We’re bringing you something special this week. The trailer for a new podcast produced by Pineapple Street Studios called Love Thy Neighbor. Hosted by journalist Collier Meyerson, this five-episode series is about two communities in the New York City neighborhood of Crown Heights: the Lubavitch Jewish community and the Caribbean-American community. It’s a story about immigration; white flight; the downfall of New York City’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins; and the rise of Rudolph Giuliani. But...
Feb 21, 2022•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast New York City has an impressive collection of historic homes, but none as unique and or as joyful as the Louis Armstrong House and Museum , located in Corona, Queens. What other historic home in the United States has a gift shop in its garage, aqua blue kitchen cabinets, bathroom speakers behind silver wallpaper, mirrored bathrooms and chandeliers over the bed? Elvis Presley's Graceland perhaps comes close, but the Louis Armstrong House has a charming comfort and a genuine grace and modesty to i...
Feb 11, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dorothy Parker was not only the wittiest writer of the Jazz Age, she was also obsessively morbid . Her talents rose at a very receptive moment for such a sharp, dour outlook, after the first world war and right as the country went dry. Dorothy Parker’s greatest lines are as bracing and intoxicating as a hard spirit. Her most successful verse often veers into somber moods, loaded with thoughts of self-destruction or wry despair. In fact, she frequently quipped about the epitaph that would some da...
Jan 28, 2022•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast PODCAST What does the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea mean to you ? Religion and architecture? Art galleries and gay bars? Shopping and brunch after a stroll on the High Line ? Tens of thousands of people, of course, call it home. But before it was a neighborhood, it was the Colonial-era estate of a British military officer who named his bucolic property after a London veterans hospital. His descendant Clement Clarke Moore would distinguish himself as a theologian and writer; he invented many ...
Jan 14, 2022•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast The strange, scandalous and sex-filled story of the Ansonia, an Upper West Side architectural gem and a legendary musical landmark. In the television show Only Murders in the Building , Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez play podcasters attempting to solve a mystery in a building full of eccentric personalities. Their fictional apartment building is called The Arconia, a name partially inspired by The Ansonia, a former residential hotel with a history truly stranger than fiction. Built ...
Dec 31, 2021•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Believe it or not, we've got one more brand new Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast for 2021. Look for it on January 31. But for today we wanted to give you another sampling of our new spin-off podcast called The Gilded Gentleman , a look at America's Gilded Age period, hosted by social and culinary historian Carl Raymond . In this new episode, Carl looks at one of the most legendary figures of the period – Caroline Astor , or the Mrs Astor, the ruler and creator of New York’s Gilded Age ...
Dec 23, 2021•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Steven Spielberg's new version of West Side Story is here -- and it's fantastic -- so we're re-visiting our 2016 show on the story of Lincoln Center , with a new podcast introduction discussing the film and the passing of musical icon Stephen Sondheim . The fine arts campus assembles some of the city's finest music and theatrical institutions to create the classiest 16.3 acres in New York City. It was created out of an urgent necessity, bringing together the New York Philharmonic , the New York ...
Dec 17, 2021•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast The following is a special presentation — the first episode of brand spin-off podcast called The Gilded Gentleman , hosted by social and culinary historian Carl Raymond. In this debut episode, recorded at Greenwich Village's Salmagundi Club , Tom and Greg sit with Carl to formally introduce him to listeners and also to discuss the ideas surrounding the Gilded Age, a period of great wealth and great inequality during the late 19th century. PLUS: Subscribe to The Gilded Gentleman on your favorite ...
Dec 10, 2021•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree has brought joy and sparkle to Midtown Manhattan since the early 1930s. The annual festivities may seem steady and timeless but this holiday icon actually has a surprisingly dramatic history. Millions tune in each year to watch the tree lighting in a music-filled ceremony on NBC, and tens of thousands more will crowd around the tree's massive branches during the holiday season, adjusting their phones for that perfect holiday selfie. But the Rockefeller Cente...
Dec 01, 2021•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Presenting a new history podcast produced by Tom Meyers and Greg Young from the Bowery Boys: New York City History . If you’re a fan of Downton Abbey , The Age of Innocence or Upstairs Downstairs , then we know The Gilded Gentleman podcast will be your cup of tea. You’re cordially invited to join social and culinary historian Carl Raymond for a look behind the velvet curtains of America’s Gilded Age, Paris’ Belle Époque and England’s Victorian and Edwardian eras. The food, the music, the archite...
