Once lined with flophouses, brothels, and gambling dens, New York's Bowery was originally a rural road that has since become a destination for the city's nightlife.
diverse neighborhoods, from the celebrated to the infamous. And none of them may hold as notorious of a place in the city's history as the Bowery. This stretch of city blocks has acted as a backdrop for everything from New York gangs and horrific poverty to the seeds of the city's punk movement and, today, a bustling luxury district.
The Rural Beginnings Of The Bowery
Long before Manhattan became an island of skyscrapers and the Bowery one of its most important downtown arteries, this area of lower Manhattan acted as an important thoroughfare for Indigenous Americans.
Tribes called the trail Wickquasgeck, which, according to Curbed, translates as "path to the wading place" or "birch-bark country." It later became the road that led to Governor Peter Stuyvesant's bouwerie or farm, per Britannica.
Though the Bowery - named in 1807 - was considered an elegant part of town at the end of the 18th century, it soon faced a massive decline. War, gangs, and the construction of the Third Avenue Elevated railway darkened the reputation of this New York City neighborhood for well over a century.
The Bowery's Slow, Steady Decline
A number of factors led to the Bowery's decline in the 19th and 20th centuries. Though it had once hosted elegant theaters, the make-up of the neighborhood changed after the Civil War. Beginning in 1875, the construction of the Third Avenue Elevated railway cast a literal shadow over the Bowery.
According to NYCity Media, the El made living in the Bowery newly unpleasant. Hot oil dripped down from the tracks, and many fled the pollution that came along with the train. As theatres moved out, pawnshops, brothels, and flophouses moved in.
"I have nothing very flattering to say on the subject," one Bowery shopkeeper said, according to Curbed. "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."
To make matters worse, several New York gangs operated in the vicinity. The southern end of the Bowery ran parallel to the Five Points, a poor swath of the city that was run by gangs like the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits (as depicted in the 2002 film Gangs of New York). There, many poor immigrants also lived in decrepit tenement housing.
"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," Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1913. Voicing an opinion many shared, he added that "it is haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the 'Inferno.'"
By the 20th century, the Bowery became known as New York City's "Skid Row." Some even called it "Satan's Highway." According to NYCity Media, the word "Bowery" itself came to mean "bum," and curious out-of-towners often visited the neighborhood to see how the out-of-luck lived. They could even take a tour - though not until the police cleared the streets of any poor souls who'd died in the open during the night.
But the Bowery was just down - not out. And the iconic New York City neighborhood would transform again and again in the decades to come, often in surprising ways.
If any New Yorker has anything to add, we'll be glad to hear about it in the comments.
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Peace.
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