History, Natural History & the Arts
The Bowery is one of Manhattan’s oldest “streets,” dating back to the Dutch days of New Amsterdam. It runs along the path Director-General Peter Stuyvesant took from his home at the tip of the island to his farm, which the Dutch called his bouwerij.
In the 1870s, it ran about a mile from Printing House Square to 8th street. Printing House Square was the heart of the city’s newspaper business, where Park Row is today. [Read more…] about A Walk Up the Bowery, Circa 1872
In 1912, Margaret Sanger was living in Manhattan with her husband Bill and their three children. She and Bill dabbled in radical politics, inviting socialists, anarchists, Wobblies, and intellectuals into their home. They debated issues with the likes of Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, and Jack Reed. Arguing fiercely, they were all so determined to change the world in those days.
Sanger worked as a nurse, specializing in obstetrics. She visited her pregnant patients in their homes, a woman’s bedroom being much preferred for lying in than a hospital. Many were middle-class wives of lawyers, salesmen, and clerks, but calls from the tenements of the Lower East Side drew her as if by some magnetic force. [Read more…] about The Woman Rebel: Margaret Sanger’s Epiphany
People arriving in New York City for the first time have had reactions ranging from fascination to astonishment to horror. Here are six of their perspectives ranging from 1915 to 1967, from a journalist, a poet/artist, a Socialist, a suffragist, a travel writer, and a songstress. [Read more…] about New York City Newcomers: Six Perspectives, 1915-1967
Early in 1872, a young woman named Emma Couch hurried along Bleecker Street on a mission. Bleecker was New York’s most bohemian thoroughfare. Stately mansions testified to the wealth and fashion formerly inhabiting its blocks. Now signs on their facades offered cheap lodgings and cheap meals.
Despite its aging, the street lacked the weariness of Greene and Mercer running south, nor did it suffer the degeneracy of the Bowery, at which it ended. Rather, Bleecker had emerged from its fall from grace with the vibrancy of Paris. [Read more…] about #MeToo in 1872: On Beats and Hussies
Niblo’s Garden was a venerable name in the theater business. Its first shows dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson. The finest Shakespeareans and grandest divas graced its stage. Its audiences witnessed New York debuts of Italian operas, the dancing of the polka, and the military antics of the French Zoaves. The original theater at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street burned in 1846. Newly rebuilt on the same spot, Niblo’s reopened in 1849.
The theater’s greatest triumph opened on a September evening in 1866. The ballet corps of The Black Crook pranced out before an overflow crowd. [Read more…] about The Black Crook: Burlesque Comes to New York
Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherland, was the stiffest of men, outraged by immoral behavior. He must have nearly burst in anger when Broad Advice was published in 1649.
Purporting to offer advice to the West India Company, this pamphlet really delivered a libelous screed against Stuyvesant and his predecessor Director Willem Kieft. [Read more…] about Peter Stuyvesant and Judith Bayard: A Romance
At 11:56 on the morning of November 7, 1918, the United Press Association in New York City received a cable from its Paris agent. “Urgent. Armistice Allies Germany signed, eleven morning. Hostilities ceased.” Three minutes later the message passed the censor, and minutes after that the news hit the street. “WAR OVER,” screamed the New York Evening World in its biggest type ever. [Read more…] about The False Armistice of World War One
At Tony Pastor’s Opera House, one of the more respectable establishments on The Bowery in 1872, the impresario sang of the gulf separating the city’s Upper Ten Thousand and Lower Ten Thousand. But whether blue-blood on Fifth Avenue or down-and-out in Five Points, everyone in New York City could enjoy a good party. [Read more…] about Partying in New York’s Gilded Age
Long before the recent calls for “Patriotic Education,” New York State undertook its own program to promote “Americanism” in the classroom.
The effort kicked off in Brooklyn’s Commercial High School. On January 14, 1919, teacher Benjamin Glassberg opened a discussion about Bolshevism in his history class. [Read more…] about Americanism in the Classroom: New York’s Teacher Witch-Hunt
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