The Bowery Boys: New York City History

In today’s episode, Tom visits the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side to walk through the reconstructed two-room apartment of an African-American couple, Joseph and Rachel Moore, who lived in 1870 on Laurens Street in today’s Soho neighborhood. Both Joseph and Rachel moved to New York when they were about 20 years old, in the late 1840s and 1850s. They married, worked, raised a family – and th...

Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence is a perfect novel to read in the spring — maybe its all the flowers — so I finally picked it up to re-read, in part due to this excellent episode from the Gilded Gentleman which we are presenting to you this week.  The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, an enduring classic of Old New York that has been rediscovered by a new generation. What is...

Baseball, as American as apple pie, really is “the New York game.” While its precursors come from many places – from Jamestown to Prague – the rules of American baseball and the modern ways of enjoying it were born from the urban experience and, in particular, the 19th-century New York region.  The sport (in the form that we know it today) developed in the early 1800s, played in Manhattan’s many o...

The Chrysler Building remains one of America's most beautiful skyscrapers and a grand evocation of Jazz Age New York. But this architectural tribute to the automobile is also the greatest reminder of a furious construction surge that transformed the city in the 1920s. After World War I, New York became newly prosperous, one of the undisputed business capitals of the world. The tallest building was...

The Brooklyn waterfront was once decorated with a yellow Domino Sugar sign, affixed to an aging refinery along a row of deteriorating industrial structures facing the East River. The Domino Sugar Refinery , completed in 1883 (replacing an older refinery after a devastating fire), was more than a factory. During the Gilded Age and into the 20th century, this Brooklyn landmark was the center of Amer...

So much has happened in and around Madison Square Park -- the leafy retreat at the intersections of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street -- that telling its entire story requires an extra-sized episode, in honor of our 425th episode. Madison Square Park was the epicenter of New York culture from the years following the Civil War to the early 20th century. The park was really at the heart of Gild...

FX is debuting a new series created by Ryan Murphy — called Feud: Capote and the Swans -- regarding writer Truman Capote's relationship with several famed New York society women. And it's such a New York story that listeners have asked if we’re going to record a tie-in show to that series. Well, here it is !  Capote -- who was born 100 years ago this year -- and the "swans" are part of the pivotal...

The Kosciuszko Bridge is one of New York City's most essential pieces of infrastructure, the hyphen in the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that connects the two boroughs over Newtown Creek, the 3.5 mile creek which empties into the East River. The bridge is interestingly named for the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kościuszko who fought during the American Revolution, then attempted to bring a similar re...

On the morning of November 14th, 1943, Leonard Bernstein, the talented 25-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, got a phone call saying he would at last be leading the respected orchestral group — in six hours, that afternoon, with no time to rehearse. The sudden thrust into the spotlight transformed Bernstein into a national celebrity. For almost five decades, the wunderkind...

Manhattan's Grace Church sits at a unique bend on Broadway and East 10th Street, making it seem that the historic house of worship is rising out of the street itself. But Grace is also at another important intersection -- where religion and high society greeted one another during the Gilded Age . Grace is one of the important Episcopal churches in America, forming in 1809 in lower Manhattan litera...

This week we're highlighting an especially festive episode of the Gilded Gentleman Podcast, a show with double the holiday fun, tracing the history of Christmas and holiday celebrations over 19th-century New York City history. Licensed New York City tour guide and speaker  Jeff Dobbins  joins host Carl Raymond for a look at the city’s holiday traditions dating back to the early Dutch days of New A...

For decades New Yorkers celebrated Evacuation Day every November 25, a holiday marking the 1783 departure of British forces from the city they had occupied for several years during the Revolutionary War. The events of that departure -- that evacuation -- inspired annual celebrations of patriotism, unity, and a bit of rowdiness. Evacuation Day was honored well until the late 19th century. But then,...

