The Bowery Boys: New York City History

In Part Two of our mini-series, The Streets of the West Village , we turn to the people who gave the neighborhood its character and vitality — from Irish longshoremen on the docks to actors on the off-Broadway stage, from street gangs to speakeasy proprietors. From Eugene O’Neill to Bea Arthur , their stories help define this corner of Manhattan. Well into the early 19th century, the West Village...

Why are the streets of Manhattan's West Village so unusually charming and romantic? Why does it make such an excellent place for a night out in New York City? Why is the real estate so expensive? And when did it become a distinct place separate from Greenwich Village? We hope to get to the bottom of these questions in the first part of our epic new limited series on the history of the West Village...

Here’s a classic from the Bowery Boys Podcast archive, recorded in early 2013, just a few months after Hurricane Sandy .  Each winter, when forecasters warn of an approaching monster storm, they inevitably invoke one of the most infamous tempests ever to strike New York City: the now-legendary Great Blizzard of 1888 , a devastating collision of wind and snow. The battering snow-hurricane of 1888,...

For more historical deep dives just like these, check out HISTORY This Week wherever you get your podcasts! February 14, 1905. A stick of dynamite detonates under the Hudson River — and the ground above swallows a locomotive whole. It's the latest setback in an audacious plan to tunnel beneath the river and bring trains into Manhattan. The Pennsylvania Railroad is the largest corporation in the wo...

On the afternoon of December 22, 1984, shots rang out beneath the streets of New York, from the subway's 2 Seventh Avenue express train . A Greenwich Village man named Bernhard Goetz shot four black teenagers who he believed were about to assault him. The incident made international news, amplified by the city’s shameless tabloid newspapers because it so perfectly embodied all the cultural stereot...

On August 6, 1930, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater stepped into a taxi on West 45th Street and vanished without a trace. For 27 days, nobody reported him missing—not his wife waiting in Maine, not his Tammany Hall cronies, not the courts. When the story finally broke, it became the most famous missing persons case in New York history. Judge Crater was a rising star in the city’s legal wo...

“A Highway is Crumbling. New York Can’t Agree on How to Fix It.” That was a headline in the New York Times back in November about the highly problematic section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway located beneath the Brooklyn Promenade , the romantic walkway that offers sumptuous views of lower Manhattan. Everybody loves the Promenade. Nobody loves the BQE, especially in its present state. So how di...

On Lexington Avenue sits a special food store named Kalustyan's with a second floor stocked with international spices, syrups, and bitters. In 1881, this was the home of Chester A. Arthur , and it was here in the early morning hours of September 20, that he became the 21st President of the United States. He is one of only two men inaugurated as president in New York City -- the other was George Wa...

Bowery Boys History Live is a live-show series at City Winery hosted by Greg Young featuring a variety of historians and tour guides. The last installment this summer featured author Liz Block and tour guide Keith Taillon. As live performances, they're a bit more loose and irreverent than the regular podcast and sometimes feature references to images being projected on stage. As a special holiday...

New Yorkers have gotten around their cities by subways, buses, elevated trains, streetcars and ferries. And the ways in which they have paid for them have changed as well. And keeps changing! This month, the city is saying farewell to the MetroCard , the magnetic-stripe card that has gotten the town moving since the early 1990s. When the orange cards debuted, they replaced the strange physical tok...

This month marks the 190th anniversary of one of the most devastating disasters in New York City history — The Great Fire of 1835. This massive fire, among the worst in American history in terms of its economic impact, devastated the city during one freezing December evening, destroying hundreds of shops and warehouses and changing the face of Manhattan forever. It also underscored the city’s need...

She stands in New York Harbor as America’s most recognizable symbol—but the story of the Statue of Liberty begins thousands of miles away, in the charming Alsatian city of Colmar, France. In this special on-location episode, Tom ventures to the picturesque town where sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was born in 1834. Walking through Colmar’s cobblestone streets and half-timbered facades, Tom si...

