The Bowery Boys: New York City History

The Pledge of Allegiance feels like an American tradition that traces itself back to the Founding Fathers, but, in fact, the original version is only written in 1892.  (And the version you may be familiar with from elementary school is less than 70 years old.) This is the story of the invention of the Pledge, a set of words that have come to embody the core values of American citizenship. And yet...

Take a look at a historic photograph of New York from the 1930s and you'll see automats, newsies, elevated trains and men in fedoras. What you won't see -- dozens and dozens of automobiles on the curb. In a city with skyrocketing real estate values, why are most city streets still devoted to free car storage? It's a situation we're all so used to that we don't think twice about it. Whatever happen...

From 1941 and 1976, dozens of young women and high school girls were bestowed the honor of Miss Subways with her smiling photograph hanging within the cars of the New York subway system. This was not a beauty pageant, but rather an advertising campaign which promoted the subway and drew the eyes of commuters to the train car's many advertisements for cod liver oil, cigarettes and frozen foods. The...

The Brooklyn Bridge, which was officially opened to New Yorkers 140 years ago this year, is not only a symbol of the American Gilded Age, it’s a monument to the genius, perseverance and oversight of one family. This episode is arranged as a series of three mini biographies of three family members -- John Roebling , his son Washington Roebling and Washington's wife Emily Warren Roebling. Through th...

The Broadway musical is one of New York City's greatest inventions, over 160 years in the making! It's one of the truly American art forms, fueling one of the city's most vibrant entertainment businesses and defining its most popular tourist attraction -- Times Square . But why Broadway , exactly? Why not the Bowery or Fifth Avenue? And how did our fair city go from simple vaudeville and minstrel...

The history of pizza in the United States begins in Manhattan in the late 19th century, on the streets of Little Italy (and Nolita), within immigrant-run bakeries that transformed a traditional southern Italian food into something remarkable. But new research discovered in recent years has changed New York food history, revealing an origin tale slightly older than what the old guide books may have...

In the early morning hours of April 15, 1912. the White Star ocean liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg en route to New York City and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Survivors were rescued by the Cunard liner Carpathia and brought to their berth at Pier 54 on the rainy evening of April 18. On that very spot today, a fanciful waterfront development juts out into the Hudson River, a place called Little I...

Enter the magical world of New York by gaslight , the city illuminated by the soft, revolutionary glow of lamps powered by gas, an innovative utility which transformed urban life in the 19th century.   Before the introduction of gaslight in the 1820s, New York was a much darker and quieter place after sunset, its streets lit only by dull, foul-smelling whale-oil lamps. Gaslight was first used in L...

We just reedited and reworked our 2017 show on Irish immigration in time for St. Patrick’s Day and a celebration of all things Irish! So much has changed in our world since 2017 and this history feels more relevant and impactful than ever before.  You don’t have a New York City without the Irish. In fact, you don’t have a United States of America as we know it today. This diverse and misunderstood...

Wall Street , today a canyon of tall buildings in New York's historic Financial District, is not only one of the most famous streets in the United States, it's also a stand-in for the entire American financial system. One of the first facts you learn as a student of New York City history is that Wall Street is named for an actual wall that once stretched along this very spot during the days of the...

Mona Lisa , Leonardo da Vinci's stoic portrait and one of the most valuable paintings on earth, came to America during the winter of 1963, a single-picture loan that was both a special favor to Jackie Kennedy and a symbolic tool during tense conversations between the United States and France about nuclear arms. Its first stop was the National Gallery in Washington DC, where over a half million peo...

Dorothy Catherine Draper is a truly forgotten figure in American history. She was the first woman to ever sit for a photograph — a daguerrotype, in the year 1840, upon the rooftop of the school which would become New York University. Catherine was the older sister of professor John William Draper , later the founder of the university’s school of medicine. The Drapers worked alongside Samuel Morse...

Within the New York City of Edward Hopper 's imagination, the skyscrapers have vanished, the sidewalks are mysteriously wide and all the diners and Chop Suey restaurants are sparsely populated with well-dressed lonely people. In this art-filled episode of the Bowery Boys, Tom and Greg look at Hopper's life, influence and specific fascination with the city, inspired by the recent show Edward Hopper...

