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Historic Sites

By Kim Velsey 3/26 4:55pm

Historic Sites

The Bowery Mission

The Bowery Boys Push Back: Preservation Effort For Manhattan’s Historic Thoroughfare Gathers Steam

“This is a street that predates Manhattan. It has been one of the finest addresses in the city and it has been skid row, and now it’s changing again,” said Bill Wander, offering an extremely brief history of the Bowery.

We were standing with Mr. Wander, historian for McSorley’s Old Ale House (yes, McSorley’s has a historian), in the Bowery Hotel, surrounded by other historians, preservationists, punk rockers, poets, Italian bakers and many a downtown bar veteran who had gathered to celebrate the Bowery’s recent listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Read More

By Emily Witt 12/14/11 2:36pm

Historic Sites

The house as Updike knew it.

John Updike's Boyhood Home is For Sale

“When I was born, my parents and my mother’s parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood,” wrote John Updike. “This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age, was, in a sense, me.” Updike might now be gone, but the dogwood tree is still outside his boyhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and the house where the author spent his first 13 years is now for sale on Ebay. Read More