The ever-changing Bowery

The Bowery is one of the great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life, of varied interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the “Inferno.”

— Theodore Roosevelt from “Dante and the Bowery,” 1913

Over a century ago, in 1913, when former President Teddy Roosevelt penned his essay comparing the Bowery to hell, there were probably few New Yorkers of his social set who disagreed with him. For nearly three decades, the city’s oldest thoroughfare had been stuck under the shadow of the Third Avenue “El,” and the pall cast by the train tracks seemed to touch every aspect of the street.

That same year, the Evening World chronicled the “Amazing Story of ‘The Three Deuces,’ A New York House of Mystery and Crime,” a supposedly blood-stained “haunt of the Bowery’s furtive night people.” On a regular basis, the pages of the New York Times showcased the Bowery’s murders and robberies and published complaints about its many “dive” saloons. By 1913, the song “The Bowery” from the 1891 musical A Trip to Chinatown was already a standard. Its chorus summed up popular opinion:

The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry!

They say such things,

And they do strange things

On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!

I'll never go there anymore!

Today, most New Yorkers view the Bowery as the site of constant construction, home to modern hotels, upscale stores, and $17 million penthouse apartments. However, the street’s former history has proved remarkably durable. From the long-running Bowery Boys film series to Weegee’s famous photographs, from CBGB to Gangs of New York, the public perception of the Bowery is one of toughness mixed with strangeness, as if the lyrics of “The Bowery” still describe the street today. It’s not that unusual to run into someone whose reaction is, even now: “I’ll never go there.”

The true history of the Bowery has always been more nuanced than its skid row reputation. When Roosevelt was writing, the street’s curb appeal may have diminished, but the Bowery remained a cultural draw for Lower Manhattan’s German, Chinese, and Italian residents, with opera houses and theaters crowding its lower blocks. Meanwhile, starting in the 1850s, the Cooper Union anchored its northern terminus, a stalwart academic institution seemingly immune from the Bowery’s woes.

Architecture on the street never flagged, either. In 1894, Stanford White’s gorgeous Bowery Savings Bank rose on the corner of Grand Street; in 1909, Carrère and Hastings finished the Manhattan Bridge; and just over a decade after Roosevelt’s essay, the immense Citizens Savings Bank would go up at the corner of Canal Street. These three Beaux-Arts monuments—all now landmarks—tell a different story of the Bowery, a vibrant capitalist narrative seemingly at odds with Roosevelt’s “sordid and terrible tragedy” of a street where people dared not go.

Not only is the Bowery New York’s oldest street, it is perhaps the one that best embodies these contradictions. It has been poor, rich, violent, cultured, upscale, and downtrodden—all at the same time. It has also served as a buffer between neighborhoods, while never truly being part of those neighborhoods. It has born witness to every facet of New York’s history.

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No one knows the true origin of the Bowery, but parts of it likely date back millennia as a trail blazed by animals making their way to and from Manhattan’s freshwater streams and ponds, such as the Collect Pond, which occupied the space where Lower Manhattan’s courthouses now stand.

Today, we think of the Bowery as only the portion from Chatham Square in Chinatown to Astor Place, but the road’s original path wended south from Chatham Square, more or less following the route of today’s Park Row, to the southern point of City Hall Park. From there, the road continued more or less straight to Manhattan’s southern tip, following a high ridge of land.

By following high ground and skirting Lower Manhattan’s watercourses, the path became the primary American Indian route to and from a major trading and gathering place at today’s Astor Place. The road came to be known as the Wickquasgeck trail, which means, perhaps, “path to the wading place” or “birch-bark country.” As with other American Indian place names, we only have a record of this appellation starting with the European settlement. The Dutch had a tendency to assign American Indian names to people and places, but we have no idea today how historically accurate they are; for the native peoples on Manhattan who used the trail, the Bowery could have had a completely different name.

Whatever it was called, certainly by the time of the Dutch colonization in the early 1620s, the Bowery had already been in use for centuries. Once European settlement began in earnest in 1625, engineer Crijn Fredericksz was dispatched by the Dutch West India Company to survey the spot for a fort (facing today’s Bowling Green) and to stake out property lines, roads, and a number of bouwerij (farms) along the Wickquasgeck trail. The straight southernmost portion of the road in the populated area of New Amsterdam was dubbed the Heere Straat (Gentleman’s Street) and, later, Broadway; the northern spur of the trail was widened to accommodate wagon traffic and, at least informally, soon became known to the new settlers as the “road to the bouwerij.”