Greta Garbo in New York! A story of freedom, glamour, and melancholy, set at the intersection of classic Hollywood and mid-century New York City. The biography of a legendary star who became the city's most famous 'celebrity sighting' for many decades while out on her regular, meandering walks. Garbo had once been Hollywood's biggest star, a screen goddess who survived the transition from silent p...

Here's the first episode of HBO's The Official Gilded Age Podcast , hosted by Tom Meyers of the Bowery Boys Podcast and Alicia Malone of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the official companion podcast for the HBO series The Gilded Age , streaming on Max. Each week Tom and Alicia will discuss what happened on screen and the real people, places and events featured on the show.  Easter Sunday, 1886, and...

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 extravagant kind. At the heart of New York’s Gilded Age — the late 19th-century era of unprecedented...

A brand new batch of haunted houses and spooky stories, all from the gaslight era of New York City, the illuminating glow of the 19th century revealing the spirits of another world. Greg and Tom again dive into another batch of terrifying ghost stories, using actual newspaper reports and popular urban legends to reveal a different side to the city's history. If you just like a good scare, you'll e...

Theodore Roosevelt was both a New Yorker and an outdoorsman, a politician and a naturalist, a conservationist and a hunter. His connection with the natural world began at birth in his Manhattan brownstone home and ended with his death in Sagamore Hill. He killed thousands of animals over his lifetime as a hunter-naturalist, most notably one of the last roaming bison (or American buffalo) in the Da...

The rebirth of the East Village in the late 1970s and the flowering of a new and original New York subculture -- what Edmund White called "the Downtown Scene" -- arose from the shadow of urban devastation and was anchored by a community that reclaimed its own deteriorating neighborhood. In the last episode ( Creating the East Village 1955-1975 ) this northern corner of New York's Lower East Side b...

Before 1955 nobody used the phrase " East Village " to describe the historic northern portion of the Lower East Side , the New York tenement district with a rich German and Eastern European heritage. But when the Third Avenue El was torn down that year, those who were attracted to the culture of Greenwich Village -- with its coffeehouses, poets and jazz music -- began flocking to the east side, at...

This episode on the history of Tompkins Square Park ties right into an all-new two-part episode coming in September, the first part coming at you next week.  Tompkins Square Park is the heart and soul of the East Village.  And it's also one of New York City's oldest parks! However this was not a park designed for the service of the upper classes in the mid-19th century. It provided open air and re...

Stroll the romantic, rambling paths of historic Central Park in this week's episode, turning back the clock to the 1860s and 70s, a time of children ice skating on The Lake , carriage rides through the Mall , and bewildering excursions through The Ramble. You’re all invited to walk along with Greg through the oldest portion of Central Park. Not only to marvel at the beautiful trees, ancient rocks,...

The tale of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is one of New York's true epic adventures, mirroring the course of American history via the ships manufactured here and the people employed to make them. The Navy Yard's origins within Wallabout Bay tie it to the birth of the United States itself, the spot where thousands of men and women were kept in prison ships during the Revolutionary War.  Within this bay wh...

Instead of looking back to the history of New York City in this episode, we are looking forward to the future -- to the new generation of creators who are celebrating New York and telling its story through mediums that are not podcasts or books. Today we are celebrating the historians, journalists and photographers who bring New York City to life on social media platforms like Instagram. There are...

It’s one of the great narratives of American urban history — the northward trek of New York society up the island of Manhattan during the 19th century.  Bringing you this special story today is writer, tour guide and historian Keith Taillon from KeithYorkCity , joining Carl Raymond from the Gilded Gentleman podcast to analyze this unique social migration. They present a fascinating virtual tour th...

This month we are marking the 160th anniversary of one of the most dramatic moments in New York City history – the Civil War Draft Riots which stormed through the city from July 13 to July 16, 1863. Thousands of people took to the streets of Manhattan in violent protest, fueled initially by anger over conscription to the Union Army which sent New Yorkers to the front lines of the Civil War. (Or, m...