The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Latest Episodes:

#420 Garbo Walks: Old Hollywood in New York Nov 10, 2023

Show notes

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 pictures to sound in such movies as Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, and Camille. But her career was over by the 1940s, her exotic and distant screen presence no longer appealing in the years of World War II.

And so the actress -- famous for her line "I WANT TO BE ALONE" -- moved to New York City and stayed here for the rest of her life, living in a fabulous apartment near Beekman Place on the east side of Manhattan.

Her favorite activity was walking, two long trips a day in her dark glasses and trench coat, committed to freedom of urban exploration and enjoying a livelihood in the city that we all take for granted.

In attempting to live her life freely, however, she opened herself to the intrusive behavior of others — some obsessed with her as an iconic movie star, others simply gravitating to her elusive reputation. By the 1970s and surging by the 80s, Garbo sightings became a popular urban scavenger hunt. You had Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and Greta Garbo!

Visit the website for more information and images

Interested in more Bowery Boys podcasts about New York and the movies? Here's some suggestions:

Marilyn Monroe: Her Year of Reinvention
The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino
At Home With Lauren Bacall
Mae West: 'Sex' on Broadway

Her New York story reveals some bigger themes about living in a big city -- finding privacy and even solitude in a place with eight million people.

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The Official Gilded Age Podcast: S2 E1 with Lord Julian Fellowes Nov 03, 2023

Show notes

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 a new war is brewing in Gilded Age society. Are you ready to pick a side? Join hosts Alicia Malone and Tom Meyers as they dissect Episode 201, “You Don’t Even Like Opera,” with extraordinary guest Lord Julian Fellowes.

Subscribe to HBO's The Official Gilded Age Podcast to get future episodes

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Rewind: The Gilded Age Mansions of Fifth Avenue Oct 27, 2023

Show notes

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 American wealth and excess — were families with the names Astor, Waldorf, Schermerhorn, and Vanderbilt, alongside power players like A.T. Stewart, Jay Gould and William “Boss” Tweed.

They would all make their homes — and in the case of the Vanderbilts, their great many homes — on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

The image of Fifth Avenue as a luxury retail destination today grew from the street’s aristocratic reputation in the 1800s. The rich were inextricably drawn to the avenue as early as the 1830s when rich merchants, anxious to be near the exquisite row houses of Washington Square Park, began turning it into an artery of expensive abodes.

In this podcast, Tom and Greg present a world that’s somewhat hard to imagine — free-standing mansions in an exclusive corridor running right through the center of Manhattan. Why was Fifth Avenue fated to become the domain of the so-called “Upper Ten”? And what changed about the city in the 20th century to ensure the eventual destruction of most of them?

The following is a re-edited, remastered version of two past Bowery Boys shows — the Rise and Fall of the Fifth Avenue Mansion. Combined, this tells the whole story of Fifth Avenue, from the initial development of streets in the 1820s to its Midtown transformation into a mecca of high-end shopping in the 1930s.

\This could also serve as a primer to the HBO series The GildedAge, the official podcast co-hosted by Tom Meyers which debuts on October 30.

Visit the website for further information.

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#419 Ghost Stories by Gaslight Oct 13, 2023

Show notes

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 enjoy these historical frights. And if you truly believe in ghosts, then these stories should especially disturb you as they take place in actual locations throughout the city -- from the Lower East Side to the Bronx. And even in cases where these 19th-century haunted houses have been demolished, who’s to say the spirits themselves aren’t still hanging around?

Featured in this year's crop of scary stories:

-- A ghostly encounter at the Astor Library (today's Public Theater) involving a most controversial set of mysterious books;

-- A whole graduating class of ghosts stalks the campus of the Bronx's Fordham University, and it may have something to do with either Edgar Allan Poe or the film The Exorcist;

-- Just north of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, a haunted townhouse vexes several tenants, the sight of a hunched-over man in a cap driving people insane;

-- In the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, a small apartment in today's Two Bridges neighborhood becomes possessed by a poltergeist with a penchant for throwing furniture .... and punches. One vainglorious showoff named Jackie Hagerty learns the hard way;

-- And before the days of Riverside Drive, a rustic old mansion once sat on the banks of the Upper West Side, with a mysterious locked room that must never be opened.

Visit the website to see images of the real-life haunted houses and places featured in this podcast.

Listen to the entire collection of Bowery Boys ghost stories podcasts here.

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#418 Theodore Roosevelt's Wild Kingdom Sep 29, 2023

Show notes

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 Dakota Badlands. Many of his trophies hang on the walls of his home in Long Island; other specimens "live on" in institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History.

But as this episode's special guest Ken Burns reveals in his newest mini-series The American Buffalo, Roosevelt's relationship with the animal world was complicated and, in certain ways, hard to understand today.

As one of America’s great conservationists, President Roosevelt's advocacy for wildlife and public land helped to preserve so much of the natural richness of the United States.

And his involvement in the creation of the New York Zoological Society (aka the Bronx Zoo) would set the stage for one ambitious project that would help bring the American buffalo back to the Midwestern plains.

