Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr met at a clearing in Weehawken, NJ, in the early morning on July 11, 1804, to mount the most famous duel in American history. But why? This is the story of two New York lawyers -- and two Founding Fathers -- that so detested each other that their vitriolic words (well, mostly Hamilton's) led to these two grown men shooting each other out of honor and dignity, while robbing America of their brilliance, leadership and talent. You may know the story of this duel fr...
Jul 11, 2014•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Cleopatra's Needle is the name given to the ancient Egyptian obelisk that sits in Central Park, right behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is the bizarre tale of how it arrived in New York and the unusual forces that went behind its transportation from Alexandra to a hill called Greywacke Hill. The weathered but elegant monolith was created thousands of years ago by the pharaoh Thutmose III. Thanks to the great interest in Egyptian objects in the 19th century -- sometimes called Egyptoman...
Jun 27, 2014•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast On June 15, 1904, hundreds of residents of the Lower East Side's thriving German community boarded the General Slocum excursion steamer to enjoy a day trip outside the city. Most of them would never return home. The General Slocum disaster is, simply put, one of the greatest tragedies in American history. Before September 11, 2001, it was the largest loss of life of any event that has ever taken place here. This is a harrowing story, brutal and tragic. The fire that engulfed the ship near the vi...
Jun 13, 2014•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ladies' Mile -- the most famous New York shopping district in the 19th century and the "heart of the Gilded Age," a district of spectacular commercial palaces of cast-iron. They are some of the city's greatest buildings, designed by premier architects. Unlike so many stories about New York City, this is a tale of survival, how behemoths of retail went out of business, but their structures remained to house new stores. This is truly a rare tale of history, where so many of the buildings in questi...
May 30, 2014•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast England's great thespian William Macready mounted the stage of the Astor Place Opera House on May 10, 1849, to perform Shakespeare's Macbeth, just as he had done hundreds of times before. But this performance would become infamous in later years as the trigger for one of New York City's most violent events -- the Astor Place Riot. The theater, being America's prime form of public entertainment in the early 19th century, was often home to great disturbances and riots. It was still seen as a Briti...
May 01, 2014•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast The glory of early New York City came from its role as one of the world's great ports. Today the South Street Seaport is a lasting tribute to that seafaring heritage, a historical district beneath the Brooklyn Bridge that contains some of the city's oldest buildings. But there are many secrets here along the cobblestone streets. Schermerhorn Row, the grand avenue of counting houses more than two centuries old, is built atop of landfill. Historic Water Street once held a seedy concentration of br...
Apr 04, 2014•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast The George Washington Bridge is surprisingly graceful, but politically scandalous. And we're not talking about the current crisis being faced by current New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Figuring out a way to cross over the Hudson River (not using a boat or ferry) between New York City and New Jersey has been a challenge engineers and builders have tried to solve for over two hundred years. With the formation of the Port Authority in 1921, there was finally an administrative body with the abil...
Mar 07, 2014•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast The New York Fire Department protects the five boroughs from a host of disasters and mishaps -- five-alarm blazes, a kitchen fire run amok, and even those dastardly midtown elevators, always getting stuck! But today's tightly organized team is a far cry from the chaos and machismo that defined New York's fire apparatus many decades ago. New York's early firefighters -- Peter Stuyvesant's original ratel-watch -- were all-purpose guardians, from police work to town timepieces. Volunteer forces ass...
Feb 07, 2014•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Central Park has frequently been called 'the people's park," but we think Tompkins Square Park may have a better claim to that title. From its inception, this East Village recreational spot -- named for Vice President Daniel D Tompkins -- has catered to those who might not have felt welcome in other New York parks. Carved from the marshy area of Peter Stuyvesant's old farm, Tompkins Square immediately reflected the personality of German immigrants who moved here, calling it Der Weisse Garte...
Jan 10, 2014•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Broadway Musical is one of New York City's greatest inventions, 150 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 shows to 'Shuffle Along', 'Irene' and 'Show Boat', surely the beginning of the truly modern American musica...