These large farms on the outskirts of the Dutch settlement were designed, in part, to help make the colony self-sufficient; over the years, they instead became both a way for local administrators to enrich themselves—in 1632, Director General Wouter van Twiller deeded himself the largest parcel—and then were used as part of the town’s defensive scheme. There was a wall on Wall Street, but the Bowery farms were just as important.

In 1626, the Dutch West India Company had been among the first of the European settlers in North America to import enslaved Africans; two decades later, a number of those enslaved workers were granted their freedom and parcels of land along the Bowery. These men and women were manumitted, in part, because older laborers were less useful to the company; however, by giving out land on the Bowery, the company was also hoping these freed slaves would act as a buffer between the town and the wilderness. Should the town be attacked overland by the English or American Indians, these freed slaves would bear the brunt of the assault.

Among those given land were Domingo Antony, who was granted the “west side of Bowery to the Collect, Canal to south of Bayard or to Pell” on July 13, 1643; that same day, Catelina Antony, “widow of Joachim Antony, negro,” was given “a triangular plot along Bowery to north of Hester.” A few years later, another freed slave named Bastiaen was deeded a “piece of land adjoining … Antony Congo, 200x300 paces in length along the public wagon road….” on March 25, 1647.

Over the next century, ongoing hostility between New York’s white citizens and its black population (both free and enslaved) would push many African Americans out of the city. The 1741 “slave revolt”—which was likely neither a revolt nor primarily led by enslaved Africans—saw 18 of the city’s blacks put to death by hanging, another 13 burned at the stake, and over 70 deported from the colony. Yet the Bowery’s black population would never fully disappear; in the 19th century, the street saw both the birth of African-influenced tap dance and of derogatory minstrelsy. In 1834, the population was still large enough that anti-abolitionists targeted blacks on the Bowery. While Harlem and the Tenderloin later became more famous, and the population today may be small, the Bowery has the longest African-American history of any neighborhood in the city.

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By the time of the English takeover of New Amsterdam in 1664, the Bowery was well-established as the primary route out of the city, connecting to what later became known as the Boston Post Road. In 1651, Peter Stuyvesant, the colony’s last and longest-serving director general, had purchased the northernmost farm along the route, Bowery No. 1, from the Dutch West India Company, and he remained until his death in 1672.

Though the exact site of his country house is unknown, today’s Stuyvesant Street, which cuts at an angle through the later, rectilinear street grid, was the main access road from the Bowery to the farm. It was along that road that Stuyvesant built the private chapel where he was later buried. Though the chapel was knocked down to build St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, Stuyvesant’s grave remains as one of the only physical links to the area’s Dutch history.

During English rule, the town of New York expanded to fill the area between Wall Street and the Commons, but north of that point, the land along the Bowery remained farms and large estates. On Bernard Ratzer’s famous map of New York from 1767, older Dutch names such as Stuyvesant and Tiebout intermingle with newer residents like the Delanceys.

Courtesy The New York Public Library

The Ratzer map is also the last time that the entire length of road north of the Commons is indicated simply as “the Bowery Lane.” After the American Revolution, the wide place in today’s Chinatown where the Bowery curved northward was renamed Chatham Square in honor of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, who died in 1788. Even earlier, the section of the Bowery south of Chatham Square that we today call Park Row had been similarly dubbed Chatham Street. (The earl, a champion of American liberty, is also honored by the Lower East Side’s Pitt Street and places like Pittsburgh.)

The oldest buildings on the Bowery date from this period. The most famous is the landmarked Edward Mooney house at 18 Bowery, which is likely the oldest brick townhouse remaining in Manhattan, built in circa 1785. Two doors down at 14 Bowery stands a Georgian home that probably dates to the same year, when New York was capital of the United States, and George Washington himself lived a six-minute walk away at the corner of Rose and Pearl Streets, just one block from the Bowery. Nearby, at 50 Bowery, would have stood the famous Bull’s Head Tavern (long since demolished), where Washington stopped during his triumphal return to the city on November 25, 1783.

The rapid development of the lower Bowery during the Federal era was the result of many connected factors: the increase in the city’s population after the Revolution; the growing consolidation of the butchering trade around the Collect Pond; and the confiscation of British loyalists’ land, which was then broken up into smaller lots, after the war.