Nov 25, 2021•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Presenting a history of the Bowery in the 20th century when this street became known as the most notorious place in America. And the stories of the lonely and desperate men whose experiences have been mostly forgotten. From the moment that elevated train went up in 1878, the historic Bowery became a street of deteriorating fortunes. And by the 1940s, things had gotten so bad that the Bowery had taken on the nickname Skid Row. For decades it had become the last resort for men down on their luck, ...
Nov 18, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast November 24, 1966. Millions of spectators flood Broadway in New York City to watch the Macy’s Day Parade on Thanksgiving morning. The iconic floats – Superman, Popeye, Smokey the Bear – are set against a sky that can only be described as noxious. A smog of pollutants is trapped over New York City, and it will ultimately kill nearly 200 people. How did the 1966 Thanksgiving Smog help usher in a new era of environmental protection? And how have we been thinking about environmental disasters all wr...
Nov 12, 2021•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast The thrilling tale of a classic heist from the Gilded Age, perpetrated by a host of wicked and colorful characters from New York's criminal underworld. Jesse James and Butch Cassidy may be more infamous as American bank robbers, but neither could match the skill or the audacity of George Leonidas Leslie , a mastermind known in his day as the "King of the Bank Robbers". On October 27, 1878, Leslie's gang broke into the Manhattan Savings Institution and stole almost $3 million in cash and securiti...
Nov 05, 2021•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast What are the greatest ghost stories and haunted legends in New York City history? Since 2007 -- every October for fourteen years -- the Bowery Boys podcast has shared the city's most notorious and frightening ghost stories and urban legends. Over fifty-five stories and counting -- from malevolent wraiths who walk the avenues to strange spirits forever at home in some of New York's greatest landmarks. So for this 15th annual Bowery Boys Halloween ghost story podcast, Greg and Tom taking a look ba...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast The following podcast may look like the history of New York City cemeteries -- from the early churchyards of the Colonial era to the monument-filled rural cemeteries of Brooklyn and Queens. But it's much more than that! This is a story about New York City itself, a tale of real estate, urban growth, class and racial disparity, superstition and architecture. Cemeteries and burial grounds in New York City are everywhere -- although by design we often don’t see them or interact with them in daily l...
Oct 08, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast There's no business like show business -- thanks to Lee, Sam and J.J. Shubert, the Syracuse brothers who forever changed the American theatrical business in the 20th century. At last Broadway is back! And the marquees of New York's theater district are again glowing with the excitement of live entertainment. And many of these theaters were built and operated by the Shubert Brothers, impresarios who helped shape the physical nature of the Broadway theater district itself, creating the close clust...
Sep 24, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast On the occasion of the 245th anniversary of the Revolutionary War in New York City, we revisit the story of the Great Fire of 1776 , the drumbeat of war leading up to the disaster, and the tragic story of the American patriot Nathan Hale. This is a reedited, remastered version of an episode that we recorded in 2015. A little after midnight on September 21, 1776, the Fighting Cocks Tavern on Whitehall Street caught on fire. The drunken revelers inside the tavern were unable to stop the blaze, and...
Sep 17, 2021•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Just south of the World Trade Center district sits the location of a forgotten Manhattan immigrant community. Curious outsiders called it "Little Syria" although the residents themselves would have known it as the Syrian Colony. Starting in the 1880s people from the Middle East began arriving at New York's immigrant processing station -- immigrants from Greater Syria which at that time was a part of the Ottoman Empire. The Syrians of Old New York were mostly Christians who brought their trades, ...
Sep 10, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast By the time Audrey Munson turned 25 years old, she had became a muse for some of the most famous artists in America, the busiest artist’s model of her day, She was such a fixture of the Greenwich Village art world in the early 20th century that she was called the Venus of Washington Square, although by 1913 the press had given her a grander nickname — Miss Manhattan. Her face and figure adorned public sculpture and museum masterpieces. And they do to this day. But just a few years after working ...
Aug 27, 2021•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast When it opened in 1919, the Hotel Pennsylvania was the largest hotel in the world. Over a hundred years later, its fate remains uncertain. Is it too big to save? After the Pennsylvania Railroad completed its colossal Pennsylvania Station in 1910, the railroad quickly realized it would need a companion hotel equal to the station's exquisite grandeur. And it would need an uncommonly ambitious hotelier to operate it. Enter E.M. Statler , the hotel king who made his name at American World's Fairs an...
