onno, Author at Bowery Alliance of Neighbors

Feb 21 2016

National Register of Historic Places/Bowery Historic District

Feb 21 2016

Historical & Cultural Significance of the Bowery (info sheet)

“The most interesting place in New York” –Stephen Crane, 1891

No dainty kid-glove business, but electric force and muscle. –Walt Whitman, 1888

…one of the great American streets, as charged with historical significance
as Beale Street in Memphis or Basin Street in New Orleans –Luc Sante

The Bowery is the cradle of American entertainment. –Trav S.D., Vaudeville Historian

. . . no area of this city—indeed, of this country—is more directly and intimately connected to the saga of immigration, the development of popular culture and the rise of urban politics than the Bowery. –Peter Quinn

Origins

Bowery is NYC’s oldest thoroughfare! Originally a Native American foot path, it later linked New Amsterdam and the Dutch farms (called Bouwerij), including Peter Stuyvesant’s. Under the British, it became part of the Boston Post Road. Originally stretched 14 blocks — 1.25 miles — from Chatham Sq to Union Sq. Term Union Square refers to meeting point of Bowery & Broadway (It is not a Civil War reference) Bowery today goes from Chatham Square to Cooper Square (above 4^th is Cooper Sq.). 1643-1660: Dutch West India Co. granted former slaves small farms along Bowery. First free African American settlement.

Theater

The Bowery was NYC’s first entertainment district. It was a working class mecca, but slumming upper-crusters came, too. Bowery Theatre (1826) was largest in U.S.: 3,000 seats. Junius Brutus Booth (father of Edwin & John Wilkes), Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, James O’Neill (father of Eugene), Lola Montez, Buffalo Bill & magician John Henry Anderson performed. Francisque Hutin scandalized America with its first glimpse of ballet in 1827. Master Juba introduced tap dance here. T.D. Rice popularized Jump Jim Crow routine here. Term Jim Crow became namesake for segregation laws after Civil War. 1st minstrel troupe,Virginia Minstrels, performed Bowery Amphitheatre 37-39 Bowery. The all-black Callender’s Minstrels played Windsor Theatre. Billy Kersands, first great Black comedian gained national popularity. Early Chinese theater & opera performed at 19 Bowery, at nearby 5-7 Doyers, and later at 43-47, 46-48, 165, 199, and 235 Bowery. Illusionist Herrmann the Great, most important magician before Houdini, played Windsor & People’s Theatres.
Vaudeville born here at Tony Pastor’s Opera House (Father of vaudeville) Harrigan & Hart, fathers of musical comedy, appeared here. Miner’s Bowery Theater was birthplace of the Vaudeville hook! Performers included Eddie Cantor, W.C. Fields, Harry Houdini, Al Jolson, exotic dancer Saharet and Weber & Fields, vaudeville’s greatest comic duo. Yiddish Theater’s 1^st American home. Boris Thomashevsky, Jacob Adler, Bertha Kalich performed. People’s Theatre, Thalia, etc… Hebrew Actors’ Union — 1^st U.S. actor’s union — was formed 1899 by United Hebrew. Trades to support strike at People’s Theatre. Dime Museums featured freaks, circus, & theater acts, Sammy’s Bowery Follies (made famous by Weegee’s photos), Ada Isaacs Mencken appeared at Bowery Theatre & New Bowery Theatre, Bouwerie Lane Theatre, Amato Opera and Dixon Place.

Dance

Mme. Francisque Hutin scandalized America with its first glimpse of ballet in 1827.
Tap dance born in adjacent Five Points. Master Juba (William Henry Lane), father of tap, introduced it at Bowery Theatre. Early appearances of exotic dancer Saharet at Miner’s Bowery Theatre. Ping Chong, choreographer, Asian American Dance Theatre.

