The Bowery Boys: New York City History
A genuine survivor: The building to the right was once the Strangers Hospital in the 1870s. This picture, by Berenice Abbott, was taken many decades later, in 1937. And the building is still around today! (Picture NYPL) New York used to lump the sick, the poor and the homeless into one mass of needy unwanted.… Read More
Liberace is the embodiment of a certain California flamboyance, but New Yorkers were as susceptible to his allure as anyone. In fact, for this brightly-painted musical showman, Radio City Music Hall was a second home. He continued to smash box office records here year after year as late as the 1980s, well past his prime… Read More
A barber shop at the Hotel de Gink on the Bowery, circa 1910-15 [LOC] The fight for worker’s rights swept through a variety of occupations over a century ago as New York City laborers rebelled against unfair corporate practices and unsafe working conditions. Garment workers marched the avenues in protest following the tragic Triangle Factory… Read More
Green-Wood Cemetery celebrates its 175th year as Brooklyn’s oldest greenspace, populated with deceased politicians, writers and actors. It’s the final resting place for some of New York’s most famous and notorious characters — Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, DeWitt Clinton and Boss Tweed among them. The Museum of the City of New York debuts its… Read More
Ah, take in the horrid reality of the Corona marshes with their ashes, manure and garbage! (Courtesy CUNY) Outside of probably Hell, there is no literary landscape as forlorn and soul-crushing as the ash dumps of Corona, Queens. “This is the valley of ashes,” writes Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, “a fantastic farm where ashes… Read More
BOWERY BOYS BOOK OF THE MONTH Each month I’ll pick a book — either brand new or old, fiction or non-fiction — that offers an intriguing take on New York City history, something that uses history in a way that’s uniquely unconventional or exposes a previously unseen corner of our city’s complicated past. Then over the… Read More
BOWERY BOYS BOOK OF THE MONTH The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald I re-read The Great Gatsby a few weeks ago on purpose, not because I had a school assignment. Unlike my first experience with Gatsby at age 14, I actually read it, without the signposts of a Cliff’s Notes to tell me what… Read More
Above: The Church of the Holy Communion — and once the quite infamous nightclub Limelight — as the less lauded follow-up, called Avalon. Within a couple years, the club would be transformed again — into a high-end retail experience. Below: Michael Alig, one of its more notorious nightly residents. (source)PODCAST If you had told… Read More
WARNING The article contains a couple light spoilers about last night’s ‘Mad Men’ on AMC. If you’re a fan of the show, come back once you’re watched the episode. But these posts are about a specific element of New York history from the 1960s and can be read even by those who don’t watch the… Read More
The dramatic Woolworth mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery With completion of the Woolworth Building in 1913, the leader of the five-and-dime retail craze Frank W. Woolworth had his grand declaration of success in New York, widely feted and proclaimed. His hundreds of stores would go on to define the shopping experience around the world over the… Read More
From this angle, you can see two of Cass Gilbert’s creation, the West Street Building and the Woolworth under construction. View of his Broadway-Chambers Building is obscured by the building to the left. (LOC)It’s Woolworth Building week here in New York City! The lights of Frank Woolworth‘s treasured office tower were turned on in an… Read More
The exaltation of fat, plucky babies via beauty contests stems from a rather grim origin — American infant mortality rates of the 19th century. During the 1880s, as swelling immigrants and overcrowding in New York created harbors for disease and malnourishment, over one in five infants would die in America, with higher occurrence among poor… Read More
A press photo from Hair, the hottest show in town in early 1968, photographer Kenn DuncanWARNING The article contains a couple light spoilers about last night’s ‘Mad Men’ on AMC. If you’re a fan of the show, come back once you’re watched the episode. But these posts are about a specific element of New York… Read More
So how do you follow two journalists around the world, in opposite directions and from the vantage of almost 125 years in the future? I asked Matthew Goodman, the author of “Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World,” this month’s Bowery Boys Book of the Month, about the two competitors… Read More
Greetings from Columbo, Ceylon, one of the many glamorous destinations you’ll visit in Matthew Goodman’s new book.BOWERY BOYS BOOK OF THE MONTH Each month I’ll pick a book — either brand new or old, fiction or non-fiction — that offers an intriguing take on New York City history, something that uses history in a way… Read More