The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Carnegie Hall is one of America’s greatest and most enduring cultural landmarks, enchanting audiences and making history since its opening night on May 5, 1891, when Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky appeared there in his first performance in the United States.

This groundbreaking performance space (originally known simply as “Music Hall”) is in fact a trio of distinct venues, all nestled within a single, opulent Italian Renaissance–style building.

Although its benefactor Andrew Carnegie and his fellow Gilded Age elites had moved their grand residences farther up Fifth Avenue, New York’s established cultural institutions, like the venerable Academy of Music, still lingered well to the south. Carnegie Hall helped shift that center of gravity uptown.

Yet the true history of Carnegie Hall lives inside its walls—within the experiences of the audiences and the artists, and, for this week’s show, within the archives themselves. Tom and Greg have been invited into the Carnegie Hall archives for an exclusive, unprecedented encounter with the story of American music.

Kathleen Sabogal and Robert Hudson of the Rose Museum & Archives guide the Bowery Boys through the Hall’s past, using some of their collection’s most cherished artifacts: a clarinet, mysterious locks, ledger books, stickpins, suffrage buttons, beaded jackets, photographs, and autograph books that together bring the spirit of Carnegie Hall vividly to life.

And in the end -- they even take to the stage!

Visit the website for more information and to listen to more episodes of the Bowery Boys podcast. You can also watch this show on YouTube.

This episode was proudly sponsored by Carnegie Hall. Visit CarnegieHall.org for information on upcoming shows, including the United in Sound: America at 250 festival, a multifaceted reflection of the United States 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

This episode was produced and edited by Kieran Gannon

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Once upon a time, the streets of the Lower East Side were lined with pushcarts and salespeople haggling with customers over the price of fruits, fish and pickles. Whatever became of them?

New York’s earliest marketplaces were large and surprisingly well regulated hubs for commerce that kept the city fed. When the city was small, they served the hungry population well.

But by the mid 19th century, mass waves of immigration and the necessary expansion of the city meant a lack of affordable food options for the city’s poorest residents in overcrowded tenement districts.

Then along came the peddler, pushcart vendors who brought bargains of all types — edible and nonedible — to neighborhood streets throughout the city. In particular, on the Lower East Side, the pushcarts created makeshift marketplaces.

Many shoppers loved the set-up! But not a certain mayor — Fiorello La Guardia, who promised to sweep away these old-fashioned pushcarts that packed the streets — and instead house some of those vendors in new municipal market buildings.

For those immigrant peddlers, the Essex Street Market — in sight of the Williamsburg Bridge — would provide a diverse shopping experience representing a swirl of various cultures: Eastern European, Puerto Rican, Italian and more.

But could these markets survive competition from supermarkets? Or the many economic changes of life in New York City?

Originally released in November 2020. This show was re-edited and remastered by Kieran Gannon

 

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In 1889, Robert Ray Hamilton, great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton, became ensnared in a sensational web of deceit — forged identities, attempted murder, and brazen fraud that captured headlines across the country. Although this gripping saga played out over a two-year period, it has largely faded from public memory.

 In his book The Scandalous Hamiltons, author Bill Shaffer resurrects the scandal in vivid detail. Bill joins The Gilded Gentleman to unravel this astonishing true-crime drama, a story that shocked Gilded Age readers and is sure to raise eyebrows even today.

This show is brought to you by The Gilded Gentleman podcast, produced by the Bowery Boys and edited and produced by Kieran Gannon.

 

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Why is the West Village both historically important and incredibly expensive? In the final part of our West Village mini-series, we look at the elements that define the modern neighborhood — from battles with Robert Moses to the protests that galvanized the gay-rights movement.

The 19th-century charms of the old Village seem timeless, but they survive thanks to the 1969 Greenwich Village Historic District. The fight to save the neighborhood, however, began two decades earlier, and those early conflicts even popularized the name “West Village.” Jane Jacobs, fresh off the publication of her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, would become the leading voice in protecting this uniquely New York enclave.

That same year, clashes between police and patrons at the Stonewall Inn united the area’s LGBT residents, culminating in the first Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade (today’s NYC Pride March). A vibrant, radical queer culture flourished — from leather bars to the Christopher Street Piers.

In the 1980s, thousands of New Yorkers died of AIDS, and St. Vincent’s Hospital became known for its pioneering care. Today, long-running establishments like the Monster and Julius’ form a kind of “legacy cultural district,” linking present-day nightlife to those transformative years.

In the 1990s, pop-cultural phenomena Friends and Sex and the City (which made one Perry Street brownstone famous) brought international attention to the neighborhood. By the 21st century, the West Village had become a luxury enclave, even as its history was further elevated with Stonewall’s designation as a U.S. National Monument.

This episode was produced and edited by Kieran Gannon

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In Part Two of our mini-series, The Streets of the West Village, we turn to the people who gave the neighborhood its character and vitality — from Irish longshoremen on the docks to actors on the off-Broadway stage, from street gangs to speakeasy proprietors. From Eugene O’Neill to Bea Arthur, their stories help define this corner of Manhattan.

Well into the early 19th century, the West Village still felt like a true village, with its preserved, winding lanes. Over the following decades, a diverse array of residents arrived and made the neighborhood their own, working along the waterfront or gathering at local haunts like the beloved White Horse Tavern.

The promise of a new subway line once seemed entirely beneficial, but it brought a devastating consequence: Seventh Avenue had to be extended straight through the western Village, cutting a swath through the existing streetscape and wiping away hundreds of buildings. 

Prohibition and the Jazz Age are seemingly etched into the very fabric of the West Village, reflected in the many institutions that date from the 1920s and ’30s, including numerous former speakeasies. Join us as we wander through the Jazz Age Village — Fedora, Chumley’s, the Cherry Lane Theatre, and more — and trace the echoes of that exuberant era.

This episode was produced and edited by Kieran Gannon.

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