Music

Songwriters: Stephen Foster Beautiful Dreamer, Oh, Susannah. Irving Berlin God Bless America, White Christmas. Woody Guthrie’s first weeks in NYC were spent playing the Bowery bars & it is where he began writing This Land Is Your Land. Sidewalks of New York was first sung in public by Lottie Gilson at London Theatre 235 Bowery. Composers Phillip Glass, Bela Bartok. Daisy Bell – Bicycle Built for Two premiered at Atlantic Garden, 50 Bowery. Librettist: Lorenzo Da Ponte (Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro; founder, Italian Opera House in NYC) first NYC job on Bowery. Music clubs: – The Five Spot jazz club featured Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane. A haunt of Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, and Norman Mailer. Debbie Harry & Blondie lived 266 Bowery. CBGBis the Birthplace of punk rock. Performers include The Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads, Sting, Richard Hell, Sonic Youth, B-52s, Pearl Jam, Joan Jett, Lou Reed, Green Day, Alan Jackson, Television, Guns ‘n Roses, AC/DC, Dead Boys, The Police. Many classical/operatic works had American premieres here, including Wagner’s Tannhauser @ Stadt Theatre 37-39 Bowery (1859)

Literature

Walt Whitman loved expressive Bowery slang, which he used in his poetry. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie climaxes on the Bowery. Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is set on Bowery. It is considered first work of American literary naturalism. Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl partially inspired by the Bowery. Diane DiPrima, Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, John Giorno, Bob Holman, Paul Pines, William Burroughs. The Bowery Poetry Club at 308 Bowery still rocks the boulevard with the music of words.

Ideas / Education

Cooper Union is America’s 1st free university. Its Great Hall is bastion of free speech welcomed Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman, & Obama. Lincoln’s epochal anti-slavery speech made here. Abolitionist John Brown’s body prepared for burial & briefly displayed at 163 Bowery. Feminist Kate Millett lived at 295 Bowery.

Photographers

Jacob Riis, Chuck Close, Nan Goldin, Berenice Abbott, Robert Mapplethorpe, Terry Richardson, David Godlis, Weegee, Jay Maisel, Erika Stone, Robert Frank, Charles Eisenmann, Stephanie Chernikowski, Bob Gruen, Roberta Bayley and Carin Drechsler-Marx..

Architects / Architecture / Engineering

Oldest brick building in Manhattan: 18 Bowery, The Edward Mooney House (circa 1785-1789) Stanford White designed Bowery Savings Bank (1895, McKim, Mead & White) Influenced Roman temple approach to bank design. James Ware, father of the dumbbell design for tenements. Citizen’s Savings Bank (1924), corner Bowery & Canal. Germania Fire Insurance Bldg (1870) E. Bowery near 4th Germania Bank Building 190 Bowery at Spring. Bowery Mission (1879), East Bowery between Staunton & Rivington, Metropolitan Savings Bank (1867) at 7th & Cooper Square, Cooper Union Foundation Building (1853-59) Oldest extant U.S. building framed with steel beams. Manhattan Bridge gateway arch patterned after Porte St. Denis in Paris; colonnade patterned after Bernini columns at the Vatican.

Architects: Maya Lin, Rick Scofidio. Bowery was one of America’s first streets that Edison electrified.

Painters / Sculptors / Designers

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Fernand Leger, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eva Hesse, Maya Lin, Sol LeWitt, Stan Subossek, Wynn Chamberlain, Elizabeth Murray, Max Gimblett, Woong Kim, Roy Lichtenstein, Chuck Close, J. Forrest Vey, Michael Goldberg, Patricia Field, June Leaf, James Rosensquist, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, Lynda Benglis, Mark Rothko.

Cinema

Mae West tells Cary Grant to come up and see her sometime in She Done Him Wrong (1933), her homage to gay ‘90s Bowery. Two Raoul Walsh classics are set on the Bowery: Regeneration (1915) and The Bowery (1933). The Bowery Boys movies (1937-1958) were infused with Bowery slang. Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy w/Jack Kerouac & Beat poetsOn the Bowery (1955) is a classic documentary. John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s film Fly is filmed at 184 Bowery. Martin Scorsese grew up a block from Bowery. His Gangs of New York recreates 1800s Bowery. Independent filmmakers Sara Driver and Jim Jarmusch. Many No Wave filmmakers of 70s/80s were Bowery based. The Bugs Bunny cartoon, Bowery Bugs, spoofs Steve Brodie’s legendary claim to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. A Hare Grows In Manhattan establishes Bugs’ streetwise beginnings on the Bowery and Lower East Side.

Religion / Philanthropy

Huang Da Xian, Taoist Temple Primitive Methodists’ 1^st place of worship was 193 Bowery. Confucius state at corner Division St. and the Bowery Mission (1879) has provides meals, shelter, job opportunities, and rehabilitation to millions.

