Big Tim Sullivan, Tammany Hall & New York City

Focusing on the career of Big Tim Sullivan, historian Richard Welch explores the operations of Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine that dominated New York City politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Timothy D. “Big Tim” Sullivan, the King of the Bowery, began as a poor Irish kid from the notorious Five Points district, who went on to leverage his intelligence and ambition to create an impregnable multiethnic political machine on New York’s Lower East Side. Celebrating Irish American Heritage Month and 250 years of American History, this program presents a rich excursion into Gotham on the cusp of the modern age through the life a career of the man who exemplified much of it.