The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Anchors Aweigh: A museum finally opens in one of Brooklyn’s most restricted outposts The Brooklyn Navy Yard finally got the museum it deserves this past weekend with the opening of BLDG 92: Brooklyn Navy Yard Center, a badly needed introduction to this long-restricted yet important component of New York history. The environmentally-friendly new center is affixed… Read More
Work hard, play hard: The FBI director in his early days There are at least three scenes in the new Clint Eastwood-directed J. Edgar Hoover biopic ‘J. Edgar’ set in New York, one of which might surprise you. The first features Hoover on Ellis Island, but he’s hardly there to greet new arrivals. The FBI… Read More
Above: a typical scene during the Garbage Strike of 1911 New York street cleaners and garbage workers (sometimes referred to as ‘ashcart men’) went on strike on November 8, 1911, over 2,000 men walking off their jobs in protest over staffing and work conditions. More importantly, that April, the city relegated garbage pickup to nighttime… Read More
Above: The unusual weather this weekend left my pumpkin with an unfortunate new hairstyle. We hope you all have a fun and safe Halloween this year! In this year’s ghost-story podcast, I talked about a haunted church in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Apparently, other spirits find the neighborhood desirable. I’m reprinting an article from three years ago… Read More
A still from ‘The Wrong Man’, a crime drama shot in New York in 1956. (Courtesy Empire Magainze.) Alfred Hitchcock‘s innovative anthology series ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ debuted on CBS in the fall on 1955. As a filmed dramatic series (vs. the live camera TV hits like ‘I Love Lucy’ and ‘The Honeymooners’), the weekly mystery… Read More
We had a terrific time recording this year’s ghost-story show — Haunted Histories of New York. Here’s some extra details about our four subjects that were left out of this week’s show. (By the way, if you wouldn’t mind, please vote for us in this year’s 2011 Podcast Awards. We’re in the Best Travel Podcast… Read More
Most Holy Trinity in Bushwick, Brooklyn, shrouded in shadow, a place where the ghosts of former clergy are alleged to lurk the halls and other spirits may torment the nearby school. PODCAST What mischievous phantoms and malevolent spirits haunt the streets of New York City today? In our fifth annual podcast of local ghost stories,… Read More
Kidd’s swanky new home on Pearl Street, which he shared with his high society wife and two lovely daughters. It was near the eastern gate to New York’s northern wall, later to become Wall Street. In later years, landfill will would extend east, removing old Pearl Street residences from the waterfront. Tomorrow’s podcast will feature a… Read More
Next week begins ‘ghost stories’ week on the blog, but I need to make one more trip to Chinatown, the topic of the last podcast. As I just wrote about Columbus Day last week, I would be remiss if I skipped this very coincidental date in history. It was exactly one hundred years ago yesterday… Read More
Christopher Columbus is among the most honored figures in New York statuary, appearing abundantly throughout the five boroughs — standing prominently, nestled in parks and squares, peering from building features. I’ve located a seemingly complete list of New York Columbus monuments, strangely enough, on a German website, inclusive even of Chris’s appearance of 8th Avenue subway… Read More
The Dakota Apartment circa the 1890s: If you arranged everything just right, could you go back to it? The writer Jack Finney, who was born a hundred years ago this week, on October 2, 1911, turned the Dakota Apartments into a time machine in his 1970 novel ‘Time And Again’. He inspired a legion of New… Read More
I enjoyed the first part of the Ken Burns and Lynn Novak documentary series ‘Prohibition’ which debuted last night. But let’s be honest, the second part — introducing the Roaring 20s and the godfathers of organized crime — should be far more provocative. After all, morally righteous reformers did what they believed was right for… Read More
Reading about Chinatown in classic books like ‘Gangs of New York’, one gets a sense that certain mysteries and legends about the neighborhood were already firmly in place. And nothing of these gauzy preconceptions arose to the public consciousness more than the problem of Chinatown’s opium dens. In fact, no other feature of American Chinatowns… Read More
Casual posing at the opening of Doyers Street, circa 1900. (LOC) I’m so relieved that we finally got to cover a proper New York neighborhood on the podcast. Since reviewing the historic shifts and events of a neighborhood are better covered topically, we hope there wasn’t too much confusion regarding the chronology. Manhattan’s Chinatown was… Read More
PODCAST Manhattan’s Chinatown is unique among New York neighborhoods as its origins and its provocative history can still be traced in many of the buildings and streets still in existence. Two hundred years ago, the sight of a Chinese person would have astonished New Yorkers, and the first to arrive in the city were… Read More