The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Does your personal library overwhelm your home? Are there too many books in your life — but you’ll never get rid of them? Then you have a lot in common with Gilded Age mogul J.P. Morgan! Morgan was a defining figure of the late 19th century, engineering corporate mergers and crafting monopolies from the desk… Read More
Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, known to all as just Mamie Fish, was one of the more larger-than-life personalities of the Gilded Age, a hostess who thrived within the confines of high society. Who was this enigma of the Newport set? Carl Raymond is joined by historian and writer Keith Taillon, a returning listener favorite, as well as actor Ashlie… Read More
NEW from The Gilded Gentleman podcast — some overlooked history of the 19th century, the story of black life and social class in New York City. Dr. Carla Peterson, author of Black Gotham: Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City, joins Carl to share her research and perspective on the growth and… Read More
So we don’t know if you’ve heard, but New York City is an expensive place to live these days. So we thought it might be time to revisit the tale of the city’s most famous district of luxury — Fifth Avenue. For about a hundred years, this avenue was mostly residential— but residences of the most… Read More
Robert Allerton lived without a care thanks to his family’s Gilded Age fortune, built from the stockyards of Chicago’s meat processing district. As a young man, Allerton used his inherited wealth to maintain the family estate near Monticello, Illinois, cultivating a garden escape where he could be left to his own devices. And then, in… Read More
PODCAST At the heart of New York’s Gilded Age — the late 19th century era of unprecedented American wealth and excess — were families with the names Astor, Waldorf, Schermerhorn and Vanderbilt, alongside power players like A.T. Stewart, Jay Gould and William “Boss” Tweed. They would all make their homes — and in the case… Read More
It’s a different world: Illustrating the difficulty of a New York TV show set in the 1880s, above is a picture of the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. The Reservoir is off to the left, where the New York Public Library is today. More on this photo here. Ever since the announcement that… Read More