The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Above: the Algonquin Hotel, home to those bawdy rakes of the Round Table during the 1920s. You may find yourself meeting one of them even today. A special illustrated version of our ghost-story podcast, Spooky Stories of New York (Episode #65). is now available on our NYC History Archive feed. Just hit play and images […]
Kids these days! With their fancy selection of Halloween costumes, with ornate detailing and comfort, with their diversity and realism. For thrifty parents in the 1970s and 80s, the decision to costume their children usually led to the rows of Ben Cooper Halloween smocks and plastic body garb, topped with a mask (held to the […]
Here’s a chilling thought for the Halloween season: if you’re visiting one of New York’s many amazing parks and squares, most likely you’re standing on land that was formerly used as a cemetery or potter’s field. And in some cases they even left the bodies behind! If you’re fluent in your New York history, you […]
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 […]
The Algonquin Hotel: the hippest haunt for the dead writer set By popular demand, we return to the creepier tales of New York City history, ghost tales and stories of murder and mayhem, all of them at some point involving great American icons — Alexander Hamilton, P.T. Barnum, Dorothy Parker and Mark Twain. Listen to […]
From the podcast: David Belasco and some his feminine daliances. Belasco is still believed to haunt his theater on 44th St. A city this size certainly has its share of ghosts, and the Bowery Boys spend the spooky season with some of the most famous — a suicide showgirl, a grumpy landowner, a womanizing theater […]