By Kevin Baker
The Bowery, the Bowery!
They say such things and they do such things
On the Bowery, the Bowery!
I’ll never go there anymore!
—Charles Hoyt
“On the Bowery”
Lisa Phillips smiles affectionately at the pocket parking lot at 235 Bowery, situated at the end of Prince Street and sandwiched between a restaurant supply business and one of Manhattan’s last genuine flophouses. What Phillips, who is director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art sees is not the mundane present but the seven-story-high, $35-million building that will double her museum’s exhibition space, and that will likely be the largest cultural institution ever erected on the Bowery.
The New Museum’s new museum is still in the design stages, but Phillips expects “something bold and innovative, that would also respond to the context of the Bowery,” from architects Kazuo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Japanese firm Sanaa, winners of an international competition to build the new space.
“We’ve never been one to follow the crowd. We’re trailblazers,” she asserts, referring not only to the hip, edgy artists from around the world the New Museum likes to display, but also to its peripatetic history. After starting its existence in a few rooms of the New School in 1977, the museum moved to its current location at 583 Broadway, between Houston and Prince streets, in 1983—just as the SoHo art scene was approaching its zenith.
Its next move raises the inevitable question: Does this augur a similar ascent (or descent) into SoHo style trendiness for the Bowery, a street that has resolutely resisted change for over half-a-century now?
More importantly, it speaks to the ongoing debate over whether the contemporary city can exist as something more than a vertical suburb. Is the future of the Bowery Starbucks? Or is it the lively, multi-purpose, multi-ethnic, neighborhood that has been promised before, in so many places, during New York’s many waves of gentrification, yet which never quite seems to materialize?
Actually, in many ways, the Bowery is that neighborhood right now. It is an avenue unlike any other in New York, an intriguing hodge-podge of business and bohemia, gently hooking north and west for the mile between Chatham Square and Cooper Square. As such, it runs through or alongside some of the city’s most venerable and dynamic neighborhoods—Chinatown, the Lower East Side, SoHo, NoLita, the East Village—without really seeming to be a part of any of them.
In the daytime, the Bowery is a young woman in shades, white overalls, and a cow-pattern bikini top, gleefully rolling a tier of kitchen racks away from the Bari restaurant supply store. At night, the Bowery is a young woman stepping out of a cab in black leather pants and an open-backed, silver blouse, and throwing a bright pink cape over her shoulders with a flourish before she strides into a Cuban tapas bar.
The Bowery is its own New York, at any moment a palimpset of nearly every image, good and bad, that has defined the city over the past fifty years. It is one of Manhattan’s last industrial markets; still the place to go when you want to buy a lamp, or a dough retarder, or maybe one of the life-sized, resin-based caricatures of an Italian waiter lined up outside Bari’s, just across from the New Museum’s new location. There are no fewer than 56 restaurant supply establishments on the Bowery today, along with 28 lighting stores and 12 furniture and interiors stores. The Bowery is, as well, the home of “at least a hundred” visual artists, taking advantage of the cheap loft footage and the abundant light in the floors above the restaurant supplies stores, just as they have been for over half-a-century.
The Bowery is a place of squalor, where you can still see grizzled old winoes sitting on the sidewalk outside the avenue’s few remaining flophouses, fiddling with a cigarette, or a bagged can of beer. It is a place of stunning, unexpected beauty, of striated, pink-and-blue sunsets glimpsed from its broad intersection with Delancey. And it is, occasionally, a place where beauty and decay are conjoined. Only on the Bowery can you still find the grand, picturesque ruins that dominated the Lower East Side during the 1970s. Jutting out from several razed lots on the block between Houston and East First Street is the high, brick tenement that used to be McGurk’s Suicide Hall—a bar/brothel that became notorious a hundred years ago as a place where despondent prostitutes went to kill themselves, sometimes by drinking carbolic acid. Just to the east of the old McGurk’s is a monolithic, partly burned out school where groups of anarchists are now rumored to meet. Just to the south is perhaps the last building to be used as part of the jolly German beer gardens that dominated the area in the 1820s, where families flocked to listen to music and be served meals and nickel beers by saucy, teenaged waitresses in short dresses, and red boots with bells on them.
Now the corner lot at Houston is a lush, green tangle of a community garden; a collection of enchanting little grottoes, where people sat sipping wine and talking quietly on recent summer night, only a few feet from a major thoroughfare. It is the Bowery in all of its back pages, turned all the way to its rural antecedents—and all on a single street corner.
