The Bowery ()"Bowery" (US) and is a street and neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City, New York. The street runs from Chatham Square at Park Row, Worth Street, and Mott Street in the south to Cooper Square at 4th Street in the north.Jackson, Kenneth L. "Bowery" in , p. 148 The eponymous neighborhood runs roughly from the Bowery east to Allen Street and First Avenue, and from Canal Street north to Cooper Square/East Fourth Street.citidex.com 2006; Fodor's 1991 The neighborhood roughly overlaps with Little Australia. To the south is Chinatown, to the east are the Lower East Side and the East Village, and to the west are Little Italy and NoHo.Manhattan: City Council, Assembly, and State Senate (map) It has historically been considered a part of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
In the 17th century, the road branched off Broadway north of Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan to the homestead of Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of New Netherland. The street was known as Bowery Lane prior to 1807.Brown, 1922 "Bowery" is an anglicization of the Dutch , derived from an antiquated Dutch word for "farm": In the 17th century the area contained many large farms.
The New York City Subway's Bowery station, serving the BMT Nassau Street Line (), is located close to the Bowery's intersection with Delancey and Kenmare Streets. There is a tunnel under the Bowery at Confucius Plaza, intended for use by a never-completed portion of the Second Avenue Subway. The M103 bus runs on the entire Bowery.
History
Colonial and Federal periods The Bowery is the oldest thoroughfare on Manhattan Island, preceding European intervention as a Lenape footpath, which spanned roughly the entire length of the island, from north to south.Sanderson, Eric W. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, 2009, p. 107, illus. "Lenape sites and trails", and Ch. 4 "The Lenape", passim. When the Dutch settled Manhattan island, they named the path Bouwerie road – "bouwerie" (or later "bouwerij") being an old Dutch word for "farm"In modern Dutch, boerderij – because it connected farmlands and estates on the outskirts to the heart of the city in today's Wall Street/Battery Park area.
In 1654, the Bowery's colonial residents settled in the area of Chatham Square; ten freedmen and their wives set up cabins and a cattle farm there. Petrus Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam before the English took control, retired to his Bowery farm in 1667. After his death in 1672, he was buried in his private chapel. His mansion burned down in 1778 and his great-grandson sold the remaining chapel and graveyard, now the site of the Episcopal church of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.Fodor's 2004
In her Journal of 1704–05, Sarah Kemble Knight describes the Bowery as a leisure destination for residents of New York City in December:
Their Diversions in the Winter is Riding Sleys about three or four Miles out of Town, where they have Houses of entertainment at a place called Bowery, and some go to friends Houses who handsomely treat them. [...] I believe we mett 50 or 60 slays that day – they fly with great swiftness and some are so furious that they'le turn out of the path for none except a Loaden Cart. Nor do they spare for any diversion the place affords, and sociable to a degree, they'r Tables being as free to their Naybours as to themselves.
By 1766, when John Montresor made his detailed plan of New York,The relevant section is illustrated in Sanderson 2009, p. 41, bottom. "Bowry Lane", which took a more north-tending track at the rope walk, was lined for the first few streets with buildings that formed a solid frontage, with market gardens behind them; when Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist for Mozart's Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Così fan tutte, immigrated to New York City in 1806, he briefly ran one of the shops along the Bowery, a fruit and vegetable store. In 1766, straight lanes led away at right angles to gentlemen's seats, mostly well back from the dusty "Road to Albany and Boston", as it was labeled on Montresor's map; Nicholas Bayard's was planted as an avenue of trees. James Delancey's grand house, flanked by matching outbuildings, stood behind a forecourt facing Bowery Lane; behind it was his parterre garden, ending in an exedra, clearly delineated on the map.
The Bull's Head Tavern was noted for George Washington's having stopped there for refreshment before riding down to the waterfront to witness the departure of British troops in 1783. Leading to the Post Road, the main route to Boston, the Bowery rivaled Broadway as a thoroughfare; as late as 1869, when it had gained the "reputation of cheap trade, without being disreputable" it was still "the second principal street of the city".Smith, Matthew Hale. Sunshine and Shadow in New York, 1869, p. 214.
Early growth
As the population of New York City continued to grow, its northern boundary continued to shift northward, and by the early 1800s the Bowery was no longer a farming area outside the city. The street gained in respectability and elegance, becoming a broad boulevard, as well-heeled and famous people moved their residences there, including Peter Cooper, the industrialist and philanthropist. The Bowery began to rival Fifth Avenue as an address.
When Lafayette Street was opened parallel to the Bowery in the 1820s, the Bowery Theatre was founded by prominent families on the site of the Red Bull Tavern, which had been purchased by Andrew Morris and John Jacob Astor; it opened in 1826 and was the largest auditorium in North America at the time. Across the way the Bowery Amphitheatre was erected in 1833, specializing in the more populist entertainments of equestrian shows and circuses. From stylish beginnings, the tone of Bowery Theatre's offerings matched the slide in the social scale of the Bowery itself.
