The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Latest Episodes:

#407 New York by Gaslight: Illuminating the 19th Century Mar 31, 2023

Show notes

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 London, and it made its American debut in Newport and Baltimore.

The New York Gas Company received its company charter in 1823 and began to install gas pipes under the street that decade. With gas-powered lighting, New York really became the city that never slept.

It meant you could work late without your eyes straining – or wander the streets with less apprehension. It meant greater ease reading a book or throwing a lavish ball. Gaslight brought the 19th century city to life in ways that are easy to overlook.

In this episode we're joined by author Jane Brox, author of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light who discusses the curious charms of this rare and enigmatic light source.

FURTHER LISTENING: After you listen to the show about the history of gaslight, check out these past Bowery Boys podcasts with similar themes.

-- Electric New York: With the discovery of electricity, it seemed possible to illuminate the world with a more dependable, potentially inexhaustible energy source.

-- Tesla: The Inventor in Old New York

-- Building Stuyvesant Town

If you like our show, please consider giving the Bowery Boys podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts

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Rewind: When The Irish Came To New York Mar 17, 2023

Show notes

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 immigrant group began coming over from Ireland in significant numbers starting in the Colonial era, mostly as indentured servants. In the early 19th century, these Irish arrivals, both Protestants and Catholics, were already consolidating — via organizations like the Ancient Order of the Hibernians and in places like St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

But starting in the 1830s, with a terrible blight wiping out Ireland’s potato crops, a mass wave of Irish immigration would dwarf all that came before, hundreds of thousands of weary, sometimes desperate newcomers who entered New York to live in its most squalid neighborhoods.

The Irish were among the laborers who built the Croton Aqueduct, the New York grid plan and Central Park. Irish women comprised most of the hired domestic help by the mid 19th century.

The arrival of the Irish and their assimilation into American life is a story repeated in many cities. Here in New York City, it is essential in our understanding of the importance of modern immigrant communities to the life of the Big Apple.

PLUS: The origins of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade!

Other shows you may enjoy:

The Civil War Draft Riots
Jacob Riis: 'The Other Half' of the Gilded Age
Battery Park and Castle Clinton
The Story of Five Points
Bowery Boys Movie Club: Gangs of New York

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#406 How Wall Street Got Its Name Mar 03, 2023

Show notes

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 Dutch when New York was known as New Amsterdam.

The particulars of the story, however, are far more intriguing. Because the Dutch called the street alongside the wall something very different.

During the colonial era, the wall was torn down and turned into the center of New York life, complete with Trinity Church, City Hall and a shoreline market with a disturbing connection to one New York's financial livelihoods -- slavery.

So how did this street become so associated with American finance? The story involves Alexander Hamilton, a busy coffee house and a very important tree.

Visit the website for more images and information about this subject

More Bowery Boys episodes related to this one:

George Washington's New York Inauguration
Life In New Amsterdam
Land of the Lenape
Tearing Down King George: The Revolutionary Summer of 1776
Trinity Church: Anchor of Wall Street

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#405 Mona Lisa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Feb 17, 2023

Show notes

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 people spent hours in line to gaze at the famous smile.

Then, on February 7, 1963, she made her debut to the public at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hosted in the medieval sculpture hall for a month-long exhibition that would become one of the museum's most attended shows.

On that first day, thousands lined up outside in the freezing cold to catch a glimpse of the iconic painting. By week's end, a quarter of a million people had visited the museum to see the Italian masterpiece.

PLUS: What's it like guarding precious and iconic works of art like the Mona Lisa? Patrick Bringley, a former guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, joins Greg and Tom in the studio to discuss his new book All The Beauty In The World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, recounting a decade of purpose, sorrow and epiphany while working in America's largest museum.

Visit our website for images and more details

After listening to this show, you may also like to listen to these other past episodes:

-- Our history of the Metropolitan Museum on its 150th anniversary
-- Why is the Mona Lisa so famous? Find out why in the Gilded Gentleman's show The Theft of the Mona Lisa
-- Exactly one year to the day after the Mona Lisa came to town, so did these guys.

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The First Woman Ever Photographed Feb 10, 2023

Show notes

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 in the period following his invention of the telegraph.

The experiments of Draper and Morse, with Catherine as assistant, would set the stage for the entire history of American photography.

The legendary portrait was taken when Miss Draper was a young woman but a renewed interest in the image in the 1890s brought the now elderly matron a bit of late-in-life recognition.

To see the photograph of Draper and other early photography, visit our website.

This episode originally appeared on Greg’s podcast called The First which had a respectable run a few years ago. The feed for that show will be going away soon so we wanted to present some of that show’s greatest hits over the next few months, in between regular episodes of the Bowery Boys as bonus stories about American history. Enjoy!

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#404 Nighthawks and Automats: Edward Hopper's New York Feb 03, 2023

Show notes

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's New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hopper, a native of the Hudson River town of Nyack, painted New York City for over half a decade. In reality, the city experienced Prohibition and the Jazz Age, two world wars and the arrival of automobiles. But not in Hopper's world.

