The Bowery Boys: New York City History

The history of pizza in the United States begins in Manhattan in the late 19th century, on the streets of Little Italy (and Nolita), within immigrant-run bakeries that transformed a traditional southern Italian food into something remarkable.

But new research discovered in recent years has changed New York food history, revealing an origin tale slightly older than what the old guide books may have you believe.

Understanding the history of American pizza is important because it's a food that brings people together, young and old -- from pizza parties to corner slice places, from classic traditional pies to the latest upscale innovations.

Pizza lovers of all kinds -- even you, Chicago deep-dish lovers -- will find much to enjoy in this show, tracing the early origins of American pizza and specifically how New York City-style pizza was born. (What even is New York style pizza? Even that answer is trickier than you think.)

On this wandering episode -- through Nolita, Greenwich Village and even the Bowery -- Tom and Greg are joined by the prince of pizza himself Scott Wiener of the long-running Scott's Pizza Tours.

Perhaps nobody in New York City knows more about pizza than Scott, and he takes the Bowery Boys on a culinary adventure which includes two of New York's most famous pizza restaurants -- Lombardi's Pizza and John's of Bleecker Street.

And a stop at the most important restaurant-supply store in American pizza history, a place were dreams (and pizza ovens) were once made.

Visit our website for pictures and other information

Our deep thanks to Chicago pizza historian Peter Regas whose research was used in this show.

FURTHER LISTENING: Episodes of the Bowery Boys with similar or related themes

The Big History of Little Italy

The History of the Bagel

Chop Suey City: The History of Chinese Food in New York

A Walk Through Little Caribbean in Brooklyn

A Culinary Tour of the Lower East Side

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In the early morning hours of April 15, 1912. the White Star ocean liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg en route to New York City and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Survivors were rescued by the Cunard liner Carpathia and brought to their berth at Pier 54 on the rainy evening of April 18.

On that very spot today, a fanciful waterfront development juts out into the Hudson River, a place called Little Island which opened in 2021. This recreational oasis will draw thousands of people, New Yorkers and tourists alike, this spring and summer.

But on the southern side of Little Island, peering out of the water, are dozens of wooden posts – these are the remains of the former Pier 54.

And it was on this pier, on April 18, 1912, that survivors of the Titanic disembarked and touched land.

This is the story of the places that figured into the aftermath and the story of how New York memorialized those lost to the tragedy.

And in the end we return to Little Island and to the ghost of Pier 54, the place where this disaster became reality for most people. Where survivors were greeted with joy and where many hundreds of people faced the reality that their loved ones were never coming home. 

Visit our website for images and more information.

FURTHER READING:

A short history of New York City’s various Titanic memorials

The doctor, the heiress and the accidental nanny: New York women who survived the Titanic

A haunting look inside the Lusitania

FURTHER LISTENING:

Chelsea Piers: New York City in the Age of the Ocean Liner
The Complicated History of the Waldorf-Astoria
How Chelsea Became A Neighborhood

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Enter the magical world of New York by gaslight, the city illuminated by the soft, revolutionary glow of lamps powered by gas, an innovative utility which transformed urban life in the 19th century.  

Before the introduction of gaslight in the 1820s, New York was a much darker and quieter place after sunset, its streets lit only by dull, foul-smelling whale-oil lamps. Gaslight was first used in London, and it made its American debut in Newport and Baltimore.

The New York Gas Company received its company charter in 1823 and began to install gas pipes under the street that decade.  With gas-powered lighting, New York really became the city that never slept.

It meant you could work late without your eyes straining – or wander the streets with less apprehension. It meant greater ease reading a book or throwing a lavish ball. Gaslight brought the 19th century city to life in ways that are easy to overlook.

In this episode we're joined by author Jane Brox, author of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light who discusses the curious charms of this rare and enigmatic light source.

FURTHER LISTENING: After you listen to the show about the history of gaslight, check out these past Bowery Boys podcasts with similar themes.

-- Electric New York: With the discovery of electricity, it seemed possible to illuminate the world with a more dependable, potentially inexhaustible energy source.

