Bowery, Manhattan
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The Bowery is a well-known street in Manhattan that more or less marks the boundary between Chinatown and Little Italy on one side and the Lower East Side on the other—running from Chatham Square in the south to Astor Place in the north.
History
The Bowery is the former location of both the farm (located where East 15th and East 16th Streets today cross The Bowery, with the farm house located on the same line, at what today is 1st Avenue), and the road built by Peter Stuyvesant that takes its name from an old Dutch word for farm, bouwerij (the modern word being boerderij).
George Washington is noted for having refreshed himself at The Bull's Head Tavern before riding down to the waterfront to witness the departure of British troops in 1783. Not necessarily for that reason, The Bowery became, by the end of the 18th Century, New York's most elegant street, lined with the mansions of prosperous residents and with fashionable shops.
Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Librettist for Mozart's Don Giovanni, Marriage of Figaro, and Cosi Fan Tutte, ran one of the shops - a fruit and vegetable store - after he immigrated to New York City in 1806. But by the time of the Civil War, the mansions and shops had given way to brothels, beer gardens, and flophouses, like the one at #15 in which the composer Stephen Foster lived in 1864."The Street Book"; an encyclopedia of Manhattan's street names and their origins. By Henry Moscow.
Home of many music halls in the 19th century, the Bowery later became notable for its economic depression. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was regarded as an impoverished area. The "Dead End Kids" of film were from the Bowery. In the 1940s through the 1970s, the Bowery was New York City's "Skid Row," notable for "Bowery Bums" (alcoholics and homeless persons). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bowery was viewed as a high crime, low rent area. However, since the 1990s the entire Lower East Side has been reviving. As of July 2005, gentrification is contributing to ongoing change along the Bowery. In particular, the number of high-rise condominiums is growing.
Michael Dominic's documentary film [Sunshine Hotel] (2001) follows the lives of the denizens of one of the few remaining Bowery flophouses.
Major streets that intersect the Bowery include Canal Street, Delancey Street (at which corner the subway station named Bowery is situated), Houston Street, and Bleecker Street.
CBGB
CBGB, a club initially opened to play Country, Bluegrass & Blues (as the name CBGB stands for), began to book the Ramones as their house band in the late 1970s, which later spawned punk rock. It is for this reason that CBGB and the Bowery is known as the home of punk rock. This birth of a musical genre gained the Bowery national fame. Due to large-scale gentrification and reviving of the Bowery area, the club will be forced to close on October 31, 2006.References
External links
- [The Bowery (from LINA)]
- [New York Songlines: 4th Avenue]
- [Dave Ranney, or Thirty Years on the Bowery] - autobiography of a Bowery dweller, published in 1910, from Project Gutenberg
- [The Bowery at forgotten-ny.com] - images, descriptions, and history
- [East-Village.com]
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