Dec 13, 2013•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Hotel Theresa is considered a genuine (if under-appreciated) Harlem treasure, both for its unique architecture and its special place in history as the hub for African-American life in the 1940s and 50s. The luxurious apartment hotel was built by a German lace manufacturer to cater to a wealthy white clientele. But almost as soon as the final brick was laid, Harlem itself changed, thanks to the arrival of thousands of new black residents from the South. Harlem, renown the world over for the a...
Nov 15, 2013•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is the Bowery Boys 7th annual Halloween podcast, with four new scary stories to chill your bones and keep you up at night, generally doused with strange and fascinating facts about New York City. For this episode, we've decided to go truly old-school, reaching back to old legends and tales from the years of the Revolutionary War and early 19th century. These ghosts have two things in common -- George Washington (directly or indirectly) and ghosts! Although no ghosts of George Washington. We...
Oct 18, 2013•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast As New York City enters the final stages of this year's mayoral election, let's look back on a decidedly more unusual contest 100 years ago, pitting Tammany Hall and their estranged ally (Mayor William Jay Gaynor) up against a baby-faced newcomer, the (second) youngest man to eventually become the mayor of New York City. John Purroy Mitchel, the Bronx-born grandson of an Irish revolutionary, was a rising star in New York, aggressively sweeping away incompetence and snipping away at government ex...
Sep 20, 2013•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the third part of the Bowery Boys Summer TV Mini-Series , we give you a grand tour of the New York City television production world from the 1970s to today, from the debut of Sesame Street in the Upper West Side to the flourishing 1990s, where the city was represented by a few iconic shows, including Sex And The City and Seinfeld. Along the way, hear about the debuts of public access, HBO, MTV, the Cosby Show, NY1 and, of course, the TV show that employed thousands of New Yorkers during its t...
Aug 23, 2013•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's the second part of the Bowery Boys TV Mini-Series, covering the years of New York City television production from the late 1940s to the 1960s. This podcast is arranged a little bit like a leisurely Midtown walking tour, taking you past four of the greatest locations in NYC televison history. And we guide you through the stories of the greatest shows in TV history -- from Howdy Doody to the Ed Sullivan Show! www.boweryboyshistory.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys...
Aug 02, 2013•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's the beginning of The Bowery Boys Summer TV Mini-Series, three podcasts devoted to New York City's illustrious history with broadcast television -- from Sarnoff to Seinfeld! In our first show, we go back to the start of the invention of the television and the city's role in both the creation of the complicated technology and the early formation of programming. We begin with the Electro Importing Co . and the imagination of one of the greatest names in science fiction. Then head into scientif...
Jun 28, 2013•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Bellevue Hospital , you might have heard, once had a very notorious psychiatric ward. But those horror stories have only distracted from the rather breathtaking -- and heart-breaking -- history of this historic institution, a lifeline not only for the sick, but for the poor, the incarcerated, the abandoned -- even the dead! The hospital traces its origins to a six-bed almshouse that once sat near the location of New York City Hall today. Despite its humble and (to the modern eye) confusing origi...
May 31, 2013•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you had told 1840s religious leader William Muhlenberg that his innovative new Church of the Holy Communion, designed by renown architect Richard Upjohn , would become the glittering seat of drugs and debauchery 150 years later, he might have burned it down then and there. But thankfully, this lovely building is still with us, proving to be one of the most flexible examples of building use in New York City history. This unusual tale begins with the captivating relationship between Muhlenberg ...
May 03, 2013•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Here's the story of how two very big cities and a whole bunch of small towns and villages -- completely different in nature, from farmland to skyscraper -- became the greatest city in the world. This is the tale of Greater New York , the forming of the five boroughs into one metropolis, a consolidation of massive civic interests which became official on January 1, 1898. But this is not a story of interested parties, united in a common goal. In fact, Manhattan (comprising, with some areas north o...
Apr 05, 2013•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast A long, long time ago in New York -- in the 1730s, back when the city was a holding of the British, with a little over 10,000 inhabitants -- a German printer named John Peter Zenger decided to print a four-page newspaper called the New York Weekly Journal. This is pretty remarkable in itself, as there was only one other newspaper in town called the New York Gazette, an organ of the British crown and the governor of the colony. (Equally remarkable: Benjamin Franklin almost worked there!) But Zeng...