Additional cultural and historical info

Bull’s Head Tavern 46-48 Bowery: Nov. 25, 1783 – Washington celebrated the British evacuation of NYC.
The Astor family established itself on Bowery. Heinrich Astor (1754-1833), successful butcher. Brother Johann Jacob Astor (1763-1848), successful fur trader; America’s first multi-millionaire. Astors became land barons on the Bowery & in NYC. Zoological Institute, one of first zoos in U.S., opened in 1833. Located at 37-39 Bowery; it stretched to Chrystie St. First American streetcars ran on Bowery from Prince to 14th Street (New York & Harlem Railroad). In 1848, Hammacher Schlemmer opened at 221 Bowery; relocated at 209 Bowery, 1857-1904. America’s longest-running catalogue. McSorley’s, just off Cooper Square, is city’s oldest continuously operating bar (est.1854). Tattoo legends Samuel O’Reilly & Charlie Wagner had their studio at 11 Bowery from 1890s through 1953. Steve Brodie became a folk hero after allegedly jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, July 23, 1886. Bookie/saloon keeper at 114 Bowery. In 1890s, there were a dozen bars that catered to gays and/or provided gay oriented entertainment. Ex: Paresis Hall at 392 Bowery. The 1800s nativist Bowery B’hoys gang headquartered at 40 Bowery. Their battle against the Irish Dead Rabbits started here. Cocky, flamboyant speech/dress style of Bowery b’hoys & g’hals influenced American idiom & fashion. “Big Tim” Sullivan was a Tammany Hall boss from 1880s to 1913. Based at 207 Bowery and Occidental Hotel at 146-148 Bowery Namesake for Sullivan Law, which requires licenses in order to carry a gun. His funeral on Bowery attracted 75,000. Bowery was Chinatown’s traditional eastern border. Since 1800s, Bowery missions and flophouses have sheltered millions. McGurk’s Suicide Hall (1895-1902), at 295 Bowery, was notorious suicide site for several prostitutes. Paul Kelly’s notorious Five Point Gang operated out of 338 Bowery in the early 1900s.

Community Gardens:

Liz Christy Gardens (1973), at Bowery & Houston, is city’s first community garden.

Research

Bowery Alliance of Neighbors www.boweryalliance.org Email: mulbd@yahoo.com 631-901-5435 General: ban62007@gmail.com

Feb 21 2016

Letters Supporting Bowery Preservation

Elected Representatives/Political Candidates

Community Organizations

Community Gardens

Artists / Architects / Historians / Writers

Theaters/Performance Spaces

Cultural Organizations

Institutions

New York Marble Cemetery, Inc.

Museums

Residents/Tenants Associations

Restaurants/Bars

Building Owners / Resident Building Owners

Businesses

Feb 21 2016

East Bowery Preservation Plan

Preservation plan

Feb 21 2016

Lost Architectural Treasures (Demolished)

Painting by Fritz Meyer, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Interior of the German Winter Garden at 45 Bowery, 1865.

New-York Historical Society

1876 photo of the Dry Dock Bank that once stood at 339-343 Bowery, at the corner of Bowery and 3rd Street.

As Nathan Silver shows us in the classic study Lost New York, the destruction of beautiful and distinctive architecture in this city — structures that help tell us who we are and where we came from — did not begin with the destruction of magisterial Penn Station in 1963. The Bowery was the city’s first entertainment district, with theatres, nightspots and businesses that served the working class as well immigrant Irish, Italian, Chinese, Germans and Jews, yet few of the theatres of that time survive to tell the tale. One of those cited by Silver was this stunning structure that once stood on lower Bowery and catered to the Germans of the area’s Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) .

135 Bowery: DEMOLISHED in 2012

BUILT: 1819; ALTERATIONS 1903, CIRCA 1920
ARCHITECT: UNKNOWN STYLE: FEDERAL

This Federal-style dwelling was constructed in 1819 for John A. Hardenbrook, who owned two lots, 133 and 135 Bowery by 1809. (In 1814 he moved his soap and candle manufacturing establishment from Broadway to a shop at 133 Bowery.) The three-story building with attic is of wood frame construction with a brick façade laid in Flemish bond and a surviving end chimney. Characteristic of the Federal style, the peaked roof has twin gabled dormers capped by a cornice with returns and wood spandrels suggesting arched windows.

The building was probably converted to mixed use in the last quarter of the 19th century. In 1903, architect Edwin C. George introduced projecting show windows at street level. Interior columns were made fireproof with terra-cotta blocks. At this time galvanized iron window frames with classical molded lintels replaced the original simple stone lintels on the second and third floors. The original stone sills remain.

