputation (or perhaps because of it), New York had bested Boston to become the biggest, richest, most powerful city in America by the time of the Civil War.
Below: New York City in 1873 (from George Schlegel lithograph)
And so it was that, in the late 19th century, an apparatus arose for which the undercurrent of rivalry between the cities could take a more explicit, more robust form — sports.
Universities already organized sports teams — with accompanying rivalries of their own — and now, in the post-war era, professional teams began sprouting up in a wide variety of games.
The first sports leagues formed in the Northeast, thus it was natural that teams from Northern and Rust Belt cities would often clash.
The first organized baseball league principally concerned New York and Brooklyn teams. (Don’t even get me started onthe New York/Brooklyn rivalry!) Teams wouldn’t truly take on defined regional characters until the formation of the National League in 1876, which included the Boston Red Stockings, a precursor of the Sox, among its original teams.
The two baseball franchises that would cement the Boston-New York conflict were born in the 20th century. The Boston teamcame first, in 1901, with the inauguration of the American League, but were not referred to by their distinctive bold-colored foot coverings until 1908.
In 1904, the Boston team was declared champion of the American League. However, National League teams looked down upon the ‘inferiority’ of the younger American League teams, and thus, what might have been the first World Series — between the Boston Red Sox and National League victors the New York Giants — never occurred.
The Giants were considered New York’s principal baseball franchise and even spawned a successful soccer team. (They frequently played a soccer spinoff of the Boston Beaneaters.)
By this time, another New York team limped into the city in 1903 — the Highlanders, who later changed their name to the New York Yankees.
In 1918 came an event that changed the fortunes of the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees forever. Red Sox star Babe Ruth was traded to the New York Yankees during the off-season 1919-1920, allegedly because Sox owner Harry Frazee was looking to finance his Broadway musical offering No No Nanette. (That’s the popular legend, although many believe the trade was to finance another, equally ridiculous production called My Lady Friends.)
Whatever the origin of the ‘Curse of the Bambino’, it had a psychological effect on fans and players on both sides. Boston, once the league’s most successful squad, didn’t win another World Series until 2004, while the Yankees, well, changed sports history with 27 World Series victories.
The deep animosity spilled over into other sport match-ups. In basketball, the New York Knicks pale under the legacy of the Boston Celtics, simply put the best basketball team in history.
In hockey, the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers became the first two American teams to play each other for the Stanley Cup in 1929. The Bruins cleaned the ice with the Rangers.
But it’s in football that the two cities have had some truly dramatic clashes. The New York Giants football team, hardly a threat when they first formed in the late 1920s, were a force to be reckoned with by the time they first met the Boston Patriots in 1960.
Notably, when the Boston team changed its name to the New England Patriots and moved to Schaefer Stadium in Foxborough in 1971, the first game they played was against the Giants.
The Giants and the Patriots have met in the Super Bowl just once before — and notably so — in 2008. New York was the victor, in one of the greatest upsets in sports history. This Sunday, Boston seeks revenge. As you sit through a halftime show with Madonna (a New Yorker in her formative years), ponder upon the weight of history hanging over both teams.
To sports fans: I welcome any clarification of details if I’ve gotten something wrong!
Courtesy of Garland County Historical Society and Butler Center Books
PODCASTHell’s Kitchen, on the far west side of Midtown Manhattan, is a neighborhood of many secrets. The unique history of this working class district veers into many tales of New York’s criminal underworld and violent riots which have shaken the streets for over 150 years.
This sprawling tenement area was home to some of the most notorious slums in the city, and sinister streets like Battle Row were frequent sites of vice and unrest. The streets were ruled by such gangs as the Gophers and the Westies, leaving their bloody fingerprints in subtle ways today in gentrified buildings which at one time contained the most infamous speakeasies and taverns.
We break down this rip-roaring history and try to get to the real reason for its unusual name!
The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!
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The mysteries begin over 200 years ago when ordered avenues and streets could scarcely be imagined, and the shoreline was a ragged coast.