Mar 08, 2013•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This year is the 125th anniversary of one of the worst storms to ever wreck havoc upon New York City, the now-legendary mix of wind and snow called the Great Blizzard of 1888. Its memory was again conjured up a few months ago as people struggled to compare Hurricane Sandy with some devastating event in New York's past. And indeed, the Blizzard and Sandy have several disturbing similarities. But the battering snow-hurricane of 1888, with freezing temperatures and drifts three stories high, was ma...
Feb 08, 2013•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Armory Show of 1913 was the mainstream debut of modernist art -- both European and American -- to New York City audiences. Galleries had previously devoted themselves to the great European masters, antiquity and American landscapes as a way to influence the taste of a growing city. But even though vanguards like Alfred Stieglitz debuted artists like Picasso and Cezanne into his Fifth Avenue gallery, those names were still barely known to the average New Yorker. The Armory Show, located at th...
Jan 11, 2013•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the secret history of Herald Square, New York City's second favorite intersection -- after Times Square, of course, just a few blocks north. But we think you may find this intersection at 34th Street, Sixth Avenue and Broadway perhaps even more interesting. This is a tale of the Tenderloin, an entertainment and vice district which dominated the west side of midtown Manhattan in the late 19th century, and how it abutted the great cultural institutions that soon became attracted to Hera...
Dec 14, 2012•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast The bicycle has always seemed like a slightly awkward form of transportation in big cities, but in fact, it's reliable, convenient, clean and -- believe it or not -- popular in New York City for almost 200 years. The original two-wheeled conveyance was the velocipede or dandy horse which debuted in New York in 1819. After the Civil War, an improved velocipede dazzled the likes of Henry Ward Beecher and became a frequent companion of carriages and streetcars on the streets of New York. Sporting m...
Nov 16, 2012•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast A brief snapshot into what's happening in the city as of Friday afternoon, November 2, reviewing some of the events associated with Hurricane Sandy, the catastrophic storm which hit the Northeast this week. Featuring some of the historical context for the storm. This is just a summary of what's occurred as of now, so much of this information is sure to have changed after recording date. Please check your local news for up-to-date information. www.boweryboyspodcast.com Support the show: https://w...
Nov 02, 2012•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our sixth annual ghost story podcast takes a little twist this time around. Oh sure, we have two of New York's most FAMOUS horror stories in our first part, beginning with a spirited sailor named Mickey who haunted a classic structure on the Lower West Side. Today's it's the Ear Inn, where you better watch your drink. Then we switch to a Colonial-era tale of obsession and entrapment in old Flatbush, the tale of Melrose Hall with its secret passages, stairwells and dungeons. But in the second hal...
Oct 19, 2012•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the great challenges faced by a growing, 19th-century New York City was the need for a viable, clean water supply. Before the 1830s, citizens relied on cisterns to collect rainwater, a series of city wells drilling down to underground springs, and the infamously polluted Collect Pond. The solution lay miles north of the city in the Croton River. New York engineers embarked on one of the most ambitious projects in the city's history -- to tame the Croton, funnelling through an aqueduct dow...
Sep 21, 2012•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast They once called it the University of the City of New York, an innovative, nondenominational school located in a intellectual castle on the northeast corner of the Washington military parade ground. Today its better known as New York University, one of America's largest private schools of higher education, inhabiting dozens of buildings throughout the city. Find out more about its spectactular and sometimes strange history, from the inventors among its early faculty to some of the more curious c...
Aug 24, 2012•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast New York City's thriving craft brewing industry today hearkens to a time over a century ago when the city was one of America's great beer-making capitols, the home to a robust industry of breweries and beer halls. In the 19th century, German immigrants introduced the lager to thirsty crowds, manufacturing thousands of barrels per year from breweries in Manhattan and Brooklyn's 'Eastern District' (primarily Bushwick and Williamsburg). Following World War I and Prohibition, New York lost its hold ...
Jul 27, 2012•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Rockaways are a world unto its own, a former resort destination with miles of beach facing into the Atlantic Ocean, a collection of diverse neighborhoods and a truly quirky history. Retaining a variant of its original Lenape name, the peninsula remained relatively peaceful in the early years of New York history, the holding of the ancestral family of a famous upstate New York university. The Marine Pavilion, a luxury spa-like resort which arrived in 1833 featuring 'sea bathing', opened up va...
Jun 29, 2012•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
