The Bowery B’hoy

Today’s reading for vWNY is Benjamin Baker’s 1848 play A Glance at New York, best known for introducing NYC’s homegrown folk hero, Mose the Bowery B’hoy, to the American stage. The full text doesn’t seem to be available online, but you...

RIP 35 Cooper Square

Top image (The Bowery in the 1860s, looking south from Cooper Square) via NYPL. Photo of scaffolding on 35 Cooper Sq. and final image, below, via EV Grieve. As Grieve, Jeremiah, and Local East Village have all reported, there will be no reprieve for 35 Cooper Square,...

Get your flash on

The aim of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was to situate Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass within the nineteenth-century city’s worlds of print, from the highbrow publishing industry to cheap print, penny presses, flash weeklies, and...