The Dutch later called it the Great Kill District, for the creek which emptied into the Hudson River (North River) at 42nd Street. As you can see from this diagram the shore was evened out with landfill to create 12th Avenue although the inward dip at 43rd Street is still visible on a modern map.
A map (drawn by John Bute Holmes) of the original estate borders of Bloomingdale from the late 18th century. The jagged shore line would later be filled in to make the blocks between 11th and 12th Avenues.
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
The Ninth Avenue barricades made by rioters in the area of Hell’s Kitchen during the Civil War Draft Riots.
The Orange Riot of July 12 from Eighth Avenue south from 25th street, an 1871 image from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
Bad boys: Some Hell’s Kitchen ruffians show Jacob Riis how to rob people who have passed out.
Jacob Riis
An intriguing shot of 58th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues
Museum of the City of New York
Jacob Riis’ photograph of the Hell’s Kitchen tenement and the remains of Sebastopol (the rocks), 1890
Photo by Jacob Riis
Street vendors under the 9th Avenue Elevated Railroad
Museum of City of New York
The Hartley House, a settlement house for the Hell’s Kitchen community. on West 46th Street
Museum of the City of New York
At the recreation pier — a public swimming hole at West 51st Street and the Hudson River.
Museum of the City of New York
The later configuration of the Gophers. Owney Madden is on the back row, fourth from the left. A very rough and dangerous gang, but don’t they clean up nice?
Courtesy of Garland County Historical Society and Butler Center Books
Owney Madden, the king of the Hell’s Kitchen speakeasy racket.
A couple spectacular shots of 1938 slum clearance — eliminating the tenements of 37th Street.
Wurts Brothers. Museum of the City of New York
Wurts Brothers. Museum of the City of New York
Businesses on West 52nd Street, facing into DeWitt Clinton Park. It’s likely that William Hopper & Sons Truckmen at no. 626 probably traces itself back to the original Hopper land owners. Photograph by Charles von Urban
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
The entrance to DeWitt Clinton Park (at 54th Street) in 1936
New York Public Library
Most of the pressures faced by the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood came from its perimeter with dramatic changes to the waterfront to its west, Port Authority/Lincoln Tunnel to its south, Madison Square Garden/Times Square to its east and Lincoln Center/Columbus Circle to its north.
Below: The West Side Highway and piers 95-98, looking west from a roof on West 54th Street
New York Public Library
The Port Authority Bus Terminal in 1950, at West 40th and 41st Streets and 8th Avenue.
Wurts Brothers, courtesy Museum of the City of New York
The 8th Avenue Madison Square Garden, as seen in 1935.
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
A mural from 1974 — “The Neighborhood Belongs to the People Not Big Business.”
Today marks the 114th 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, return again to one of our earliest shows:
On this day in 1911, late in the afternoon, fire swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, located on the upper floors of a ten-story building near Washington Square Park.
Due to odious practices by the factory’s supervisors, the doorways were blocked and the fire escapes were in poor shape.
Library of Congress/Bain Collection
Hundreds of employees, mostly young immigrant women, scrambled to escape by any means necessary.
When the fire was finally extinguished, 146 workers had been killed in the blaze. Many, fearing death by the flames, leaped to the street below to the horror of onlookers who had stumbled over from the park.
Library of Congress/Bain Collection
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is one of the most horrible tragedies in American history, both an indictment on New York sweatshop industries and the lack of any oversight about safety in high rise buildings. Many building regulations that keep us safe today were directly put in place due to these events.
From the New York Tribune the following day:
——–
Remembering Them
But on this anniversary I wanted to focus on the people who died at the Triangle Factory that day. Can we imagine something about them by looking at where they lived?
Thanks to the research of Michael Hirsch and the Kheel Center at Cornell University [found here], it’s possible to actually come up with a map of the homes of all 146 victims of the Triangle fire.