Between 1785 and 1800, New York’s population surged from about 15,000 people to nearly 60,000. The city needed a larger food supply, and even before the war, the lower Bowery began to attract the meat industry. In 1750, a public slaughterhouse was established on the banks of the Collect Pond, and that same year the Bull’s Head Tavern opened as a drover’s watering hole, with a large stockyard next door at 46-48 Bowery, where cattlemen could bring their animals to be sold.

It’s not surprising that Edward Mooney, “an important figure in the wholesale meat business,” wanted to live nearby—though I imagine the smell on hot days must have been horrific. Mooney bought his parcel of land from the Delancey estate—one of those confiscated and resold after the war—at auction from the Commissioners of Forfeiture in 1785, and he presumably built his home that same year.

As noted in the home’s landmarks designation report, 18 Bowery is wonderfully preserved, with much of the home’s original exterior intact, including “splayed stone lintels with double keystone blocks … above most of the windows. At the gable end of the house … the garret floor is lighted by a central round-headed window, the upper sash of which contains original wooden tracery.” Surprisingly, the interior “also discloses many original architectural details including, in the earliest section, window frames and trim….”

By contrast, 14 Bowery has been so altered over time that it is hard to tell it’s a Federal building, though intact keystone lintels give a clue to its heritage. (Farther up the street, 76 Bowery appears to be from the same era, with the same window treatments and visible Flemish bond brickwork, but it has also been severely altered over time.)

There are other vestiges of the area’s life as the city’s meatpacking district: The 1901 York & Sawyer bank building at 124 Bowery (at Grand) replaced the earlier Butchers & Drovers Bank on that spot; up at 140 Bowery, a butcher is listed as the resident as early as 1799; and John Brown’s Porterhouse, a tavern for butchers, occupied the ground floor of 208 Bowery (at Rivington). That building, built around 1810, is a signal that as the city’s population edged northward, the butchers were also being pushed uptown. In 1807, work had begun on draining the Collect Pond—which had become the stinking repository of much of the waste from the slaughterhouses—and as the butchers moved out, the Bowery began to change.

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Through the end of the 17th century, despite being the main thoroughfare in and out of the city, the Bowery retained a rural character. A “kissing bridge” crossed a stream near where One Police Plaza now stands, and courting couples could sneak there to remove themselves from their parents’ prying eyes. Horse racing along the street was such a nuisance that the Common Council had to ban it in 1798. And the upper reaches of the street, near today’s Astor Place, were still actual farmland.

However, the first decades of the 18th century saw rapid improvements: The street was paved up to Broome Street, sidewalks were installed, and, in 1813, the street’s name was officially changed from the more quaint “Bowery Lane” to simply “The Bowery.” The commission and implementation of the New York street grid in 1811 also signaled that the street would now have a finite beginning (Chatham Square) and end (Union Square), though the northern terminus of the road ended up being Astor Place instead.

A number of residential and commercial buildings were erected in a flurry of development between 1800 and 1830, including the hotel at the corner of Broome Street that is probably the oldest hotel still in business in New York, and may have had guests as early as 1805. Today it operates as the Sohotel.

Courtesy The New York Public Library

In 1826, the old Bull’s Head Tavern and its stockyards were sold and one of the first Bowery playhouses, the New York Theatre, opened at 46-48 Bowery. At the opposite end of the Bowery, Vauxhall Gardens had opened in 1806 on the spot near where the Public Theater now stands. As one traveler wrote in 1813:

It is a neat plantation, with gravel walks adorned with shrubs, trees, busts, and statues.... Light musical pieces, interludes, &c. are performed in a small theatre situate [sic] in one corner of the gardens: the audience sit in what are called the pit and boxes, in the open air. The orchestra is built among the trees, and a large apparatus is constructed for the display of fire-works.

Over the next 125 years, the stretch of the Bowery between the New York Theatre and Vauxhall Gardens would become one of New York’s most crowded entertainment districts, even as “legitimate” theater gravitated toward Broadway, first in today’s Soho, and then later in and around Times Square.

The New York Theatre (soon redubbed simply the Bowery Theatre) provides a good example of the changing face of the Bowery during this period. The first theater building burned down in 1828 and was quickly rebuilt, only to burn down again in 1836. It was during this period that Walt Whitman was a devotee of the theater, which was home to performances of New York’s most famous actors, including Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes) and Edwin Forrest, who was at the center of the Astor Opera House Riot in 1849. Whitman recalled in his essay “The Old Bowery” in 1888 that on “any good night at the old Bowery,” the theater would be:

pack'd from ceiling to pit with its audience mainly of alert, well dress'd, full-blooded young and middle-aged men, the best average of American-born mechanics—the emotional nature of the whole mass arous'd by the power and magnetism of as mighty mimes as ever trod the stage — the whole crowded auditorium, and what seeth'd in it, and flush'd from its faces and eyes, to me as much a part of the show as any—bursting forth in one of those long- kept-up tempests of hand-clapping peculiar to the Bowery—no dainty kid-glove business, but electric force and muscle from perhaps 2000 full-sinew'd men….