Not for long. Real estate developers—so often the final social arbiters in New York—seem to be betting that the Bowery’s long equilibrium is at last about to break. The community garden will stay, but the the building that used to be McGurk’s—along with the abandoned school, and the beer hall—will be put to the wrecker’s ball soon, to be replaced with an enormous, mixed-use complex featuring residences, businesses, and a community center. Smaller residential projects are going up both to the south and north of Houston, and Upper East Side refugees are already renting loft spaces for $5,000 a month. A new, strikingly ugly set of condominiums on the corner of the Bowery and Bond Street promises “Downtown Chic Meets Luxury Loft Living”—for prices starting at $1.295 million.
The very notion of the Bowery as chic—not to mention $1.3 million chic—will be enough to drop the jaws of New Yorkers of a certain age. No other street has been so synonymous with urban danger and depravity. And no other street has ever been quite so influential in shaping the city’s self-image. As the words from the1892 dance hall hit quoted above suggest, New Yorkers have long reveled in the Bowery’s seamy side, taking an ironic pleasure in both its allure for unsuspecting greenhorns and the proof it provides of their own toughness. There is film of Al Smith, the quintessential New Yorker, gleefully singing the same lyrics with a room full of his fellow Tammany sachems. If the Bowery could talk it would call you “bub,” or maybe “pal-ly.”
The city’s meanest street actually had a pastoral origin. The Bowery began life as a deer path and its name comes from bowerij, Dutch for “farm”; specifically the farm of Peter Stuyvesant, who bought most of the surrounding land in 1651. By the mid-nineteenth century, though, it was contending with Broadway to be the city’s premier entertainment district. The Bowery was dotted with early vaudeville theaters, many of them featuring plays about “Mose”—a sort of local Paul Bunyan who was also the epitome of the Bowery b’hoy; the original savvy, streetwise New Yorker with a heart of gold. By the Civil War the theaters had been joined by nickel museums, imitators of Barnum’s that featured exotic animals, freak shows, manufactured oddities, and tableaux vivants with an emphasis on women in various stages of undress.
The Bowery had begun to define New York’s—and thereby America’s—emerging popular culture. Before long, though, the beer gardens were overwhelmed by street toughs and gangs, then replaced by dives that didn’t even provide glasses, just rubber hoses through which, for three cents, customers could suck all the rotgut liquor they wanted until they had to come up for air.
In 1878, an elevated rail line was erected down the middle of the broad avenue. Oil, ashes, and hot coals spilled down on the pedestrians below, and even the streetwalkers stayed away. The Bowery became a shadowy realm under the el, an almost exclusively male preserve where men went when they had no place else to go. They weren’t called “homeless” yet, but “Bowery bums,” and by 1907 there were an estimated 25,000 of them living in the innumerable flophouses, missions, and one-night cheap hotels under the rumbling trains.
Yet the Bowery was not, with notable exceptions such as McGurk’s, a truly dangerous place; more sad and sleazy—and colorful. Here came to be gathered nearly all of Manhattan’s pawnshops, along with most of its tattoo parlors, its barber colleges and flea circuses, and a hive of eccentric characters celebrated by the Aschcan painters, and by Joseph Mitchell in the pages of the New Yorker.
Then, in 1955, the elevated rail line came down, and the Bowery stood blinking in the full light of day for the first time in nearly eight decades. The flophouses and bars began to slowly vanish, replaced by the restaurant supply wholesalers—and by a Renaissance’s worth of artists. These included the likes of Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Frank, Bryce Marsden, Billy Sullivan, and John Copeland—with any number of writers, poets, and other artists thrown into the mix. The Beat poet John Giorno, who has been living at 222 Bowery off and on since 1962, remembers a rooftop birthday party forty years ago that included Andy Warhol, Jim Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenburg, Jasper Johns, Frank O’Hara, John Ashberry, Merce Cunningham, Tricia Brown, and his roommate, William Burroughs— “and that was just ordinary!”
“We were the last generation to even get a toehold in Manhattan,” reflects the architect and sculptor Maya Lin, who had a fifth-story walkup studio on the Bowery herself for nine years, beginning in 1988. “It’s an incredible neighborhood, and fairly unique. You’ll never see anything like it in the city.
From a development standpoint, the artists’ long presence on the Bowery also seems like a case of the dog that didn’t bark. In the world of New York real estate, artists are usually the shock troops, the first wave of more “desirable” tenants reclaiming a decaying or forgotten neighborhood. After fifty years, though, the Bowery still resists the sort of gentrification that has overwhelmed, say, SoHo or Chelsea. How can this be?
One answer is surely physical. Like most of New York, the Bowery is much cleaner than it used to be, and you’re more likely to be hit by a discarded paint tube than a live coal. But it is still an ungainly street, singularly devoid of shade. An informal survey counted only 19 trees, and many of them little more than saplings. Outside of Harlem, no street in Manhattan conveys such a sense of spaciousness. Yet the same openness that draws so many artists may well make other urban denizens nervous. On the most primal level, if cities serve as the forests that we advanced primates like to recreate for ourselves, the Bowery has the exposed, vulnerable feel of the savannah.