It would look something like the map below. Just zoom into it to look at the individual sites and take a look at which neighborhoods and boroughs that were most affected:
NOTE: The addresses are accurate, but a few of the points are approximately placed. In a few cases, the streets no longer exist, so I placed the points in close vicinity.
A Lower East Side Tragedy
To nobody’s surprise, the neighborhood most devastated by the tragedy is the Lower East Side (The east side above Houston Street — i.e. today’s East Village — didn’t take that new designation until the late 1950s.) There doesn’t seem to be a block in the neighborhood with an empty home that day one hundred years ago.
A few years before the Triangle fire, the Lower East Side had experienced an even more ghastly tragedy — the explosion of the General Slocum paddle steamer on June 15, 1904.
Among the 1,021 victims of that horrific event, most lived in this neighborhood and specifically in the German area of Kleindeutschland. As the victims were mostly women and children, the disaster effectively marked the end of the German enclave here.
The deaths of the 146 garment workers on March 25, 1911, did not produce the same effect to the neighborhood, but certainly the loss was gravely felt in tenements and houses throughout the city. The map shows that the disaster’s immediate impact reverberated even into the other boroughs.
Essex Street in 1905. “You feel lonely. How would you like to live here?” Museum of the City of New York
East vs. West
Of the 146, most all of them were born in three countries — Italy, Russia or Austria. A handful were born in the United States, presumably the children of first generation immigrants.
So it’s no surprise most of them found homes in the Lower East Side, still the heart of immigrant life in the early 20th century. But I really didn’t expect it to be so decisive.
Outside of a small cluster of people who lived in Greenwich Village close to the factory, there were no victims who listed addresses anywhere on Manhattan’s west side — not in Hell’s Kitchen, the Upper West Side, or anywhere else.
I’m fascinated by those who lived further out, near the growing German neighborhood of Yorkville on the Upper East Side, for instance.
A great many took streetcars and elevated trains into work from Brooklyn and the Bronx, and some might even have taken advantage of the new subway (although in 1911, its route was very limited).
No surprise that none of them lived in Queens; the ethnic neighborhoods of that borough would really flourish after the 1920s.
And then there’s young Vincenza Billota, a 16 year old girl who lived out with her uncle in Hoboken, NJ — the only one of the victims to commute into the city.
Her uncle came in from New Jersey that night to identify Vincenza who burned alive inside the factory. He identified her because her shoes had recently been repaired; he recognized the cobbler’s work.
From 1909, the caption reads “Tenement dwellers dropping clothes from fire escape for Italians on East side.” Library of Congress
Missing Tenements
There’s something moving about finding and identifying the homes of the victims.
Most of these people had no solid roots, no property they owned. Only an address, a home they most likely shared with family members and other tenants.
Every year on the anniversary of the fire, the sidewalks outside these addresses are marked with chalk, the names and ages written on the ground as a yearly reminder. You can look at a photo array from the 2011 chalk excursions here.
They didn’t live in fabulous Beaux-Arts mansions or apartment buildings.
Their homes were tenements, most overcrowded and poorly maintained.
Thus, many of the actual buildings themselves are gone. In the cases of the victim’s homes on Monroe Street, even most of the street itself is gone, replaced with more modern housing projects.
135 Cherry Street, the home of fire victim Rose Cirrito. The photo is from 1939 (courtesy NYPL); the entire row of buildings was later demolished.
509 East 13th Street was the home to two Italian girls, Antonietta Pasqualicchio and Annie L’Abate, and an older Italian woman Annina Ardito, who all lost their lives that day. But that building has been replaced with a modern apartment.
Family and Friends
To grasp a disaster of this magnitude — at a vantage over one century later — you have to deal with it in generalities.
The victims were mostly girls, mostly immigrants, mostly uneducated.
However, by singling out a particular address, the individual tragedies come into focus. And oddly, you get to place that person’s life next to what inhabits that address today.
In the case of the Lower East Side, some of these places are now restaurants, bars and luxury condos.