In the 19th century, the Fulton Fish Market in downtown Manhattan was to seafood what the Chicago stock yards were to the meat industry, the primary place where Americans got fish for their dinner tables. Over the decades it went from a retail market to a wholesale business, distributing fish across the country – although as you’ll hear, that was a bit tricky in the days before modern refrigeratio...

New York City has a new landmark, a little bar in the West Village named Julius' , officially recognized by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on December 6th, 2022.  Now it may not look like much from the outside, but it's here that one moment of protest (the Sip-In of 1966 ) set the stage for a political revolution, “a signature event in the battle for LGBTQ+ people to gather, s...

Flushing-Meadows Corona Park in the borough of Queens is the home of the New York Mets , the U.S. Open , the Queens Zoo , the New York Hall of Science and many other recreational delights. But it will always be forever known as the launching pad for the future as represented in two extraordinary 20th century world's fairs. There is so much nostalgia today for the 1939-1940 World's Fair and its str...

Greg and Tom -- with some help from producer Kieran Gannon -- reflect nostalgically upon old New York City restaurants from the 1990s ( Mars 2112 , anyone?), wonder what it was like to eat at a chop suey restaurant, praise the strange wonders of Chez Josephine and Congee Village and reveal their favorite places to get pizza in New York City.  --- Here’s the first episode of Side Streets, a convers...

Crosswords, jigsaws, mazes, rebuses, Rubik's cubes, Myst , Words With Friends -- and now Wordle? Not only have people loved puzzles for centuries, they've actually gone wild for them. Every few years, a new tantalizing puzzle comes along to captivate the nation. But each of these little games has an extraordinary history and for this special show, we have the "the puzzler" himself to help us unrav...

A Special Presentation: We know some of you like to celebrate the holiday spirit with actual alcoholic spirits so we thought you'd enjoy this episode of The Gilded Gentleman , the Bowery Boys spin-off podcast hosted by Carl Raymond, which lays out everything you've wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about absinthe -- aka the green fairy. Absinthe was one of the most popular and most mysteriou...

In 1890 the Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis turned his eye-opening reporting and lecture series into a ground-breaking book called How The Other Half Lives , a best seller which awoke Americans to the plight of the poor and laid the groundwork for the Progressive Era. Riis exposed more than a humanitarian crisis. He laid bare the city's complacent Gilded Age divide in revolutionary ways, mos...

To wrap up our 15th anniversary celebration -- and to set up our big 400th episode -- we take a fond look at one corner of New York City which taught us to love local history. Perhaps you know this area for Seward Park , the first municipal playground in the United States, or for Straus Square , named for Nathan Straus , philanthropist and co-owner (with his brother Isidor) of Macy's Department St...

In late December 1954 Marilyn Monroe came to New York City wearing a disguise. Monroe -- the biggest movie star in the world when she arrived -- came to the East Coast to reinvent herself and her career. The year 1955 would be a turning point in her life and it all played out on the streets of the city. She intended to spend most of her life here. It was a year of discovery -- exploring the city,...

On January 1, 2023 , New York City will celebrate a special moment, the 125th anniversary of the formation of Greater New York and the creation of the five boroughs — The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. In honor of this special moment in New York City history, we are celebrating a bit early, reissuing our episode (originally #150) on the Consolidation and the formation of the...

Beware! The ghosts and goblins of the Hudson River Valley have been awakened. In this year's annual celebration of New York urban legends and folktales, Tom and Greg journey up the Hudson River to explore the region's spookiest stories. Tales of mystery and the supernatural have possessed the villages and towns of the Hudson River Valley since ancient times, when native tribes whispered of strange...

In honor of an exciting new theater season, we're revisiting our 2011 episode on the history of Sardi's restaurant, updated to cover the trials and triumphs of the past decade. The famous faces on the walls of Sardi's Restaurant represent the entertainment elite of the 20th Century, and all of them made this place on West 44th Street their unofficial home. Known for its caricatures and its Broadwa...