The Bowery Boys: New York City History

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...

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...