In his most famous work Nighthawks (1942), figures from a dreamlike film appear trapped in an aquarium-shaped diner. But Hopper has captured something else in this iconic painting: fear and paranoia. No wonder he's considered a huge influence on Hollywood film noir and detective stories.

Hopper painted New York from his studio overlooking Washington Square Park, and both he and his wife Josephine Nivison Hopper would become true fixtures of the Greenwich Village scene.

PLUS: Tom visits the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York, to talk the artist's early life with executive director Kathleen Motes Bennewitz. And Greg finds some of the hidden puzzles in Hopper's paintings thanks to American art historianRena Tobey.

Visit the website for more pictures and other interesting information from this episode.

Other Bowery Boys episodes related to this one:

-- The Armory Show of 1913
-- Jane Jacobs: Saving Greenwich Village
-- New York University: A School For The Metropolis
-- Tragic Muse: The Life of Audrey Munson

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#403 The Fulton Fish Market: History at the Seaport Jan 20, 2023

Show notes

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 refrigeration.

Today its former home is known by a more familiar name -- the South Street Seaport, a historical district that has undergone some incredible changes in just the past half century. The fish market, once an awkward staple of this growing tourist destination, moved to the Bronx in 2005. But you can still find ghosts of the old market along these historic stone streets.

And you can still find delicious seafood at the Seaport. And the Tin Building has taken dining in the neighborhood to the next level, literally in the architectural remains of a former fish market building.

On this show, we'll be joined by professor Jonathan H. Rees, author of the new book The Fulton Fish Market: A History. By the end of our conversation today, we're confident that you'll never look at the fish section of your local grocer in the same way.

MORE SHOWS SIMILAR TO THIS ONE:

-- South Street Seaport
-- Has Jack the Ripper Come to Town?
-- The High Line
-- Essex Street Market

Visit our website for more stories and images from New York City History.

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Rewind: A Bar Named Julius', New York's Newest Landmark Jan 13, 2023

Show notes

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, socialize, and celebrate openly in bars, restaurants, and other public places.”

So we thought it would be a great time to revisit our 2019 show on the history of Julius' and a look at the life of gays and lesbians in the mid 20th century. But this show also features an interview -- recorded at Julius' of course -- with When Brooklyn Was Queer author Hugh Ryan who was just on our recent show on the history of Jefferson Market and the Women’s House of Detention .

PLUS there’s even a tie-in to the Worlds Fair of 1964, linking to our last episode.

Visit our website for photographs and more details -- boweryboyshistory.com

This episode features an audio interview clip from the podcast Making Gay History, as well as a musical clip of 'I Hear A Symphony' by The Supremes (Motown).

Our thanks to Andrew Berman of Village Preservation for allowing us to use audio from the 2022 historic plaque unveiling

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#402 Treasures from the World's Fair Jan 06, 2023

Show notes

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 stranger, more visually chaotic 1964-65 World's Fair. And that nostalgia has fueled a thriving market for collectables from these fairs -- the souvenirs and other common household items branded with the two fairs' striking visual symbols.

The Trylon and Perisphere represented the dreams of 1930s America after the Great Depression, the strange symbols of "the World of Tomorrow." A quarter century later the Unisphere depicted its theme -- "Peace Through Understanding" -- as a space-age fantasy.

Millions of souvenirs were manufactured and sold at these two fairs. And those very treasured items which survive -- in the hands of collectors, at flea markets and antique shops -- are nearly all that remain of these special, ephemeral events.

In this show, Greg is joined by design and cultural historian Kyle Supley, recorded at Brooklyn's City Reliquary where Supley's own collection of World's Fair has found a permanent home.

How do such souvenirs allow us to visit the past? And what do they say about our world today?

FURTHER LISTENING:
-- The Crystal Palace: America's First World Fair
-- 1939-1940 World's Fair
-- 1964-65 World's Fair
-- Ruins of the World's Fair (about the New York State Pavilion)

_________

Kyle Supley is a historian, curator and preservationist with a focus on Mid-Century American culture, consumer products, architecture, and design.

He is the creator and host of the TV show Kyle Supley’s Out There! on Ovation’s Journy Network, a NYC tour guide for Bowery Boys Walks, and a DJ of music from the golden age of disco, at the landmarked NYC gay bar Julius’ in Greenwich Village.

Follow him on Instagram here

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Side Streets: Good Diners, Great Pizza and Mars 2112 Dec 30, 2022

Show notes

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.

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Here’s the first episode of Side Streets, a conversational show about life and culture in New York City, an exclusive podcast for t hose that support the Bowery boys on Patreon. We’re giving you this preview of the first episode with hopes that you’ll join on Patreon, at any level, to check out the rest. You can listen to more by signing up at Partreon.com/boweryboys.

Featured on the show:

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