The Bowery Boys: New York City History – Détails, épisodes et analyse

What was Times Square before the electric billboards, before the Broadway theaters and theme restaurants, before the thousands and thousands of tourists?

What was Times Square before it was Times Square? Today it’s virtually impossible to find traces of the area’s 18th and 19th century past. But in this episode, Tom and Greg will peel away the glamour and chaos — evict the Elmos and the pedicabs — to explore a far different world — of colonial estates, rolling farms, horse stables, and beer-themed hotels.

They’ll be ENDING their story today on the date December 31, 1904, when the very first New Year’s Eve celebration was held here – in the plaza newly christened as Times Square. But if you had walked through here fifty years earlier, you certainly would not have called it ‘the crossroads of the world.’

FEATURING: The Vanderbilts, the Pabsts, the Ochs, and the biggest musical of the 1900s! And a few connections in Times Square where you can still find these 19th-century traces of the past.

This show was edited by Kieran Gannon

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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" thanks to the popularity of the ticker-tape parade.

While many cities with skyscrapers host ticker-tape parades today, New York was the place they originated in the late 19th century and for a very obvious reason -- the ticker-tape itself, a byproduct of the Financial District which revolutionized the way stocks were traded.

New York has regularly honored athletes, politicians, pilots, kings and queens, astronauts and generals with ticker-tape parades for over 125 years. Today, they're best known as a way to celebrate New York sports teams, the winners of the World Series, the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup.

The story of the ticker-tape parade is also a story of modern American history in capsule form, celebrating technological achievements, victories in war, cultural milestones and international unity.

Greg and Tom are back in the studio to give you a rundown of New York's greatest parades. And they also pay tribute to those other local heroes -- the Department of Sanitation who cleans up after these festive but messy celebrations.

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Get your tickets for The Gilded Age Unplugged with Greg Young and Carl Raymond (Sept 5 at the Montauk Club) here.

Consider the following show an acknowledgment – of people. For the foundations of 400 years of New York City history were built upon the homeland of the Lenni-Lenape, the tribal stewards of a vast natural area stretching from eastern Pennsylvania to western Long Island. 

The Lenape were among the first in northeast North America to be displaced by white colonists -- the Dutch and the English. By the late 18th century, their way of life had practically vanished upon the island which would be known by some distorted vestige of a name they themselves may have given it – Manahatta, Manahahtáanung or Manhattan.

But the Lenape did not disappear. Through generations of great hardship, they have persevered.

In today’s show, we’ll be joined by two guests who are working to keep Lenape culture and language alive throughout the United States, including here on the streets of New York

-- Joe Baker, enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and a co-founder of the Lenape Center, an organization creating and presenting Lenape art, exhibitions and education in New York. 

-- Ross Perlin, linguist and author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

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, culture and cuisine to the streets of lower Manhattan. And many headed over to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn as well, creating another district for Middle Eastern American culture which would outlast the older Manhattan area.

Who were these Syrian immigrants who made their home here in New York? Why did they arrive? What were their lives like? And although Little Syria truly is long gone, what buildings remain of this extraordinary district?

PLUS: A visit to Sahadi's, a fine food shop that anchors today's remaining Middle Eastern scene in Brooklyn. Greg and Tom head to their warehouse in Sunset Park to get some insight on the shop's historic connections to the first Syrian immigrants.

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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 with these great artists, Audrey Munson disappeared from the New York art world, caught up in a murder scandal that would unfairly ruin her reputation.

And on her 40th birthday she would be locked away forever.

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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 and brought sophisticated new ideas to this exceptional hotel geared towards middle-class and business travelers.

But the Hotel Pennsylvania would have another claim to fame during the Swing Era. Its restaurants and ballrooms -- particularly the Café Rouge -- would feature some of the greatest names of the Big Band Era.

Glenn Miller played the Cafe Rouge many times at the height of his orchestra's fame. He was so associated with the hotel that one of his biggest hits is a tribute -- "Pennsylvania 6-5000."

The hotel outlived the demolition of the original Penn Station, but it currently sits empty and faces imminent demolition thanks to an ambitious new plan to rehabilitate the neighborhood.

What will be the fate of this landmark to music history? Is this truly the last dance for the Hotel Pennsylvania?

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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 private carriages -- or, much worse, pulling street trolleys, often overloaded with New Yorkers trying to get to work or home?

In the book, “A Traitor to His Species”, author Ernest Freeberg tells the story of these animals -- and of their protector, Henry Bergh, the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). He ran the organization from the 1860s to the 1880s, and was a celebrity in his day -- widely covered, and widely mocked for his unflinching defense of the humane treatment of all animals, even the lowliest pesky birds or turtles.

His story is full of surprising turns, and offers an inside account of the early fight for animal rights, and engrossing tales of Gilded Age New York from a new perspective -- the animal’s perspective!

Ernest Freeberg is a distinguished professor of humanities and head of the history department at the University of Tennessee.

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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 caught on, especially in southern United States.

New Yorkers really caught the ice craze in the 1830s thanks to an exceptionally clear lake near Nyack. Within two decades, shops and restaurants regularly ordered ice to serve and preserve foods. And with the invention of the icebox, people could even begin buying it up for home use.

The ice business was so successful that — like oil and coal — it became a monopoly. Charles W. Morse and his American Ice Company controlled most of the ice in the northeast United States by the start of the 20th century.

He was known as the Ice King. And he had one surprising secret friend — the Mayor of New York City Robert A. Van Wyck.

PLUS: The 19th century technologies that allowed American to harvest and store ice. The Iceman cometh!

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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 Gate, 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 Hospital, a quarantine hospital for New Yorkers with smallpox, tuberculosis and many more contagious illnesses.

Greg takes the reigns in this show and leads you through the following tales featuring North Brother Island:

-- A bizarre incident -- involving a body found in the waters off the island -- which first put the place on the map;

-- The nightmarish city policy of 'forced exile' to battle the spread of disease in the city's poorest quarters;

-- The tragic crash of the General Slocum steamship;

-- The complicated struggles of Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary;

-- The implausible tale of a 1950s rehab center for teenage drug addicts.

Visit the website for images and videos of North Brother Island.

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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, much older!

Join us as we explore the unusual history of this building, through ill-executed fireworks, disgruntled architects, and its near-destruction — to be saved only by a man named Grosvenor Atterbury.

PLUS: We look at the park area itself, a common land that once catered to livestock, British soldiers, almshouses and a big, garish post office.

This is a reedited and remastered version of episode #93 featuring an all-new, very special 'Choose Your Own Adventure' challenge at the end.

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