In addition to the “best average of American-born mechanics,” the Bowery Theatre also drew more famous faces; in 1839, when Martin Van Buren was running for reelection, he made a campaign stop in Manhattan that included a visit to the Bowery Theatre to see The Honeymooners, a version of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Evidently, Van Buren “laughed heartily at the buffoonery.”

Soon, other theaters crowded into the lower Bowery. Across from the Bowery Theatre, the Bowery Amphitheatre was opened in 1833 by the Zoological Society as a menagerie. Within a couple of years, it had been retrofitted to allow for equestrian demonstrations and soon added more conventional stage shows. In 1839, the New Chatham Theatre opened on Chatham Square; it was here, in 1843, that modern minstrelsy was born:

[T]he Virginia Minstrels first performed on stage as a minstrel music troupe (without blackface, but in musical caricature of “negroes”).... This performance has been cited as the “birth” of minstrelsy, though blackface performance had been common for decades. Of the four members of the troupe, only Dan Emmett may be remembered today for minstrel songs attributed to him, including “Turkey in the Straw” and “Dixie.”

Minstrelsy would soon become popular at almost every theater—a later history of the Bowery Amphitheatre boasted that “the first band of negro minstrels made their second appearance” there—and it was not uncommon for minstrelsy, dancing, opera, and Shakespeare to all share the same bill.

Courtesy The New York Public Library

While the Bowery entertainment district was growing, it was being fed, in part, by the residential neighborhood due east—the Five Points. Centered around the intersection of what are today Baxter and Worth Streets, the Five Points had drawn Irish and German immigrants since the draining of the Collect Pond. The abolition of slavery in New York State in 1827 added an influx of freed blacks to the mix. At the same time whites were donning blackface to perform at Bowery theaters, African Americans were absorbing immigrant Irish dance styles to create tap dance, which was another hit at the Bowery theaters.

For the people of the Five Points, the Bowery provided an important point of contact with the rest of New York City; it was easy to reach on foot—a necessity in the era before convenient public transit—and so became both a place for Five Pointers to work and to enjoy entertainment.

Yet it remained resolutely outside the Five Points itself, and because of that, it drew visitors from other parts of the city. If they’d strayed one or two blocks over, those visitors would have been “slumming,” but the Bowery itself was seen as (mostly) out of harm’s way.

Soon, seeing the denizens of the Bowery, both Five Pointers and their Nativist rivals the Bowery Boys (or B’hoys) became part of the attraction—along with more illicit entertainments. Brothels began to proliferate on the street; as reported in Timothy Gilfoyle’s City of Eros, local man-about-town George Templeton Strong:

claimed that after nightfall, amid the theaters, saloons, dance halls, and cheap lodging houses, the thoroughfare overflowed with “members of the whorearchy in slatternly deshabille.” Once elegant eighteenth-century residences like that of merchant Edward Mooney at 18 Bowery now served as brothels.

Meanwhile, plays like The Drunkard, which ran for 100 performances at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum at the foot of Chatham Street, allowed audiences to experience the Five Points without ever setting foot in the neighborhood itself. Similarly, 1848’s A Glance at New York at the Olympic Theatre on Broadway, introduced Mose, a “Bowery B’hoy,” who came to define the era. (B’hoy was a play on the Irish pronunciation of “boy.”)

Typical Bowery B’hoys, like Mose, were volunteer firefighters, and all wore a similar uniform: “wide suspenders [and] polished boots”; clenched cigars in their teeth; and “soaplocked hair” that was “greased down, long in front of the ears and short in back.” For visitors, a trip to the Bowery meant that they could witness these characters both on stage—and in real life as fellow audience members. And since most people believed the Bowery B’hoys were a gang, there was an element of illicit danger involved, too.

While historians debate the true nature of the gangs of this era, there’s no doubt the Bowery B’hoys were a potent political force, and one that was becoming predominantly anti-immigrant in the 1850s. For them, too, going to the Bowery meant being on the edge of the Five Points without having to broach its borders.