Our second in a series of podcasts about New York City and American immigration history.  Between the late 1890s and early 1920s, over 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe fled their homes and made the long journey to America, escaping persecution and violence in their native countries. Many were fleeing state-sanctioned antisemitism in Russia. This mass immigration effort was, in large part, brough...

Ellis Island is one of America’s great landmarks, a place in New York Harbor that represents the millions of people who arrived in this country during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The north side of Ellis Island, now operated by the National Park Service as the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration (part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument), saw nearly 12 million immigrants...

The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has brought joy and sparkle to Midtown Manhattan since the early 1930s. The annual festivities may seem steady and timeless but this holiday icon actually has a surprisingly dramatic history. Millions tune in each year to watch the tree lighting in a music-filled ceremony on NBC, and tens of thousands more will crowd around the tree’s massive branches during t...

The aviation hero Amelia Earhart , who became one of the world's most famous women during the Great Depression, is one of those historic figures that people think they know quite well. But during her lifetime, much of her public image was the product of a New York book publisher. And even today, Earhart's legacy is reduced down to seemingly strange disappearance over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. Lau...

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II are two of the greatest entertainers in New York City history. They have delighted millions of people with their unique and influential take on the Broadway musical — serious, sincere, graceful and poignant. In the process they have helped in elevating New York’s Theater District into a critical destination for American culture. In this episode, we tell the...

For this year's annual Bowery Boys Ghost Stories podcast , Greg and Tom take a road trip to Long Island to explore the region's most famous haunted tales from legend and folklore, 'real' reported stories of otherworldly encounters that have shaped this historic area of New York state. When you think of Long Island and scary stories, your mind might immediately go to the Amityville Horror house or...

On October 26, 1825, the fate of New York City – and the entire United States – changed with the opening of the Erie Canal , a manmade waterway that connected the Hudson River to Lake Erie. It was the most significant engineering project of its time, linking the ocean to the nation’s interior -- a 363-mile route from Albany to Lake Erie . Without even knowing where the Erie Canal is on a map of Ne...

Dominicans comprise the largest immigration group in modern New York City, and Dominican culture has become embedded in the city's rich fabric of immigrant history. And in one place in particular -- Washington Heights. This historic neighborhood of Upper Manhattan is named for George Washington , who led the Continental Army in an early, pivotal battle here during the Revolutionary War. Today, it'...

Today's New York neighborhood called NoHo, wedged between Greenwich Village and the East Village, holds the stories of many people and places that then went on to become deeply associated with the great Gilded Age. The Astor family began their dynasty here in both investment and real estate as did the well-known Dutch-American merchant family the Schermerhorns. Caroline Schermerhorn, who became th...

As New York City enters the final stages of a rather strange mayoral election in 2025, let’s look back on a decidedly more unusual contest over 110 years ago, pitting Tammany Hall and their estranged ally ( Mayor William Jay Gaynor ) up against a baby-faced newcomer, the (second) youngest man ever to become the mayor of New York City. John Purroy Mitchel , the Bronx-born grandson of an Irish revol...

On January 3, 1924, 25-year-old George Gershwin was shooting pool in a Manhattan billiard hall when his brother Ira Gershwin read aloud a shocking newspaper article: "George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto." There was just one problem—George had never agreed to write any such piece. What happened next would change American music forever. In just five weeks, the son of Russian-Jewish immigra...

We love the podcast History Daily, a co-production from award winning podcasters Airship and Noiser, so we're presenting two episodes with a very similar theme -- pirates! -- July 6, 1699. The arrest of Captain William Kidd ends the reign of plunder of one of history's most infamous pirates and sparks rumors of buried treasure -- November 16th, 1720.  The trials of notorious pirates Anne Bonny, Ma...

On the evening of December 5, 1876, the glorious Brooklyn Theatre caught fire, trapping its audience in a nightmare of flame and smoke. The theater sat near Brooklyn City Hall (today's Brooklyn Borough Hall), and the blaze which destroyed it could be seen as far away as Prospect Park. The terrible truth emerged by the morning -- almost 300 people died in this disaster. To this day, it remains the...