-- Tesla: The Inventor in Old New York 

-- Building Stuyvesant Town

If you like our show, please consider giving the Bowery Boys podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts

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We just reedited and reworked our 2017 show on Irish immigration in time for St. Patrick’s Day and a celebration of all things Irish! So much has changed in our world since 2017 and this history feels more relevant and impactful than ever before. 

You don’t have a New York City without the Irish. In fact, you don’t have a United States of America as we know it today.

This diverse and misunderstood immigrant group began coming over from Ireland in significant numbers starting in the Colonial era, mostly as indentured servants. In the early 19th century, these Irish arrivals, both Protestants and Catholics, were already consolidating — via organizations like the Ancient Order of the Hibernians and in places like St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

But starting in the 1830s, with a terrible blight wiping out Ireland’s potato crops, a mass wave of Irish immigration would dwarf all that came before, hundreds of thousands of weary, sometimes desperate newcomers who entered New York to live in its most squalid neighborhoods.

The Irish were among the laborers who built the Croton Aqueduct, the New York grid plan and Central Park. Irish women comprised most of the hired domestic help by the mid 19th century.

The arrival of the Irish and their assimilation into American life is a story repeated in many cities. Here in New York City, it is essential in our understanding of the importance of modern immigrant communities to the life of the Big Apple.

PLUS: The origins of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade!

Other shows you may enjoy:

The Civil War Draft Riots
Jacob Riis: 'The Other Half' of the Gilded Age
Battery Park and Castle Clinton
The Story of Five Points
Bowery Boys Movie Club: Gangs of New York

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Wall Street, today a canyon of tall buildings in New York's historic Financial District, is not only one of the most famous streets in the United States, it's also a stand-in for the entire American financial system.

One of the first facts you learn as a student of New York City history is that Wall Street is named for an actual wall that once stretched along this very spot during the days of the Dutch when New York was known as New Amsterdam.

The particulars of the story, however, are far more intriguing. Because the Dutch called the street alongside the wall something very different.

During the colonial era, the wall was torn down and turned into the center of New York life, complete with Trinity Church, City Hall and a shoreline market with a disturbing connection to one New York's financial livelihoods -- slavery.

So how did this street become so associated with American finance? The story involves Alexander Hamilton, a busy coffee house and a very important tree.

Visit the website for more images and information about this subject

More Bowery Boys episodes related to this one:

George Washington's New York Inauguration
Life In New Amsterdam
Land of the Lenape
Tearing Down King George: The Revolutionary Summer of 1776
Trinity Church: Anchor of Wall Street

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Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's stoic portrait and one of the most valuable paintings on earth, came to America during the winter of 1963, a single-picture loan that was both a special favor to Jackie Kennedy and a symbolic tool during tense conversations between the United States and France about nuclear arms.

Its first stop was the National Gallery in Washington DC, where over a half million people spent hours in line to gaze at the famous smile.

Then, on February 7, 1963, she made her debut to the public at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hosted in the medieval sculpture hall for a month-long exhibition that would become one of the museum's most attended shows.

On that first day, thousands lined up outside in the freezing cold to catch a glimpse of the iconic painting. By week's end, a quarter of a million people had visited the museum to see the Italian masterpiece.

PLUS: What's it like guarding precious and iconic works of art like the Mona Lisa? Patrick Bringley, a former guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, joins Greg and Tom in the studio to discuss his new book All The Beauty In The World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, recounting a decade of purpose, sorrow and epiphany while working in America's largest museum. 

Visit our website for images and more details 

After listening to this show, you may also like to listen to these other past episodes:

-- Our history of the Metropolitan Museum on its 150th anniversary
-- Why is the Mona Lisa so famous? Find out why in the Gilded Gentleman's show The Theft of the Mona Lisa
-- Exactly one year to the day after the Mona Lisa came to town, so did these guys.

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Dorothy Catherine Draper is a truly forgotten figure in American history. She was the first woman to ever sit for a photograph — a daguerrotype, in the year 1840, upon the rooftop of the school which would become New York University.

Catherine was the older sister of professor John William Draper, later the founder of the university’s school of medicine. The Drapers worked alongside Samuel Morse in the period following his invention of the telegraph.

The experiments of Draper and Morse, with Catherine as assistant, would set the stage for the entire history of American photography.