143 Essex Street was the home of two victims — two teenage brothers Max and Sam Lehrer from Austria. Both had arrived in the United States via Ellis Island in 1909; another Austrian,Sigmund Freud, also arrived at Ellis Island that year.
Young Jennie Stellino had lived in New York since she was 12 years old; she died in the blaze at age 16. She walked to the factory every day from her home at 315 Bowery, one of the few with a fairly easy commute.
Jennie survived the blaze but died from her burns three days later. Decades later, the building at that address became internationally renown for the tenant at its ground floor, CBGB’s.
I’m not sure there’s even a 35 Second Avenue anymore. The street is inhabited by a diner and a few bars today; the Anthology Film Archives sits across the street.
But it was the home to three women who lost their lives that day — Catherine Malteseand her two daughters.
PODCASTA star of the New York City skyline is reborn — the Waldorf Astoria is reopening in 2025!
And so we thought we’d again raise a toast to one of the world’s most famous hotels, an Art Deco classic attached to the Gilded Age’s most prestigious name in luxury and refinement.
Now, you might think you know this story — the famous lobby clock, Peacock Alley, cocktail bars! — but do we have some surprises for you.
The Waldorf Astoria — once the Waldorf-Astoria and even the Waldorf=Astoria — has been a premier name in hotel accommodations since the opening of the very first edition on 34th Street and Fifth Avenue (the location of today’s Empire State Building).
But the history of the current incarnation on Park Avenue contains the twists and turns of world events, from World War II to recent diplomatic dramas. In essence, the Waldorf Astoria has become the world’s convention center.
Step past the extraordinary Art Deco trappings, and you’ll find rooms which have hosted a plethora of important gatherings, not to mention the frequent homes to Hollywood movie stars.
But its those very trappings — some of it well over a century old — that finds itself in danger today as recent changes threaten to wipe away its glamorous interiors entirely.
LISTEN NOW: THE RETURN OF THE WALDORF ASTORIA
The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!
We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every two weeks. We’re also looking to improve the show in other ways and expand in other ways as well — through publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!
We are now a member of Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for as little as a $1 a month.
Please visitour page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans. If you’d like to help out, there are five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). Check them out and consider being a sponsor.
We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far. And the best is yet to come!
The original Waldorf-Astoria which once sat at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. The first hotel, the Waldorf, is the shorter one facing 33rd Street.
Park Avenue at nighttime, 1937. Seen here: 515 Mad. Ave, Gen. Electric, the Waldorf Astoria, the Chrysler Building, the Chanin Building, and the New York Central Building.
Museum of the City of New York
A 1931 postcard announcing the debut of the Waldorf Astoria with the Chrysler in the background.
Courtesy MCNY
MCNY
Marilyn Monroe at the Waldorf, her home in 1955. Here she is at the April In Paris ball with her then-husband Arthur Miller.
Courtesy New York Daily News
And at another function, this time chatting with Eartha Kitt.
A photo posted by Gregory Young (@boweryboysnyc) on
More information here on the Historic District Council’s efforts to help save the interior decor of the Waldorf Astoria.
CORRECTION: There are a few classic photographs of Marilyn Monroe at the Waldorf-Astoria; however the one that Greg described on the show is actually taken at the Ambassador Hotel, a couple blocks north of the Waldorf. (It was torn down in the 1960s.)
In the early days of July 1915, the United States was preparing for a subdued celebration of America’s 139th Independence Day.
It was hardly a festive time. War was still raging in Europe, and America was debating its entry on the side of Britain, Italy and France.
The deaths of 128 Americans aboard the RMS Lusitania on May 7 had forced the U.S.’s hand, some thought. President Woodrow Wilson pressed Germany for an apology while not yet calling for war. His Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan thought even that too harsh; he resigned in protest from Wilson’s cabinet in June.
The headlines were dire as it seemed the entire world would soon be caught in the maelstrom of the Great War.
And then, right before midnight, July 2, 1915, a bomb went off at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
It exploded in an empty reception area. “The explosion was a loud one and shook the entire building, breaking transoms and shattering plastering, ” said the Sun. Windows and mirrors were smashed, but the only bodily harm it caused was throwing a watchman from his chair.
