The Bowery Boys: New York City History

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...

You may have heard about the messy, chaotic and truly horrible presidential election of 1876 -- pitting Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B Hayes -- but did you know that New York City plays a huge role in this moment in American history? Tilden, the governor of New York, was a political superstar, a reformer famous for taking down Boss Tweed and the corrupt machinations of Tammany...

In the heart of Greenwich Village sits the Jefferson Market Library , a branch of the New York Public Library, and a beautiful garden which offers a relaxing respite from the busy neighborhood. But a prison once rose from this very spot -- more than one in fact. While there was indeed a market at Jefferson Market -- dating back to the 1830s -- this space is more notoriously known for America's fir...

Just a few months ago, New York City removed most of the remaining phone booths from the streets, oft neglected, a nostalgic victim of our increasing use of cellphones. For almost a century public phones have connected regular New Yorkers with the world. Who doesn’t have fond memories of using a payphone with gum on the earpiece and extremely vulgar messages written on the box? Putting in quarters...

In today's episode, Tom discusses the vast span of New York history with filmmakers and authors Ric Burns and James Sanders, creators of " New York: A Documentary Film ". In our episode, we discuss the 8-part documentary (which aired on PBS in installments in 1999, 2001 and 2003) and its newly updated companion book, " New York: An Illustrated History " (Knopf, 2021). We cover the guiding themes o...

In honor of the 125th anniversary of the first ELECTRIC CABS hitting the streets of New York , the Bowery Boys are revisiting this episode from 2015, recounting almost 175 years of getting around New York in a private ride.  The hansom , the romantic rendition of the horse and carriage, took New Yorkers around during the Gilded Age. But unregulated conduct by — nighthawks — and the messy condition...

Tom and Greg are still off celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Bowery Boys podcast, so this week we're highlighting one of the best shows produced by the Bowery Boys this year -- for The Gilded Gentleman podcast, the spin-off show hosted by Carl Raymond.  Domestic servants during the Gilded Age did more than simply maintain the mansions of the wealthy. New York City simply could not function w...

Let's go back to 2007. Tom and Greg recorded the first episode of the podcast which would become The Bowery Boys: New York City History on June 19, 2007 . The location: the Lower East Side. The method of recording: a karaoke microphone and a small white iBook.  In this special celebration of that anniversary, they set the scene with the ultimate 'situate the listener' -- situating the year 2007 ....

What wonderful surprises await the Bowery Boys in Little Caribbean ? The Brooklyn enclave in Flatbush is one of the central destinations for Caribbean-American life and culture in New York City. Since the 1960s, thousands of immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean nations have made this historic area of Flatbush (mostly east of Flatbush Avenue) their ho...

Over 350 years ago today's Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush was an old Dutch village, the dirt path that would one day become Flatbush Avenue, lined with wheat fields and farms. Contrast that with today's Flatbush, a bustling urban destination diverse in both housing styles and commercial retail shops. It's also an anchor of Brooklyn’s Caribbean community -- Little Caribbean. There have been many...

The Renwick Ruin , resembling an ancient castle lost to time, appears along the East River as a crumbling, medieval-like apparition, something not quite believable. Sitting between two new additions on Roosevelt Island -- the campus of Cornell Tech and FDR Four Freedoms Park -- these captivating ruins, enrobed in beautiful ivy, tell the story of a dark period in New York City history. The island b...

Two landmarks to American art history sit on either side of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge over the Hudson River -- the homes of visionary artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church . Cole and Church were leaders of the Hudson River School , a collective of 19th century American painters captivated by natural beauty and wide-open spaces. Many of these paintings, often of a massive size, depicted fan...