Podcasts about New York City, New York

The loudest thing on this page is the city budget. Mayor Mamdani, Hochul, the City Council and Albany recur across the politics shows, and the arguments are about levers: on Max Politics, Annemarie Gray puts the cost of SEQRA delays at $82,000 per new apartment; on After Hours with Jamie Rubin, Liz Glazer calls Rikers a staffing and control problem, not a jail problem. The second sound is the past, a large share of the shows, from the Bowery Boys on Judge Crater to Jacob Riis read chapter by chapter. Everyday life is the small part, and the sport is NYCFC on one show and the Mets, Knicks and St. John's on another.

What New York City is

New York City is the largest city in the United States: five boroughs — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island — at the mouth of the Hudson, with more than eight million residents. It is the country's financial, media and theater capital, run by a mayor and a City Council whose taxing power is shared with, and often limited by, the state government in Albany.

City Hall, Albany and the money

Max Politics stays closest to the officials. Its titles are budget season by name — Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Finance Chair Linda Lee, Comptroller Mark Levine, Senator Gustavo Rivera — and its clips are numbers: Levine says the housing voucher program is growing 4% a month and will pass $2.5 billion next year. Indy Audio comes at the same money from the labor side, with Ligia Gualpa on new laws for 80,000 app delivery workers and $21.44 minimum pay, Belinda Hugh on the No More 24 Act to end 24-hour home-care shifts, and a talk with Peter Sterne on why property tax is the only lever the Council holds without Albany; it sounds like serious public radio, out to educate as much as persuade. Revolutions Per Minute, NYC-DSA's own radio, ranges wider, from a New York election-night special to fascism in the UK and abortion rights in Arizona.

After Hours with Jamie Rubin and Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know are both measured interview shows that expect the listener to keep up, and they pull in opposite directions. Rubin's is about systems: the Rikers episode has Steve Martin on a consent decree meant to lower violence while the jails got worse, and the story of a man held on a probation hold for something like three years who killed himself after his case was dismissed. Benítez's is about the people inside the politics, drawn out with long, layered questions: State Senator Erik Bottcher on a suicide attempt and Four Winds Medical Center and, in the same conversation, on procurement, which he calls shameful; Luis Miranda calling Trump "pure evil". Uptown Chats, from WE ACT for Environmental Justice, holds the energy beat — New York's 6-gigawatt solar target against the 80 needed to decarbonize, PFAS — under titles like "Energy Justice in New York" and "Heat Pumps".

Police, fire and the jail

Break in the Case is NYPD detectives retelling cases, and its clips are procedure: the 80-20 listening rule ESU negotiators use, why a grab is a last resort, and, in the multi-part Brooklyn Job, Owen McCaffrey picking four officers from 20 for a raid he believes has a 50-50 chance of killing them, then opening a black bag to find pipes, nails, batteries and wires. Throwback FDNY, from the New York City Fire Museum, dates its titles by year — 1911 and Frances Perkins at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, 1960 and an aircraft carrier burning at the Brooklyn Navy Yard — and one clip is Christine Godek, whose Red Cap arson patrols were credited with cutting structural fires 11 percent and vacant-building fires 37 percent. The LaGuardia and Wagner Archives podcast adds the Knapp Commission and Frank Serpico's split of the department into 10% corrupt, 10% honest and 80% wishing they were.

The city as it was

The Bowery Boys sounds like a walking tour built by two people: Greg Young and Tom Meyers trade the practical framing question and the archival answer, moving from map to date to anecdote. The Judge Crater clip is the model — showgirls at the Club Abbey, Dutch Schultz's speakeasy in the Hotel Harding on West 54th Street, Stella Crater back from Maine finding three envelopes with $6,690 in cash and a memo of who owed her husband money — and the titles are neighborhoods: SoHo, Downtown Brooklyn, "Little Italy: From Immigrant Enclave To Italian Theme Park (Rewind)".

Two audiobooks go further back: How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis's 1890 tenement study, with its cigarmaking families on East Tenth Street, and Round the Block, John Bell Bouton's 1864 novel of schemes. Rediscovering New York, filed under neighborhood history, is heard here on Eloise and the Plaza, and on how Louise Fitzhugh parodied it before Harriet the Spy. THE QUEENS NEW YORKER is Jason DeCanio's solo monologue from dense research notes, anchored in Queens: Talking Heads and an $80 million reunion tour reportedly turned down, the Daily News at its 2.4 million-copy peak in 1947. Sic Transit Gloria is heard as city-kid memory, Vivian on Bronx Science house parties and a Jackson Hole on 2nd Avenue that is no longer there.

Stages, studios and the year 2101

Soundcheck is performance-led — the titles are marked In-Studio — and the talk stays close to the songs: Julia Úlehla of Dálava on singing a Moravian folk song to her daughters as a lullaby because they do not speak Czech. City Ballet The Podcast is New York City Ballet's own: Russell Jansen on the space Pam Tanowitz makes for dancers to explore without pressure, from the original cast of Law of Mosaics. BROADWAY HOUR is an archive of a 1993-1996 broadcast from the Sheraton, stage-savvy talk that moves quickly from one memory to the next: the Jule Styne special with its story of a $250-a-week job at Republic Pictures, and Jed Bernstein arguing Broadway has to sell the live experience because it is not a CD-ROM moment. Fun City is the fiction set ahead rather than behind, an actual-play RPG in the New York of 2101, after climate catastrophe, and its clips are body horror, a 125-body flesh sphere among them.

The teams

HRB Podcast is New York City FC from a supporter panel that slides from banter into match analysis, and its clips run from grievance — dreading NYCFC II sent out in Westchester for the US Open Cup under NYCFC's name, 18-year-old Maximo Carrizo used as a late fix while Maxi Moralez was visibly gassed — to Tavon Gray's 99th-minute header for a road win in Philly. 2 Dummies That Just Watch, with Will Hernandez and LeeJay Parrilla, is the group-chat version of everything else: Mets, Yankees, Knicks, Giants and Jets in the titles, St. John's in the clips with 16 Duke turnovers turned into 18 points, and a Knicks-Spurs game where San Antonio attempted 24 second-half free throws to New York's eight.

Arriving

Coming to New York City Podcast is Nils and Katie Smith on moving a family of four from Texas, and its clips are the practical end of the page: Katie rating Greenpoint nine out of ten with the subway as its weakness, and Patti, at 65, telling hesitant retirees to do it tomorrow and, on safety, that common sense is enough and that she does not go out alone past ten at night.

Where to start

• For the budget and who controls what: Max Politics for the officials, Indy Audio for the organizers, and the Rikers episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.
• For the past: The Bowery Boys, then Throwback FDNY or the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives.
• For sport: HRB Podcast for NYCFC, 2 Dummies That Just Watch for the rest.
• For a stage: Soundcheck or City Ballet The Podcast.

The New York City feed on this page plays clips from these shows.