Bowery 2007
A self-guided walking tour through The Bowery. Expect updates. The Bowery is undergoing the largest changes in decades. From Walking Off the Big Apple. Visit the website for other themed walks.
From Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900):
No more weakly looking object ever strolled out into the spring sunshine than the once hale, lusty manager. All his corpulency had fled.
His face was thin and pale, his hands white, his body flabby. Clothes and all, he weighed but one hundred and thirty- five pounds. Some old garments had been given him--a cheap brown coat and misfit pair of trousers. Also some change and advice. He was told to apply to the charities.Again he resorted to the Bowery lodging-house, brooding over where to look. From this it was but a step to beggary.
"What can a man do?" he said. "I can't starve."
Image: Louis Sontag, The Bowery at Night, 1895
From the article "Developments On the Bowery Forecast New and Varied Business Expansion," The New York Times, November 18, 1917
From "On the Bowery, a New Home for New Art" by Carol Vogel, The New York Times, March 28, 2007
The
board spent a year scouring the city for its new home. “It wasn’t till
we saw the empty parking lot on the Lower East Side that we knew we’d
found the spot,” Ms. Phillips said. “The board saw the potential before
I did. They saw right away how consistent it was with the museum’s
mission. They loved the fact that the neighborhood was rough and the
street was languishing, and that it was a major avenue with easy subway
access.”
I'm all about the Bowery right now. The street serves as a slippery signifier of constant urban change, and with imperfect points of departure for its new iteration. The
I am excited about the New Museum arriving on the Bowery, watching its boxy whiteness unfold in its metallic mesh clothing. Aside from the museum, however, the development of the Bowery makes me nervous. The avenue is wide, the history is deep, and the traffic is noisy. I have a lot of questions, mainly about the new Bowery, and I will post them over the next couple of days.
So, t
So far I've seen a lot of industrial Hobart mixers. I could make cupcakes for all y'all.
Images: Photos of The Bowery, October 29, 2007. WOTBA.