This episode marks the 165th anniversary of Roosevelt's birth in October and the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site (which plays a small but important role in today's story. )

Visit the website for more information and images from this week's show.

This show was engineered by Casey Holford at Stitcher Studios and the interview edited by Kieran Gannon.

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#417 Walking the East Village 1976-1996 Sep 15, 2023

Show notes

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 became the desired home for new cultural venues -- nightclubs, cafes, theaters, and bars -- after the city tore down the Third Avenue Elevated in 1955.

By the mid-1970s, however, the high had worn off. The East Village was in crisis, one of the Manhattan neighborhoods hit hardest by the city’s fiscal difficulties and cutbacks. It had become a landscape of dark, unsafe streets and buildings demolished in flame.

But the next generation of creative interlopers (following the initial stampede of Greenwich Village beatniks and hippies) built upon the legacies of East Village counter-culture to create poems, music, paintings, and stage performances heavily influenced by the apocalyptic situations around them.

This was something truly distinct, a creative scene that was thoroughly and uniquely an East Village creation -- punk and hardcore, murals and graffiti, fashion and drag. In this episode Greg hits the streets of the East Village in a special live-on-the-streets event, with musician and tour guide Krikor Daglian (of True Tales of NYC), exploring the secrets of the recent past -- from the origins of skateboarding to the seeds of the American alternative rock scene.

FEATURING: CBGB, Supreme, the Pyramid, Club 57, Niagara, 7B, Brownies, and many others

AND special guests Bill Di Paola from the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space and Ramon 'Ray' Alvarez from Ray's Candy Store

ALSO: Check out our Walking The East Village playlist, curated by Krikor and Greg -- on Spotify

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#416 Creating the East Village 1955-1975 Sep 01, 2023

Show notes

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, attracted to low rents.

Soon the newly named East Village culturally became an extension of the Village with new bookstores, cafes, experimental theaters, and nightclubs. By the mid-1960s the hepcats were replaced by hippies, flamboyant and politically active, influenced by the events of the 1960s and a slightly different buffet of drugs.

At the same time, the neighborhood's Ukrainian population grew as well after the United States provided visas to thousands of refugees from Europe displaced by World War II. By the 1960s Puerto Ricans also lived in the eastern end of the district, sometimes called Alphabet City (and eventually Loisaida).

In this first of a two-part series on the history of the East Village, Greg is joined Jason Birchard from Veselka Restaurant, who shares his family's story, and by theater historian David Loewy to discuss the influence of Joe Papp and The Public Theater, a stage whose first production would capture the very counter-culture dominating the streets around it.

Visit the website for images and more information

Further listening:

Nuyorican: The Great Puerto Rican Migration
St. Mark's Place: Party Time In The East Village
The Secrets of St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery

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Rewind: The Rebellious History of Tompkins Square Park Aug 25, 2023

Show notes

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 recreational space for the many hundreds of thousands of immigrants who moved into the Lower East Side, particularly Germans who filled the park with music, food and social gatherings.

But the park has also been a place for people to voice their descent. It's become a most rebellious place over the decades. This is a story of vice presidents and labor unions and drag queens and punks.

Visit the website for more information

This show was originally released in 2014.

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#415 The Early Years of Central Park Aug 18, 2023

Show notes

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, flowers, and the dizzying assortment of birds but to look at the architecture, the sculptures, and the fountains.

The idea of a public park -- open to all people, from all walks of life -- was rather new in the mid-19th century. The original plan for Central Park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux emphasized an escape to the natural world. But almost immediately, those plans were altered to include more monumental and architectural delights.

In this rambling walking tour, Greg visits some of the most beloved attractions of the park including Bethesda Terrace and Fountain, Naumburg Bandshell, Bow Bridge and Belvedere Castle.

And he's joined by two very special guests:

-- Sara Cedar Miller, historian emerita of the Central Park Conservancy and author of Before Central Park

-- Dr. Emma Guest-Consales, president of the Guides Association of New York City and tour ambassador at One World Observatory.

Visit our website for more information

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#414 The Brooklyn Navy Yard and Vinegar Hill Aug 04, 2023

Show notes

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 where thousands of American patriots died would rise one of this country’s largest naval yards. It was built for the service and protection of the very country those men and women died for. A complex that would then create weapons of war for other battles -- and jobs for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

In this episode, Greg is joined by the amazing Andrew Gustafson from Turnstile Tours who unfurls the surprising history of the Navy Yard -- through war and peace, through new technologies and aging infrastructure, through the lives of the men and women who built the yard's reputation.

And the story extends to the tiny neighborhood of Vinegar Hill, famed for its early 19th-century architecture and the mysterious mansion known as the Commandant's House.

FEATURING the origin story of Brooklyn's most sacred public monument -- at home not in Vinegar Hill (at least not anymore) but in Fort Greene.

Visit our website for more information and also head to Turnstile Tours for information on their tours of the Navy Yard.

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