Tom Meyers, Greg Young
500 episodes listed below
Greg Young and Tom Meyers explain how New York City's streets took shape.
The Bowery Boys is a New York history show built around places listeners can still picture, walk past, or look up on a map. Its episodes move from Carnegie Hall and the West Village to pushcart markets, blizzards, tunnels, and the small scraps of evidence cities leave behind.
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The Bowery Boys is hosted by Greg Young and Tom Meyers, who alternate between two-host panel discussions and interviews with outside historians, archivists, and authors. Many episodes are organized around a single New York City neighborhood, such as the West Village, Brooklyn Heights, or the Lower East Side, tracing how street layouts, immigration patterns, and municipal decisions shaped the area over a century or more. Other episodes follow a single event or institution in depth, including the 1835 Great Fire that destroyed hundreds of buildings in lower Manhattan, the invention of the subway token, or the fundraising and construction behind Carnegie Hall and the Statue of Liberty. Guests have included the historian and author Stephen Ujifusa, discussing his book on Gilded Age immigrant shipping executives, and museum staff such as archivists connected to Carnegie Hall's Rose Archives and the Musée Bartholdi in France. At least one sampled episode is a crossover interview conducted by Carl Raymond of The Gilded Gentleman History Podcast rather than a standard in-house segment. Episodes lean on primary sources — census figures, newspaper accounts, archival objects, and named historical actors — rather than anecdote or speculation. Immigration recurs across many episodes, covering Irish and Eastern European Jewish communities and the institutions, from settlement houses to street markets, built around them. The tone throughout is educational and research-driven rather than comedic or sensational. Episode length varies considerably, from about 35 minutes to over 100 minutes, depending on the scope of the topic. The show is best suited to listeners with a standing interest in New York City specifically, or in urban and immigration history more generally.
Made for: Listeners interested in New York City history, urban development, and immigration history who prefer research-driven, archive-based storytelling over true-crime or celebrity formats.
What sets it apart: Unlike general U.S. history shows, each episode is anchored to a specific New York City street, building, or institution, frequently paired with interviews with historians and archivists tied to that place.
The tides of American history flow through the streets of New York City — from the huddled masses on Ellis Island to the sleazy theaters of 1970s Times Square. Greg and Tom explore more than 400 years of action-packed stories, featuring both classic and forgotten figures who have shaped the world.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
The Bowery Boys reads New York's streets, buildings, archives, and institutions as evidence of how the city acquired its present shape.
Greg Young and Tom Myers treat New York as a city whose history remains visible in buildings, street plans, public institutions, and overlooked corners.
A sidewalk triangle becomes a feud with City Hall, and suddenly your block has lore.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A polished archive-room visit to Carnegie Hall as a stage for music, politics, lectures, and New York memory.
The Bowery Boys treat Carnegie Hall less as a fixed monument than as a room New Yorkers kept reusing for culture, politics, and public performance.
A sharp Lower East Side history of pushcarts as street retail, neighborhood lifeline, and civic headache.
The Bowery Boys treat the Lower East Side pushcart as more than a bit of street color. Greg Young and Tom Myers frame it as a working retail system, one that carried food, clothing, and everyday goods into New York streets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
A street-corner West Village history about demolition, memory, and one stubborn little triangle of sidewalk.
The Bowery Boys frame the West Village as a neighborhood shaped by old domestic comfort, later disruption, and the odd traces left when the city remade its streets.
A grounded West Village origin story, tracing crooked streets, Bank Street, and early growth to epidemics, escape, and development.
The West Village emerges here as both old New York and a later invention: colonial in its roots, newly desirable in waves, and still famous for a street pattern that can leave even confident walkers a little lost.
A vivid Bowery Boys account of the 1888 blizzard as both citywide breakdown and enduring New York memory.
The Great Blizzard of 1888 comes through as a New York systems failure before that phrase existed. Streets vanish under drifts, carriages and carts are left where they stall, phone and telegraph lines go down, papers stop circulating, and trains in and out of the city stop…
A clear, uneasy New York history of fear, tabloids, and the dangerous romance of the vigilante story.
The Bowery Boys takes the 1984 subway shooting as a New York story about fear, race, and the ugly permission structure of vigilante myth. The episode begins with four teenagers shot beneath the city, then widens into the argument that followed: whether fear in a frightening…
A brisk Bowery Boys account of Judge Crater's vanishing, where Tammany influence, Broadway rumor, and police detail crowd the case.