The Sun: “Some persons in the crowd which had gathered around the Capitol were inclined to believe that the bomb had been placed by some war fanatic as an act of resentment against the United States government.”
Below: The Capitol reception room after the explosion
Courtesy Library of Congress
They were right. And Eric Muenter wasn’t done.
Before newspaper readers in New York City would find out about the bombing, its instigator would have already arrived in their city, with a roster of further crimes on his mind.
Muenter (pictured below), a former professor at Harvard University*, was a German sympathizer angered at American intervention in the war. He spread his vitriol wide, preparing to target private businessmen personally funding war efforts. In fact targeting one of America’s most wealthy financiers — JP Morgan Jr.
Below: Muenter after he was captured
Following his sabotage at the Capitol, Muenter fled to New York on the morning of July 3 to wreak further chaos. He had a makeshift headquarters at the Mills Hotel (Seventh Avenue and 36th Street) where he had stored dozens of sticks of dynamite and fuses. At the port of New York, he managed to sneak aboard the SS Minnehana, an ocean liner filled with explosives destined for England, and install a time bomb to detonate once the ship was at sea.
Courtesy Library of Congress
It’s at this time that a similar time bomb was placed at New York Police Headquarters at 240 Centre Street. The device here was later believed to be from the same batch of dynamite as Muenter’s. If he was involved, you have to admit he was incredibly efficient with his time, for by 8 am, he had boarded a train, headed to Glen Cove, Long Island.
Below: New York’s Inspector of Combustibles with Muenter’s steamer trunk filled with dynamite. (Courtesy Glen Cove Heritage)
JP Morgan Jr. had been in control of his father’s banking empire since the elder’s death in 1913. The son embodied America’s involvement in the Great War in the years before the U.S.’s official entry. He facilitatedan unprecedented loan of 500 million dollars to the Allied countries, backed by a consortium of over 2,000 American banks. The loans would soon grow to almost 3 billion dollars.
This made the financier both a symbol of American beneficence for some and a target of unwanted intervention for others. New York was a great stew of European diversity in the 1910s, and the far-away war often played out in the streets of New York, especially in German communities.
Morgan Jr had his recently-built summer home in Glen Cove, a palatial manor called Matinecock Point (pictured below). This was Muenter’s destination.
The assailant arrived, armed with two revolvers and a set of dynamite in his pocket, during an opportune breakfast meeting; the Morgans just happened to be entertaining the British ambassador Sir Cecil Spring-Rice.
Courtesy American Homes of Today, 1924
At the door, Muenter pulled a gun on Morgan’s butler who, quickly thinking, directed the intruder down an opposite hall then shouted in the other direction for the Morgans to hide. The family scattered throughout the house.
Eventually, for the safety of their children, the Morgans did appear at the second floor landing and lured Muenter to them.
“Now Mr. Morgan I have got you.” he said reportedly.
His wife Jane attempted to leap in front of the gunman but was harshly shoved out of the way. Muenter then shot Morgan twice and prepared to fire again from the second pistol.
Fortunately Morgan had actually fallen into the gunman, pinning him to the floor. This allowed time for Mrs. Morgan and the children’s elderly nurse to finally apprehend the shooter. The fact that Spring-Rice, the British ambassador, also personally assisted in the capture of the shooter seems especially notable.
His plan thwarted, Muenter reportedly exclaimed, “Kill me! Kill me now! I don’t want to live any more. I have been in a perfect hell for the last six months on account of the European war.”
Originally giving his names as Frank Holt, it was soon discovered that the assailant was in fact Muenter, the former Harvard professor. In 1906, he was accused of poisoning his pregnant wife. Most likely, he did indeed kill her, for he disappeared from campus, changing his name to avoid arrest and had apparently spent years cultivating this new identity.
