The Painter Who Brought The World To New York
Perched over the Hudson River near the city of Hudson sits Olana State Historic Site, once the wondrous home of painter Frederic Church. This Gilded Age mansion is unlike any in the valley, mystical and…
Bowery Boys Podcast Collection
Writers and Artists
Latest Episode
The Knicks and the Knickerbockers: The Most New York City Story Ever
The New York Knicks are the ultimate New York City sporting franchise. Why would we make such a big claim? It’s all in the name. The Knicks were founded in 1946 as one of the inaugural teams from the…
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24 episodes
#484
The Phrenology Craze: New York’s Head-Scratching 19th Century Obsession
In our modern world, people are turning to all sorts of unusual beliefs and fringe disciplines just outside the bounds of medical science and psychology, all in search of a better understanding of the human…
#481
How The West Village Became A Neighborhood: A Tale of Speakeasies and Subways
In Part Two of our mini-series, The Streets of the West Village, we turn to the people who gave the neighborhood its character and vitality. From Irish longshoremen on the docks to actors on the…
#298
The History of Brooklyn Heights and the Promenade — and that infamous section of the BQE
“A Highway is Crumbling. New York Can’t Agree on How to Fix It.” That was a headline in the New York Times back in November about the highly problematic section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway located…
#466
Pete’s Tavern and McSorley’s Old Ale House: The Oldest Bars in New York City
The ultimate bar crawl of Old New York continues through a survey of classic bars and taverns that trace their origins from the 1850s through the 1880s. And this time we’re recording within two of…
#451
The New Yorker Magazine: Talk of the Town for 100 Years
The New Yorker turns one century old — and hasn’t aged a day! The witty, cosmopolitan magazine published its first issue on February 21, 1925. And even though present-day issues are often quite contemporary in…
#450
Harlem in the Jazz Age: A Renaissance in New York, a Revolution on Swing Street
For the Bowery Boys episode number 450, we’re looking at the glamour and mystery of Harlem during the 1920s, a decade when the predominantly black neighborhood, in the words of Langston Hughes, “was in vogue.”…
The World of Tiffany Glass: Lighting the Gilded Age
Lets start the new year with something beautiful shall we? The latest in the Bowery Boys podcast feed — join Carl Raymond, host of The Gilded Gentleman podcast, and Lindsy Parrott of the Neustadt Collection…
Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball: The Absurd Story of a Marvelous Party
PODCAST Your ticket to Truman Capote’s celebrity-filled party at the Plaza. This month FX is debuting a new series created by Ryan Murphy — called Feud: Capote and the Swans — regarding writer Truman Capote‘s relationship with…
#417
Walking the East Village: Culture Among The Ruins 1976-1996
PODCAST The rebirth of the East Village in the late 1970s and the flowering of a new and original New York subculture — what Edmund White called “the Downtown Scene” — arose from the shadow…
#382
Architect of the Gilded Age: The Triumphant Tale of Richard Morris Hunt
Richard Morris Hunt was one of the most important architects in American history. His talent and vision brought respect to his profession in the mid 19th century and helped to craft the seductive style of…
#404
Nighthawks and Automats: The New York City of Edward Hopper
Within the New York City of Edward Hopper‘s imagination, the skyscrapers have vanished, the sidewalks are mysteriously wide and all the diners and Chop Suey restaurants are sparsely populated with well-dressed lonely people. In this…
#401
The World Before Wordle: A Puzzling Conversation with A.J. Jacobs
Crosswords, jigsaws, mazes, rebuses, Rubik’s cubes, Myst, Words With Friends — and now Wordle? Not only have people loved puzzles for centuries, they’ve actually gone wild for them. Every few years, a new puzzle comes…
#400
The story of Jacob Riis and ‘The Other Half’ of Gilded Age New York
In 1890 the Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis turned his eye-opening reporting and lecture series into a ground-breaking book called How The Other Half Lives, a best seller which awoke Americans to the plight of the…
#388
The Hudson River School: The Story of an American Art Revolution
PODCAST: Two landmarks to American art history sit on either side of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge over the Hudson River — the homes of visionary artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. Cole and…
#380
Dorothy Parker’s Last Party: A strange afterlife for the Jazz Age writer
PODCAST Dorothy Parker was not only the wittiest writer of the Jazz Age, she was also obsessively morbid. Her talents rose at a very receptive moment for such a sharp, dour outlook, after the first…
#370
Tragic Muse: The Life of Audrey Munson
PODCAST By the time Audrey Munson turned 25 years old, she had became a muse for some of the most famous artists in America, the busiest artist’s model of her day. She was such a fixture of…
#357
Edith Wharton’s New York: An Insider’s View of the Gilded Age
PODCAST New York’s upper class families of the late 19th century lived lives of old-money pursuits and rigid, self-maintained social restrictions — from the opera boxes to the carriages, from the well-appointed parlors to the…
#338
A New Deal for the Arts: How the WPA funded an American creative revolution
PART TWO of a two-part podcast series A NEW DEAL FOR NEW YORK. In this episode, we look at how one aspect of FDR’s New Deal — the WPA’s Federal Project Number One — was…
#319
The Tale of Charging Bull and Fearless Girl
EPISODE 319 In simpler times, thousands of tourists would flock to the northern tip of Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan to take a picture with a rather unconventional New Yorker — the bronze sculpture Charging…
Greenwich Village in the 1960s: A nostalgic stroll through an era of preservation and protest
This is the story of Greenwich Village as a character — an eccentric character maybe, but one that changed American life — and how the folky, activist spirit it fostered in arts, culture and the…
Walt Whitman at 200: Celebrating his life and legacy in the cities of New York and Brooklyn
A very special episode of the Bowery Boys podcast, recorded live at the Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn, celebrating the legacy of Walt Whitman, a writer with deep ties to New York and its 19th century sister-city Brooklyn. On…
#241
Edgar Allan Poe in New York: Places where the master of gloom and horror made his mark
PODCAST Edgar Allan Poe was a wanderer — looking for work, for love, for meaning. That’s why so many American cities can lay claim to a small aspect of his legacy. Baltimore, Boston, Richmond and…
#223
Presenting the Algonquin Round Table: The wits of New York’s Jazz Age
PODCAST The enduring legacy of the Algonquin Round Table and the brilliant (and sometimes forgotten) people who made it famous. One June afternoon in the spring of 1919, a group of writers and theatrical folk…
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