Economic decline
By the time of the Civil War, the mansions and shops had given way to popular music halls, brothels, beer gardens, pawn shops, and flophouses, like the one at No. 15 where the composer Stephen Foster lived in 1864.; A highly colored and disapproving panorama of the dissolute and lively Bowery on a Sunday is offered by Smith 1869, pp. 214–18. Theodore Dreiser closed his tragedy Sister Carrie, set in the 1890s, with the suicide of one of the main characters in a Bowery flophouse. The Bowery, which marked the eastern border of the slum of "Five Points", had also become the turf of one of America's earliest street gangs, the nativist Bowery Boys. In the spirit of social reform, the first YMCA opened on the Bowery in 1873;Levinson, David ed. (2004). The Encyclopedia of Homelessness, s.v. "Bowery, The". another notable religious and social welfare institution established during this period was the Bowery Mission, founded in 1880 at 36 Bowery by Reverend Albert Gleason Ruliffson. The mission has remained along the Bowery throughout its lifetime. In 1909 the mission moved to its current location at 227–229 Bowery.
By the 1890s, the Bowery was a center for prostitution that rivaled the Tenderloin, also in Manhattan, and for bars catering to gay men and some lesbians at various social levels, from The Slide at 157 Bleecker Street, New York's "worst dive",Chauncey, George (1994) Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books. p. 37 to Columbia Hall at 5th Street, called Paresis Hall. One investigator in 1899 found six saloons and dance halls, the resorts of "degenerates" and "fairies", on the Bowery alone.Chauncey 1994:33. Gay subculture was more highly visible there and more integrated into working-class male culture than it became in the following generations, according to historian George Chauncey.
From 1878 to 1955 the Third Avenue El ran above the Bowery, further darkening its streets, populated largely by men. "It is filled with employment agencies, cheap clothing and knickknack stores, cheap moving-picture shows, cheap lodging-houses, cheap eating-houses, cheap saloons", writers in The Century Magazine found it in 1919. "Here, too, by the thousands come sailors on shore leave, – notice the 'studios' of the tattoo artists, – and here most in evidence are the 'down and outs'".Frank, Mary and Carr, John Foster, "Exploring a neighborhood", The Century Magazine 98 (July 1919:378). Prohibition eliminated the Bowery's numerous saloons: One Mile House, the "stately old tavern... replaced by a cheap saloon"Frank and Carr 1919:378; the old tavern had been the scene of at least one violent murder, in 1862 ("The Murder in the Bowery", New York Times, 4 November 1862 accessed March 14, 2010. at the southeast corner of Rivington Street, named for the battered milestone across the way,The stone marked a mile from City Hall; it was still in evidence in 1909. Frank Bergen Kelly, Historical Guide to the City of New York (City History Club of New York), 1909:97. where the politicians of the East Side had made informal arrangements for the city's governance,One Mile House by Glenn O. Coleman, 1928 (Whitney Museum of American Art) epitomizes the scene. A ghostly painted sign on the side of the building still advertises One Mile House. was renovated for retail space in 1921, "obliterating all vestiges of its former appearance", The New York Times reported. Restaurant supply stores were among the businesses that had come to the Bowery, Today, the gentrified designation "Cooper Square" extends down the Bowery as far as 4th Street. and many remain to this day.
Pressure for a new name after World War I came to naught and in the 1920s and 1930s, it was an impoverished area. From the 1940s through the 1970s, the Bowery was New York City's "Skid Row," notable for "Bowery Bums" (disaffected alcoholics and homeless persons).Giamo, Benedict, On the Bowery: confronting homelessness in American Society (University of Iowa Press) 1989. Among those who wrote about Bowery personalities was New Yorker staff member Joseph Mitchell (1908–1996). Aside from cheap clothing stores that catered to the derelict and down-and-out population of men, commercial activity along the Bowery became specialized in used restaurant supplies and lighting fixtures. In the 1930s and again in 1947, there were efforts to change the name of the Bowery to something more "dignified and prosaic", such as "Fourth Avenue South".
Revival and gentrification
The vagrant population of the Bowery declined after the 1970s, in part because of the city's effort to disperse it. Since the 1990s the entire Lower East Side has been reviving, and gentrification has contributed to ongoing change along the Bowery. In particular, the number of high-rise condominiums is growing. In 2007, the SANAA-designed facility for the New Museum of Contemporary Art opened between Stanton and Prince Street. In 2008, AvalonBay Communities opened Avalon Bowery Place, its first luxury apartment complex on the Bowery; the structure includes a Whole Foods Market. Avalon Bowery Place was quickly followed with the development of Avalon Bowery Place II.
The new development has not come without social costs. Michael Dominic's 2001 documentary Sunshine Hotel followed the lives of residents of one of the few remaining flophouses. Construction on the Wyndham Garden Hotel at 93 Bowery in the late Aughts destabilized neighboring building 128 Hester Street (owned by the same man, William Su), and 60 tenants were thrown out of the building with the help of the Department of Buildings. At least 75 tenants were displaced from 83 to 85 Bowery in January 2018 in frigid temperatures due to long-overdue repairs that needed to be made. Tenants accused the landlord of using this displacement to start renovating the buildings into a hotel, and they went on a hunger strike.
The Bowery from Houston to Delancey Street still serves as New York's principal market for restaurant equipment and from Delancey to Grand for lamps.
Areas
Upper and Lower Bowery