In 1907, the building was owned by John Samowindyke and leased to Bernhard Gutter. By 1920, ownership had passed to Samowindyke’s widow, Anna who was leasing it to Benjamin Gleidman. At this time interior alterations were made to the first and second floors and new store windows were made flush with the building line. Reflecting its participation in almost 200 years of rich and varied Bowery history, it has housed a hat-maker, the Red, White and Blue gambling dive in the 1890s, a barbershop, a pawnbroker, and later, Abraham Edson’s jewelry store. Surviving in a remarkable state of preservation, No. 135 is a rare example of a Federal-style dwelling converted to mixed use in response to the changing residential/commercial climate of the Bowery.

138-142 Bowery: DEMOLISHED March 2016!

138 Bowery circa 1997 — Top middle: Antonio Maiori,
Bottom: W. C. Fields

Gaiety Dime Museum / Teatro Italiano (aka Drammatico Nazionale)
BUILT: CIRCA 1889
STYLE: RENAISSANCE REVIVAL

In 1903, this was Drammatico Nazionale, one of several Italian theatres established on the Bowery by the great Antonio Maiori. Though Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo DaPonte had staged Italian opera In NYC as early as 1808, and opened a short-lived Italian opera house in 1833, it was through Maiori on the Bowery that Italian theatre was established here.
Maiori’s 1902 appearance as Cellini at the Bowery’s Windsor Theatre had made him the darling of NY society’s elite 400, who would travel there in slumming parties to see what Mrs. Havemeyer had proclaimed “the greatest tragedian in the world.”

In addition to the Drammatico Nazionale, Maiori established Maiori’s Variety Theatre at 235 Bowery and Maiori’s Royal Theatre at 165-167 Bowery. Actor/producer/director Maiori also co-founded the Italian Actors Union.
storian/Educator Written for Windows on the Bowery, a 2016 signage project.

This structure was also popular from 1890 to 1902 as the Gaiety, one of the Bowery’s most flamboyant dime museums. In addition to trained lions and boxing exhibitions, one could see Jo-Jo the Dog Face Boy, tramp juggler W.C. Fields and contortionist Zamora — “the Triple-jointed Wonder” — an escape artist who pre-dated Houdini.
— David Mulkins

140 BOWERY: DEMOLISHED March 2016!

BUILT: CIRCA 1799
ARCHITECT: UNKNOWN STYLE: FEDERAL

This early Federal-style building may date back to at least 1808 and may even have been constructed in the last decade of the 18th Century. It is one of the oldest buildings still standing on the Bowery. Characteristic of the Federal-style, the 2 ½ story building has a peaked roof with twin gabled dormers capped by a cornice with returns and wood spandrels suggesting arched windows. The second floor windows of the four bay-wide façade display paneled stone lintels. From 1799-1802, 140 Bowery is listed as an address for William Everet, butcher. In 1808, another butcher, Henry Lovell is listed as owner. At least as early as 1825 the building served as both business and residence. Michael Armstrong had a dry goods business at 140 and at 140 ½ Robert M. Hartley had a dry goods store. By, at least, 1828 the owner is listed as Robert Tier.

138 Bowery circa 1932 — 138 BOWERY, circa 1932

185 Bowery – Germania Bank Building: Demolished in 2010!

First of its 3 locations on the Bowery
BUILT: 1870S STYLE: SECOND EMPIRE

I am far from alone in thinking that the building boom has gone far enough. If huge hotels continue to be built there, the congestion will erase the very attraction that leads visitors to the Bowery. The scale will be utterly destroyed, and many charming survivors of the nineteenth century — the exquisite house at 195, for example, — are immediately endangered.
— Historian Luc Sante (Low Life) from 5/1/2009 letter to City Planning

185 Bowery – Germania Bank Building: Demolished in 2010! to make way for atrocity

35 Cooper Square: Demolished in May 2011!

BUILT: CIRCA 1827
STYLE: FEDERAL STYLE

Built by Nicholas William Stuyvesant, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant — The oldest building on Cooper Square: Over 30 years older than nearby Cooper Union, 7 Years older than Merchant’s House Museum. Abe Lincoln would have walked past 35 Cooper on his way to make the great anti-slavery speech at Cooper Union. Residents included Beat poet Diane di Prima and actor Joel Grey.