Tensions between Bowery Boys and the Irish came to a head with the reelection of Mayor Fernando Wood, who was seen as a champion of the Five Pointers, in 1856. Unfortunately for many saloons along the Bowery, the backlash to Wood’s reelection took the form of his foes passing Sunday “blue” laws, which forbade the sale of alcohol on the Sabbath. (Of course, the saloons soon found a workaround: Because hotels were exempt from this law for their guests, many Bowery establishments instantly became “hotels” and their patrons all “guests.”)

At the same time, the anti-Wood state government set up a new police force (the Metropolitans) to further erode Wood’s power. Irish Five Pointers, convinced the new Metropolitans wouldn’t place any Irish among their ranks, rioted. The violence began on Chatham Square on July 4, 1857, when the mob “beat and stoned a new policeman … [who] died several days later of injuries sustained in the brutal attack.” The mob marched north to 40 Bowery, a Federal-era building that still stands, which housed the saloon that served as Bowery Boys headquarters. As Tyler Anbinder writes in Five Points:

Though the tavern was relatively deserted, the occupants barricaded themselves in as the rioters bombarded it with rocks and bricks. Meanwhile, the mob noticed another Metropolitan attempting to slip away undetected. With seventy-five to a hundred men at his heels, the officer ran inside Henry McCloskey’s “coffee and cake saloon” at 36 Bowery [now demolished].... [T]he crowd smashed the windows and hurled missiles inside at the occupants.

One observer would later call it “the most ferocious free-for-all in the history of the city.”

Yet overall development on the street wasn’t dampened. Indeed, both before and after the Civil War, construction boomed along the Bowery. Many of the new buildings were lodging houses, entertainment venues, and loft manufacturing spaces, including the Atlantic Garden beer and concert hall at 50 Bowery (the site of the Bull’s Head Tavern), which opened in 1858; the New Bowery Theater at 80-84 (now gone); and the lodging house at 15 Bowery (also gone) where prolific Bowery composer Stephen Foster died in 1864. As New York pulled itself out of the postwar economic slump, the Bowery was poised to reap the same benefits as other parts of the city.

Then came the “El.”

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New York’s public transit in the 19th century was severely lacking. Even as late as 1885, nearly two decades after the opening of the first elevated public transit, engineer Francis Greene counted nearly 8,000 horse-drawn vehicles passing through the intersection of Broadway and Pine Streets in a day.

The “El” was designed to alleviate all that; the initial line opened in 1868 and ran up Ninth Avenue. Despite some early setbacks, the system was deemed enough of a success by the mid-1870s to prompt the creation of a Third Avenue line running from South Ferry to Hanover Square, north through Chatham Square, and then up the Bowery to Astor Place, where it joined Third Avenue and headed to Grand Central.

Courtesy Library of Congress

The opening of the new line threw the Bowery into chaos. A Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter who canvassed the street less than four months after the train’s August 1878 debut found most people willing to “express themselves bitterly as to the whole operation.” As the shopkeeper at 1-7 Bowery noted:

I have nothing very flattering to say on the subject. Our goods exposed outside are injured by the discharges of coal gas and steam…. Every locomotive that passes up makes its contribution of injury to goods and to paint.

Across the street at 2 Bowery, the shop owner lamented that “customers in dressy apparel are afraid … of their clothing being destroyed,” and complained that the exhaust from the trains had smeared his windows with soot and grease. Both men complained about the deafening noise of the trains rumbling by overhead.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for property values along the Bowery to fall and the street to lose its high-end shops in favor of more saloons, cut-rate lodging houses, and cheap entertainment venues. Dime museums, heirs to Barnum’s American Museum downtown, popped up along the street, where patrons could pay a small fee to see various curiosities, such as tiny and giant animals (and people), supposedly rare discoveries (often fakes), and for an extra fee, promises of scantily clad women.

Indeed, some dime museums were fronts for prostitution, and as the 19th century wound down, the number of brothels along the street surged. One dime museum, the New-York Museum at 210 Bowery, was busted in 1883 for both gambling and for having 12-year-old girls working in the back room.

The “El” also reinforced the idea that the Bowery was not part of the neighborhoods surrounding it. What had been a de facto barrier between the Lower East Side and Chinatown/Little Italy became a physical one, and those who had no reason to cross under the train’s dirty, dark tracks stayed on their preferred side of the road.