Once in custody on Long Island, Muenter spilled the beans. “I wanted to attract the attentions of the country to the outrages being committed by those who are sending the munitions of war to the Allies.” [source]
Below is a fragment of a letter Muenter wrote to his father-in-law while in custody. “I learned to my sorrow that Mrs. M[organ] was hurt,” it begins.
On July 5th the explosion at New York Police Headquarterswent off, following another explosion at the home of Andrew Carnegie. Nobody was hurt in these blasts. These similar explosions were later declared unrelated to the Muenter incident itself, but it grimly reinforces the danger New Yorkers faced during wartime, even so far away from the battlefields.
Morgan quickly recovered from his injuries although the attack had a chilling effect among the residents of Long Island’s Gold Coast. Security was quickly beefed up at Matinecock Point and at the estates of other wealthy financiers associated with the Morgan bank loan.
Below: Muenter in custody
On the evening of July 6, Muenter leaped to his death from his cell at Nassau County jail in Mineola. While it was but a short drop, he had jumped head first, crushing his skull.
The death was so bizarre and sudden — it actually made a loud, deafening thud — that investigators initially believed that he had placed a blasting cap in his teeth to hasten his demise.
But the reign of terror wasn’t over. The time bomb that Muenter had placed aboard the SS Minnehaha did eventually explode while the ship was in the Atlantic. While it caught the ship ablaze, fortunately the ship was able to reroute to Halifax, and the fire was safely put out.
Back when the Rockettes were the Missouri Rockets.
The Rockettes are America’s best known dance troupe — and a staple of the holiday season — but you may not know the origin of this iconic New York City symbol. For one, they’re not even from the Big Apple!
Formerly the Missouri Rockets, the dancers and their famed choreographer Russell Markert were noticed by theater impresario Samuel Rothafel, who installed them first as his theater The Roxy, then at one of the largest theaters in the world — Radio City Music Hall.
The life of a Rockettes dancer was glamorous, but grueling; for many decades dancing not in isolated shows, but before the screenings of movies, several times a day, a different program each week.
There was a very, very specific look to the Rockettes, a look that changed — and that was forced to change by cultural shifts — over the decades.
This show is dedicated to the many thousands of women who have shuffled and kicked with the Rockettes over their many decades of entertainment, on the stage, the picket line or the Super Bowl halftime show.
This show is a re-edited and remastered version of our 2014 show with a new introduction — in honor of the upcoming 100th anniversary celebration of the dance troupe which would become the Rockettes.
Share your love of the city’s history with a Bowery Boys Walks gift certificate! Our digital gift cards let your loved ones choose their perfect tour and date.
The first New York home of the Rockettes (as the Roxyettes) was the Roxy Theatre, almost as large as Radio City Music Hall and located just nearby. (MCNY)
MCNY
Radio City Music Hall, which opened in 1932, was quickly transformed into the world’s largest movie house after a notorious opening night. It would be here that the Rockettes would perform a few times a day, seven days a week, for over fifty years. (NYPL)
NYPL
The Rockettes, 1935, in a ‘Cavalcade of Color,’ choreographed and directed by Leon Leonidoff. The constant high-kicking routines required great athleticism, precision and balance. (MCNY)
MCNY
The Rockettes in 1937, beauty in duplication. (Courtesy the Rockettes)
In 1939, the Rockettes gave salute to the Gay Nineties in these extravagant costumes. (Courtesy the Rockettes)
Faces of the Rockettes: A few of the dancers from the 1935 configuration.. These photos are by the Wurts Brothers, from the Museum of the City of New York Collection. You can see the complete group here. Unfortunately there are no names attached to the portraits but if any of these women look familiar, drop me their names in the comments section!
The Rockettes in the 1950s
Courtesy the Rockettes
In 1967, many Rockettes went on strike for a month to demand better wages to compensate for their vigorous schedule and unpaid rehearsal time. Needless to say, they got everybody’s attention.
Kheel Center
Pam Palmer and Kim Heil, two Rockettes from the late 1970s. (Photo by Jay Heiser)
