The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Nineteen years ago (officially on June 19, 2007) we recorded the very first Bowery Boys podcast, appropriately about Canal Street, the street just outside the window of Tom’s apartment on the Lower East Side. (For more information, check out our 15th anniversary show from two years ago.) We cannot have possibly imagined on that hot June…

In 1886, during a miles-long parade celebrating the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, office workers in lower Manhattan began heaving ticker tape out the windows, creating a magical, blizzard-like landscape. That tradition stuck. Today that particular corridor of Broadway — connecting Battery Park to City Hall — is known as the “Canyon of Heroes”…

For a very brief period — likely just a single year — there was a female counterpart to the New York (Male) Giants. The New York Female Giants seem to have an unofficial affiliation with the better known Giants, the city’s most popular baseball team.  Author Michael Carlebach speculates the team was probably formed by…

Above: the crowds at the Polo Ground for Game One. Many of these same people were certainly on hand for the fateful Game Four. One hundred years ago today, in the frantic fall of 1912, even as the nation was in the midst of an intense three-way race to elect a new president, New Yorkers…

Oh, that Peter Stuyvesant. He was all about luxury, high class athletic sport and international travel. The Concorde! Monte Carlo! Caviar! Less than three centuries after the iconic Dutch director-general of New Amsterdam died at his palatial farm in today’s East Village, his name was employed to sell a brand of stylish, premium cigarette, still…