The Bowery Boys: New York City History

What was Times Square  before the electric billboards, before the Broadway theaters and theme restaurants, before the thousands and thousands of tourists? What was Times Square before it was Times Square? Today it’s virtually impossible to find traces of the area’s 18th and 19th century past. But in this episode, Tom and Greg will peel away the glamour and chaos — evict the Elmos and the pedicabs...

In 1886, during a miles-long parade celebrating the dedication of the Statue of Liberty , office workers in lower Manhattan began heaving ticker tape out the windows, creating a magical, blizzard-like landscape. That tradition stuck. Today that particular corridor of Broadway -- connecting Battery Park  to City Hall  -- is known as the " Canyon of Heroes " thanks to the popularity of the ticker-ta...

One-two-three-four! The Ramones , a four-man rock band from Forest Hills, Queens, played the Bowery music club CBGB for the very first time on August 16, 1974. Not only would Joey, Johnny, Tommy and Dee Dee reinvigorate downtown New York nightlife here -- creating a unique and energetic form of punk -- but they would join with a small group of musicians at CBGB to revolutionize American music in t...

Carl Raymond of The Gilded Gentleman podcast and his guest Keith Taillon invite you into one of the most historically exclusive spaces in New York City -- the romantic and peaceful escape known as Gramercy Park.  This small two-acre square, constructed in the 1830s, has been called “America’s Bloomsbury”. Taking the reference from London’s famous neighborhood once home to many great writers and ar...

Follow along with Greg and Tom in this stand-alone travelogue episode as they visit several historic cities and towns in the Netherlands -- Utrecht, De Bilt, Breukelen and Haarlem -- wandering through cafe-filled streets and old cobblestone alleyways, the air ringing with church bells and street music. But of course, their mission remains the same as the past three episodes. For there are traces o...

The name Stuyvesant can be found everywhere in New York City -- in the names of neighborhoods, apartments, parks and high schools. Peter Stuyvesant , the last director-general of New Amsterdam, is a hero to some, a villain to others -- and probably a caricature to all.  What do we really know about Peter Stuyvesant? In their last days in Amsterdam (before heading to other parts of the Netherlands)...

Our adventure in the Netherlands  continues with a quest to find the Walloons , the French-speaking religious refugees who became the first settlers of New Netherland in 1624. Their descendants would last well beyond the existence of New Amsterdam and were among the first people to become New Yorkers. But you can't tell the Walloon story without that other group of American religious settlers -- t...

The epic journey begins! The Bowery Boys Podcast heads to old Amsterdam , the capital of the Netherlands, to find traces of New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlement which became New York. We  begin our journey at Amsterdam's Centraal Station and spend the day wandering the streets and canals, peeling back the centuries in search of New York's roots. Our tour guide for this adventure is Jaap Jacobs , Ho...

The Bowery Boys Podcast is going to Amsterdam and other parts of the Netherlands for a very special mini-series, marking the 400th anniversary of the Dutch first settling in North America in the region that today we call New York City. But before they go, they're kicking off their international voyage with a special conversation -- with the man who inspired the journey. Chances are good that if yo...

Announcing an epic new Bowery Boys mini series -- The Bowery Boys Adventures in the Netherlands . Exploring the connections between New York City and that fascinating European country. Simply put, you don't get New York City as it is today without the Dutch who first settled here 400 years ago. The names of Staten Island, Broadway , Bushwick, Greenwich Village  and the Bronx  actually come from th...

Consider the following show an acknowledgment – of people. For the foundations of 400 years of New York City history were built upon the homeland of the Lenni-Lenape, the tribal stewards of a vast natural area stretching from eastern Pennsylvania to western Long Island.  The Lenape were among the first in northeast North America to be displaced by white colonists -- the Dutch and the English. By t...

The New York City subway system turns 120 years old later this year so we thought we'd honor the world's longest subway system with a supersized overview history -- from the first renegade ride in 1904 to the belated (but sorely welcomed) opening of one portion of the Second Avenue Subway  in 2017. New Yorkers like Alfred Ely Beach  had envisioned a subway system for the city as early as the 1870s...

The story of a filthy and dangerous train ditch that became one of the swankiest addresses in the world -- Park Avenue.  For over 100 years, a Park Avenue address meant wealth, glamour and the high life. The Fred Astaire version of the Irving Berlin classic "Puttin' on the Ritz" revised the lyrics to pay tribute to Park Avenue: "High hats and Arrow collars/White spats and lots of dollars/Spending...

Few areas of the United States have as endured as long as Flushing, Queens , a neighborhood with almost over 375 years of history and an evolving cultural landscape that includes Quakers, trees, Hollywood films, world fairs, and new Asian immigration. In this special on-location episode of the Bowery Boys, Greg and special guest Kieran Gannon explore the epic history of Flushing through five speci...

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...