Aug 13, 2021•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Interview with Prof. Ernest Freeberg, author of “A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement” Today’s show is all about animals in 19th-century New York City. Of course, animals were an incredibly common sight on the streets, market halls, and factories during the Gilded Age, and many of us probably have a quaint image of horse-drawn carriages. But how often do we think about the actual work that those horses put in every day? The stress of pulling those pri...
Jul 30, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast New York City on ice — a tribute to the forgotten industry which kept the city cool in the age before refrigeration and air conditioning. Believe it or not, ice used to be big business. In 1806 a Boston entrepreneur named Frederic Tudor cut blocks of ice from a pond on his family farm and shipped it to Martinique, a Caribbean county very unfamiliar with frozen water. He was roundly mocked — why would people want ice in areas where they can’t store it? — but the thirst for the frozen luxury soon ...
Jul 16, 2021•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast There are two mysterious islands in the East River with a human population of zero. They are restricted. No human being lives there. One of these islands has been witness to some of the most dire and dramatic moments in New York City history. North Brother Island sits near the tidal strait known as Hell Gat e, a once-dangerous whirlpool which wrecked hundreds of ships and often deposited the wreckage on the island's quiet shore. In the 1880s the island was chosen as the new home for Riverside Ho...
Jul 02, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast New York City Hall sits majestically inside a nostalgic, well-manicured park, topped with a beautiful old fountain straight out of gaslight-era New York. But its serenity belies the frantic pace of government inside City Hall walls and disguises a tumultuous, vibrant history. There have actually been two other city halls — one an actual tavern, the other a temporary seat of national government — and the one we’re familiar with today is nearing its 210th birthday. And the park it sits in is much,...
Jun 25, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast We're sliding into Summer 2021 -- ready for great music, hot dancing and breaking into fire hydrants -- and so we’ve just released an epic summertime episode of Bowery Boys Movie Club to the general Bowery Boys Podcast audience, exploring the 1989 Spike Lee masterpiece Do The Right Thing . Lee electrified film audiences with Do The Right Thing, documenting a day in the life of one block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn on one of the hottest days of the summer. Inspired by both Greek tragedy and actual even...
Jun 18, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast The third and final part of the Bowery Boys Road Trip to Long Island -- the gay history of Fire Island! Fire Island is one of New York state’s most attractive summer getaways, a thin barrier island on the Atlantic Ocean lined with seaside villages and hamlets, linked by boardwalks, sandy beaches, natural dunes and water taxis. (And, for the most part, no automobiles.) But Fire Island has a very special place in American LGBT history. It is the site of one of the oldest gay and lesbian communitie...
Jun 04, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our new mini-series Road Trip to Long Island featuring tales of historic sites outside of New York City. In the next leg of our journey, we visit Jones Beach State Park, the popular beach paradise created by Robert Moses on Long Island's South Shore . Well before he transformed New York City with expressways and bridges, Moses was an idealistic public servant working for new governor Al Smith. In 1924 he became president of the Long Island State Parks Commission, tasked with creating new state p...
May 21, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast The first part of our new mini-series Road Trip to Long Island featuring tales of historic sites outside of New York City. In this episode, relive a little Jazz Age luxury by escaping into the colossal castles, manors and chateaus on Long Island's North Shore, the setting for one of America's most famous novels. The world is perhaps most familiar with Long Island history thanks to the 1925 classic novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald , a tale of romantic yearning and social status durin...
May 07, 2021•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Coney Island is back! After being closed for 2020 due to the pandemic, the unusual attractions, the thrilling rides and the stands selling delicious beer and hot dogs have finally reopened. So we are releasing this very special version of our 2018 show called Landmarks of Coney Island — special , because this is an extended version of that show featuring the tales of two more Coney Island landmarks which were left out of the original show. The Coney Island Boardwalk — officially the Riegelmann B...
Apr 30, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nature and history intertwine in all five boroughs -- from The Bronx River to the shores of Staten Island -- in this special episode about New York City's many botanical gardens. A botanical garden is more than just a pretty place; it's a collection of plant life for the purposes of preservation, education and study. But in an urban environment like New York City, botanical gardens also must engage with modern life, becoming both a park and natural history museum. The New York Botanical Garden ,...
Apr 23, 2021•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast 
