Bowery, Manhattan
From Free net encyclopedia
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. It is the former location of the road of Peter Stuyvesant's farm and takes its name from an old Dutch word for farm, bouwerij (the modern word being boerderij).
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.
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