In its northern reaches, particularly, the Bowery is almost as broad and as busy as a highway. Trucks rumble constantly up and down its six lanes, either serving the avenue’s many wholesalers or on their way somewhere else. At night, packs of motorcyclists gun their Harleys up and down its length, and there is often a smell of gasoline, and burning rubber in the air. And if geography is destiny, the Bowery will never change. This is where streets go to die. Prince and Spring streets from the west; Rivington, Stanton, and First streets from the east, all come to dead ends here, creating the impression that the Bowery is somehow cosmically misaligned—an ineluctable border area, permanently detached from any of the neighborhoods surrounding it.
Or perhaps there’s a simpler reason why the Bowery has remained the Bowery. Modern cities developed for the most practical of reasons, as marketplaces of goods and services, and ideas. It is only when the markets leave that cities and neighborhoods begin casting around existentially for reasons to exist. On the Bowery, neither the industrial markets nor the artists ever left. The street remained more or less content unto itself. In a way, the Bowery is the only part of the “real” city left in Manhattan.
Yet what will happen if the awful pressure of Manhattan real estate values finally convince the restaurant suppliers to sell or lease out their buildings, just as the last West Side egg and meat markets finally gave way to the city’s seemingly inexhaustible demand for residential space? What’s to keep the Bowery from becoming Tribeca—or worse?
Maya Lin admits that “SoHo worked out—what can you say?—to be the perfect European shopping mall,” but is generally more optimistic about its neighbor’s future, thanks in part to the presence of Chinatown. The Bowery begins in the shadow of Confucius’s statue down in Chatham Square, after all, and the Chinatown Bowery, south of Delancey, has a distinctly more human, working- and middle-class neighborhood feel to it.
A case in point is Stanford White’s huge, gorgeous old Bowery Savings Bank, on the corner of Bowery and Grand Street. A landmarked building, its glittering main lobby has been made over into Capitale restaurant, which Timeout magazine gushes is the city’s “Most Jaw-Dropping Venue For A Meal.” Here, where immigrants once brought their hard-earned savings, wealthy young men and women pay $33 for a plate of pan-roasted bison in chocolate oil, amidst the gilded Corinthian columns, Venetian glass, limestone walls, and chip mosaic marble floors.
But outside—occupying the rest of the space in and around the old bank like medieval shops sheltering along the walls of a castle keep, or a great cathedral—is a warren of small, Chinese-American businesses. Fruit and vegetable stands, flower sellers, children’s clothing stores, cosmeticians, chiropractors, herbalists, travel agents, computer repairers, even an Amway distributor—among many others—can be found here, usually in a welter of activity. Here, perhaps, in the advance of New York’s most enduring ethnic community, can be found the elements of a new equilibrium.
North of Delancey, where the ambience of the Bowery changes considerably, the avenue is being transformed at the street level—in a supreme irony—by bars. Once the avenue’s scarlet letter, they now serve as its validation, catering to well-off twenty-somethings and the tragically hip. They tend to be loud, with the usual contingent of banished smokers spilling out onto the sidewalk, and these days they are augmented by restaurants serving everything from Mongolian barbecue to Polynesian food. (There is even a tattoo parlor again, 334 Bowery Tattoo—though this is not some grimy, Reginald Marsh joint, but the tattoo parlor as clean, well-lighted place; a spacious shop with an emphasis on hygiene, and fluorescent lights shining off cases full of all the remarkable things you can poke through your tongue.)
The new watering holes range from the likes of the Remote, where you can check out the rest of the crowd at the bar over your very own, “cocktail console” video monitor; to the B-Bar Grill and Cafe, a cleverly converted gas station near the northern end of the Bowery, where on any given night much of the crowd is likely to be wearing name tags; to Mission, which is easily the most pretentious of the new Bowery bars. Mission keeps a velvet rope out front, charges $9 for a gin-and-tonic, has the mandatory manager and barmaid with mysterious European accents, and claims to have hosted celebrities “from Lisa Marie Presley to Posh Spice, Debbie Harry, P. Diddy and Mike Tyson”—though a few weeks ago there were only six or seven patrons in the joint, watching the MTV Video Awards on a big-screen TV.
