Categories
Gilded Age New York Neighborhoods

Chelsea and the Chocolate Factory (or rather, Hershey and his Sixth Avenue chewing gum plant)

Hershey’s employees cut and pack chewing gum at Sixth Avenue and 21st Street. For five glorious years in the early 1920s, Hershey’s Chocolate operated a candy plant at Sixth Avenue, in the neighborhood of Chelsea. While chocolate bars and chocolate coating for other candies were produced here, the Chelsea plant primarily focused on a new… Read More

Categories
It's Showtime

Podcast Extra! The Hippodrome and its famous ice ballet

Our show on the Broadway musical was quite epic, and we ended up cutting out some interesting stories to make the show a reasonable length.  However I’ll leak out a couple of these ‘deleted scenes’ over the next couple weeks. For instance, here’s a segment about another great Broadway theater. In fact, one of the… Read More

Categories
Neighborhoods Podcasts

The many lives of the Limelight, aka the facade formerly known as the Church of the Holy Communion

  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

A ragtime tribute to the New York Hippodrome

I hope you’ve had a chance to play around in the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox was recently launched on their website. It’s an incredible catalog of old music, from a variety of genres, and could easily play as a soundtrack to many of the posts on this page. One old tune I happened to… Read More