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Neighborhoods Planes Trains and Automobiles Podcasts

Up and Down Park Avenue: New York City History with a Penthouse View

The story of a filthy and dangerous train ditch that became one of the swankiest addresses in the world — Park Avenue.  For over 100 years, a Park Avenue address meant wealth, glamour and the high life. The Fred Astaire version of the Irving Berlin classic “Puttin’ on the Ritz” revised the lyrics to pay… Read More

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Bowery Boys

Odds and Ends: Ghost Stories, Apartment Tales

Here’s a few recent press and blog appearances that we’ve done in the past couple weeks:   It’s almost time for our annual ghost story podcast in a couple weeks! To get you in the mood, I made an appearance on Fox 5 News on Tuesday, speaking to Dan Bowens about ghosts at the Chelsea Hotel. You’ll… Read More

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Brooklyn History Podcasts

Park Slope and the Story of Brownstone Brooklyn

PODCAST Park Slope — or simply the park slope, as they used to say — is best known for its spectacular Victorian-era mansions and brownstones, one of the most romantic neighborhoods in all of Brooklyn. It’s also a leading example of the gentrifying forces that are currently changing the make-up of the borough of Brooklyn to… Read More

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Health and Living

The first appearance of the shower or “rain bath” in New York

With major improvements in plumbing and home design, private ‘rain-baths’ or showers began to be installed in the wealthier American homes. This is a New York Times advertisement from November 11, 1914 for a Kenney Needle Shower which inundated the body with water from multiple showerheads.   The modern form of shower was once referred… Read More

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Podcasts

The Stuyvesant, New York’s first apartment building: Imported luxury style for a new middle class

The creation of ‘acceptable’ communal living: The Stuyvesant Flats, at 142 East 18th Street, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, photographed by Berenice Abbott. PODCAST Well, we’re movin’ on up….to the first New York apartment building ever constructed. New Yorkers of the emerging middle classes needed a place to live situated between the townhouse and the… Read More

If you lived here, you’d be home by now….

The Navarro Flats, once at Seventh Avenue and 59th Street, was an early pioneer of luxury apartment living along Central Park South. Although this stunner, by Spanish architect José Francisco de Navarro, is long gone, it set the pace for acceptable living on the park’s outskirts. Tomorrow, I’ll present another vanished classic of the apartment… Read More