The Mission’s name, of course, is an ironic take on its neighbor, the Bowery Mission. It is an irony which is not appreciated by Timothy Weal, a friendly, earnest, 46-year-old operations manager of the Bowery Mission with a shy smile, who looks much too young to have been, as he describes it, “an alcoholic for 27 years.” The Bowery Mission, which is just two doors down from the New Museum’s future home, is still doing what is has been doing for 125 years now, serving derelict and alcoholic men. To that purpose it conducts religious services, runs an 18-bed shelter, and provides showers, medical services, counseling, job training, and some 300-500 meals a day to the homeless.
A few of the Mission’s transient guests often cluster outside on the sidewalk in the early evening, but they are a surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive presence there. On a typical night last month, a few of the homeless men talked quietly among themselves, while one politely asked a passerby if he knew how to get to the Staten Island ferry. By nine o’clock they had all gone. Meanwhile, a good two blocks up the avenue, the bar Mannahatta was still blaring Third Eye Blind out into the night for anyone who cared—or didn’t care—to listen.
“I can tell you this personally about homeless men, we’re more afraid of you than you are of us. They live with a lot of shame,” points out Weal, who acknowledges that all but six or seven of the Bowery’s once abundant flophouses and missions are gone now, and welcomes the changes in the neighborhood—though he does not believe the Bowery will ever change in any fundamental way.
“I don’t think the store furniture places are going to go anyplace, and I don’t think the Bowery Mission is going to go anyplace. Homeless men go where they need to go, and in this neighborhood alone, even though you didn’t know it, there are 18 different places to eat. You’ll find them when you’re hungry,” he explains. “I think we’ll coexist. I really think we will.”
Lisa Phillips agrees, and says that her staff is already exploring joint programs the museum could undertake. The Sunshine Hotel, which borders the New Museum’s parking lot to the north, may prove to be a more difficult neighbor. A recent visit to the old flophouse uncovered a scene from the bad, old Bowery—a darkened staircase leading up to a cage door, with three derelict men in between, smoking something on the narrow stairs. But Phillips brushes aside any concerns over such an environment, and says that she is looking into programs the museum might try with the Sunshine, too.
“When we moved into 583 Broadway, now one of the fanciest addresses in SoHo, it was an abandoned, derelict structure with no roof,” she laughs. “So no, we’re not worried.”
Phillips insists that the Bowery will remain a vital, mixed neighborhood—and she expects the New Museum to play a key role in keeping it that way. She compares the contemporary art museum to Barnum’s old nickel museums, and she may well be right. The New Museum’s current exhibits are a rich, provocative multi-media tribute to the late African musician and radical, Fela Anikulap-Kuti; and a collection of brash, sometimes interactive pieces by the Hispanic artist Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez, including a disembodied hand lining up a pool shot, and a row of skateboards made from fried pork. This is art to gawk at, art to engage a mass audience—art that just might recreate the old urban experience for the twenty-first century.
“I think art does provide that kind of challenge, surprise, the unexpected, an adventure, a different kind of experience,” Phillips muses. “Last year we had an exhibit that was a gigantic, 40-foot long contraption that simulated the human digestive system. It was very, very popular, it got fed two to three times a day, and it eliminated two to three times a day, and in addition to being a very good piece of art, it was also an attraction. Art can have that. It doesn’t always, but it can.”
Bob Holman has anticipated the New Museum’s experiment for a year-and-a-half , trying to make it on the Bowery by galvanizing populist traditions of art and entertainment. Holman is both a “working poet” and the owner of the Bowery Poetry Club and Café, a bar and coffeehouse which occupies one of the few shady nooks of the Bowery at the foot of First Street, and which offers poetry slams and open-mike nights, and a standing invitation to “Come On In and Have a Cuppa Po.” The club draws its audience and its performers from NYU students, twenty-somethings, and older poets, such as one Sunshine Hotel resident who styles himself Bingo Gazingo.
“I want everything to be here,” says Holman, a stocky man with gelled hair and thick-framed glasses who tends to speak in long, mellow, poetic riffs that trail off ecstatically. “This wants to be an intersection, or more often a collision of cultures. And it seems to me that that’s the problem with Times Square. Everything is there, but everything is packaged, so it’s only one thing that you get there.”
Holman first encountered the Bowery in 1966, as an 18-year-old Columbia student from Cincinnati, trying to sell a suit to a used clothing shop. He still remembers the smell of the street at the time—“Uriniferous!”—but ever since, “Downtown has been my life.” He doesn’t know if a new, upscale Bowery has space for a poetry café, but he sees his establishment as a vital link, as “a continuation of the Beat coffee houses, the Yiddish speaking socialists of the Lower East Side” and he is willing to struggle to preserve it.
“This is the land grab. This is that moment we’re seeing here. I feel really lucky to be here, to be able to give it a shot,” he enthuses. “Which direction is the Bowery going? All directions is where it’s going now!”
© Copyright The New York Times