The legendary portrait was taken when Miss Draper was a young woman but a renewed interest in the image in the 1890s brought the now elderly matron a bit of late-in-life recognition.

To see the photograph of Draper and other early photography, visit our website. 

This episode originally appeared on Greg’s podcast called The First which had a respectable run a few years ago. The feed for that show will be going away soon so we wanted to present some of that show’s greatest hits over the next few months, in between regular episodes of the Bowery Boys as bonus stories about American history. Enjoy!

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Within the New York City of Edward Hopper's imagination, the skyscrapers have vanished, the sidewalks are mysteriously wide and all the diners and Chop Suey restaurants are sparsely populated with well-dressed lonely people.

In this art-filled episode of the Bowery Boys, Tom and Greg look at Hopper's life, influence and specific fascination with the city, inspired by the recent show Edward Hopper's New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hopper, a native of the Hudson River town of Nyack, painted New York City for over half a decade. In reality, the city experienced Prohibition and the Jazz Age, two world wars and the arrival of automobiles. But not in Hopper's world.

In his most famous work Nighthawks (1942), figures from a dreamlike film appear trapped in an aquarium-shaped diner. But Hopper has captured something else in this iconic painting: fear and paranoia. No wonder he's considered a huge influence on Hollywood film noir and detective stories.

Hopper painted New York from his studio overlooking Washington Square Park, and both he and his wife Josephine Nivison Hopper would become true fixtures of the Greenwich Village scene.

PLUS: Tom visits the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York, to talk the artist's early life with executive director Kathleen Motes Bennewitz. And Greg finds some of the hidden puzzles in Hopper's paintings thanks to American art historian Rena Tobey.

Visit the website for more pictures and other interesting information from this episode.

Other Bowery Boys episodes related to this one:

-- The Armory Show of 1913
-- Jane Jacobs: Saving Greenwich Village
-- New York University:  A School For The Metropolis
-- Tragic Muse: The Life of Audrey Munson

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In the 19th century, the Fulton Fish Market in downtown Manhattan was to seafood what the Chicago stock yards were to the meat industry, the primary place where Americans got fish for their dinner tables.

Over the decades it went from a retail market to a wholesale business, distributing fish across the country – although as you’ll hear, that was a bit tricky in the days before modern refrigeration.

Today its former home is known by a more familiar name -- the South Street Seaport, a historical district that has undergone some incredible changes in just the past half century. The fish market, once an awkward staple of this growing tourist destination, moved to the Bronx in 2005. But you can still find ghosts of the old market along these historic stone streets.

And you can still find delicious seafood at the Seaport. And the Tin Building has taken dining in the neighborhood to the next level, literally in the architectural remains of a former fish market building.

On this show, we'll be joined by professor Jonathan H. Rees, author of the new book The Fulton Fish Market: A History. By the end of our conversation today, we're confident that you'll never look at the fish section of your local grocer in the same way.

MORE SHOWS SIMILAR TO THIS ONE:

-- South Street Seaport
-- Has Jack the Ripper Come to Town?
-- The High Line
-- Essex Street Market
 

Visit our website for more stories and images from New York City History.

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New York City has a new landmark, a little bar in the West Village named Julius', officially recognized by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on December 6th, 2022. 

Now it may not look like much from the outside, but it's here that one moment of protest (the Sip-In of 1966) set the stage for a political revolution, “a signature event in the battle for LGBTQ+ people to gather, socialize, and celebrate openly in bars, restaurants, and other public places.”

So we thought it would be a great time to revisit our 2019 show on the history of Julius'  and a look at the life of gays and lesbians in the mid 20th century. But this show also features an interview -- recorded at Julius' of course -- with When Brooklyn Was Queer author Hugh Ryan who was just on our recent show on the history of Jefferson Market and the Women’s House of Detention .

PLUS there’s even a tie-in to the Worlds Fair of 1964, linking to our last episode.

Visit our website for photographs and more details -- boweryboyshistory.com

This episode features an audio interview clip from the podcast Making Gay History, as well as a musical clip of 'I Hear A Symphony' by The Supremes (Motown).

Our thanks to Andrew Berman of Village Preservation for allowing us to use audio from the 2022 historic plaque unveiling

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