But not all of the Bowery became seedy. Back at 46-48 Bowery, the Bowery Theatre changed hands in 1879 and was reborn as the Thalia, a German-language theater and opera house. The Bowery Amphitheatre across the street became the Stadt, where operas like Wagner’s Lohengrin had their American premieres. The Thalia later switched to Yiddish theater, and then was taken over by Italian impresario Feliciano Acierno.

Yet by 1891, when the musical A Trip to Chinatown introduced the song “The Bowery” into the wider public consciousness, the lyrics didn’t bother with any of the street’s more staid entertainments. Instead, in verse after verse, the song’s narrator gets into trouble—at an auction house where he’s swindled, a theater, a lousy barbershop, and finally a dive bar, where he’s beaten up.

Most of these scenarios were based on real occurrences. For example, during the last two decades of the 19th century, a number of swindling auction houses popped up along the Bowery, where rubes were fleeced by not understanding what they bid on or by purchasing fake goods. In the song, the narrator bids on a box of socks, only to discover he’s only bidding on the box—not its contents.

The song’s narrator is given a terrible shave and haircut; the Bowery had numerous barber shops and schools, which persisted well into the 20th century. Often, the Bowery’s homeless population could earn a few cents by willing to be victimized by a barber in training.

Not everyone thought the Bowery was a lost cause. There were plans by various civic improvement groups to bolster the Bowery’s fortunes. A group of businessmen suggested tearing down lodging houses and ditching the Bowery name altogether in favor of “Central Broadway.” Wisely, that plan—in a city that already has three other Broadways—was never adopted.

Instead, what ushered in a new era along the Bowery was the same thing that had sparked the previous major change: the elevated train. This time, the change came from its demolition in 1958. Though not entirely duplicated by the subway—as people waiting for the completion of the Second Avenue “T” line will corroborate—the elevated trains were seen as unnecessary relics of an earlier era.

The Third Avenue line also stood in the way of Robert Moses’s dream project, the Lower Manhattan Expressway (commonly known as LOMEX), a highway that would connect the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. It’s no coincidence that with the “El” gone, ground was broken for the first section of LOMEX in 1962—which, in turn, proved a catalyst for public opposition to the project.

Allan Tannenbaym/Getty Images

Meanwhile, the Bowery’s fortunes were slow to improve. As in nearby Soho, a few older loft buildings were converted into housing for artists in the 1960s; in the early 1970s, everything on the east side of the Bowery south from the Manhattan Bridge to Chatham Square was demolished to make way for Confucius Plaza, a 762-apartment complex designed as an alternative to the substandard tenement housing in much of Chinatown. But to many outside observers, there was little outward change. The lighting and restaurant supply districts, denizens of the Bowery since the 1920s, held on, as did the small jewelry district huddled around Canal Street. A few new buildings were built or refaced, but almost nothing was razed, either. New clubs like CBGB drew patrons to the Bowery, but all the rest of the entertainment venues had closed over the years, many shuttered during the Depression or soon thereafter.

Still, residents were worried. Even as early as 1982, rallies were held at City Hall to protest Ed Koch and the city’s push for Lower East Side gentrification. In 1987, the Associated Press was chronicling the disappearance of Skid Row; a year later, the Gap opened a store on St. Mark’s Place, paying “five times what neighboring tenants paid,” thus setting “a new standard for landlords.”

Whether that Gap store was the beginning of the end for the Bowery is debatable, but it is true that development snowballed in the 1990s and 2000s. Today, there are very few vestiges of the “down and out” Bowery apparent to most passersby.

But the deeper history remains. Edward Mooney’s home stands at 18 Bowery looking much as it did in 1785, as does the Bowery Savings Bank from a century later. In 2013, the building that had replaced the Atlantic Gardens at 50 Bowery was demolished to make way for a new hotel. Historian Adam Woodward snuck into the site hoping to find evidence of the Atlantic Gardens predecessor, the Bull’s Head Tavern, former hangout of George Washington. When Woodward found a few relics from the Bull’s Head era, the city and the hotel’s builders agreed to send in contract archaeologists, who unearthed over 700 artifacts that document every era in the Bowery’s history.

The hotel has recently opened and plans a museum on its second floor that will showcase some of those finds; the museum will connect the street’s current story as a symbol of the new Chinatown to Skid Row and all the way back to the colonial era—and if we are lucky, maybe all the way back to its pre-contact roots, when the trail outside was just a wide dirt track on high ground.

Editor: Sara Polsky