Judge Joseph Force Crater's disappearance begins in the heat of August 1930, with a hurried return from Maine, papers tossed from his courthouse office, cashed checks, locked suitcases, and a cryptic promise to "straighten those fellows out." The Bowery Boys lean into the New…
A smart Brooklyn Heights walk through promenade politics, Beecher, ferries, brownstones, and neighborhood reputation.
Brooklyn Heights enters through a modern headache: the fragile, unloved stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway tucked under the Promenade, with that famous walkway still drawing affection for its view of lower Manhattan.
Multi-part dramatized retellings of scandals like OceanGate's Titan and the Lehman Brothers collapse.
A season-by-season history show pairing dramatized Rasputin and Salem narratives with historian interviews.
Fashion historians April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary dig into garments, letters, and the people who wore them.
Greg Young and Tom Myers visit Carnegie Hall at 57th Street and 7th Avenue and use the hall's Rose Archives to trace how a music venue became a center for American performance history.
Greg Young and Tom Myers return to the Lower East Side.
This episode explores bizarre historical tales from the Gilded Age, including body snatchings, bachelor culture, and a prank at an 1895 cat show in Madison Square Garden.
This episode explores Jane Jacobs' observations of daily life on Hudson Street in the West Village, highlighting her urban theory and activism for neighborhood preservation.
The Bowery Boys' #481, "How The West Village Became A Neighborhood (The Streets of the West Village Part 2)," links the area's odd street layout to land that was left out of the 1811 grid plan and laid out before 1811 on private estates and farms.
Greg Young and Tom Myers open the first of two parts on the West Village by mapping the neighborhood's oldest boundary question: where does Greenwich Village end and the West Village begin?
Greg Young and Tom Myers revisit a classic Bowery Boys episode about the Great Blizzard of 1888.
The Bowery Boys introduces a History This Week story about Alexander Cassatt and the Pennsylvania Railroad's plan to build a mile-long tunnel under the Hudson River.
On the afternoon of December 22nd, 1984, four teenagers were shot aboard the Number 2 train — the 7th Avenue Express — and the city had an immediate argument on its hands.
Joseph Force Crater is 41, well connected, and moving fast through New York's legal world.
The Bowery Boys opens with the problem of the BQE beneath the Brooklyn Promenade, then uses that tension to revisit Brooklyn Heights.
The Bowery Boys episode 477, a solo by host Greg Young, traces the life of Chester A.
Greg Young and Carl Raymond open a live Bowery Boys History recording from City Winery, taped on December 12, 2025.
MetroCards stop being sold at the end of 2025, and Greg Young and Tom Myers use that deadline as a way into a much longer question: what New Yorkers have actually paid to ride, and how that number shifted across the history of city transit.
The Bowery Boys revisits the Great Fire of 1835, which burned 693 buildings across 52 acres of lower Manhattan in a single night, starting from a broken gas line at 25 Merchant Street and spreading through the dry goods district in hurricane-strength winds while firefighters found the East River frozen and water froze on their bodies.
Tom Myers reports from Colmar in the Alsace region and frames the Statue of Liberty as Frederic Auguste Bartholdi’s 1834 birthplace story, not just a New York icon.
Carl Raymond speaks with historian Stephen Ujifusa about The Last Ships from Hamburg, which traces how Albert Ballin, Jacob Schiff, and J.P.
The Bowery Boys episode 473, "The Other Side of Ellis Island," centers on the Contagious Disease Hospital, which was built in 1909 and opened in 1911.
The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree began in 1931 as a 20-foot sapling decorated with tin cans in a muddy construction pit, created by workers who were among the few employed during the Great Depression.
The provided transcript contains only sponsor messages and a live-show promo, not the Bowery Boys episode on Amelia Earhart.
Greg and Tom discuss a new movie about lyricist Lorenz Hart and revisit their past episode on Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, exploring Broadway's golden age.
The episode discusses a ghost story from 1895 in Sag Harbor, New York, as part of a Halloween special.
The episode discusses the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and its impact on New York City and the United States.
This episode explores the history of Dominican migration to New York City, focusing on Washington Heights, with an interview with Dr.
The hosts promote their live ghost stories show and share a guest appearance on another podcast about New York City ghost lore.
This episode covers the history of Battery Park, Castle Clinton, and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in lower Manhattan.
Tom Myers interviews historian Keith Tallien about his Instagram account, walking every block of Manhattan during the pandemic, and his new book on New York City history.
Greg and Tom interview Patrick Brinkley about his book on working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Greg and Tom review Oscar-nominated movies with strong New York City connections, starting with 'Anora' set in Brooklyn.
An interview with Nate DiMeo about history, memory, and podcasting, framed by New York City stories.
Greg and Tom discuss the history and importance of mom-and-pop shops in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens neighborhood.