The Bowery. To New Yorkers, the name is thick with grimy connotations: poverty, hard drugs, the slow decline of the down-and-out. For generations, this wide street in Lower Manhattan has been the city's skid row, home to a motley assortment of shelters, flophouses and wholesale merchants.
Walking past its old tenements and lofts on a sunny afternoon, from the East Village south toward Chinatown, it's easy to see that history hanging on. At Roger & Sons Food Service Equipment, the sidewalk is full of freezers and steam tables. And there's a crowd at the Bowery Mission, which has helped the homeless here since 1879. But then there's the red-brick tower at the corner of 4th Street, which if you look closely reveals itself, in flowing script, as the Bowery Hotel.
Yes, it's a boutique hotel, and a very good one, taking the name of the neighbourhood as a point of pride. Strange, but that's the state of the Bowery these days: Like the rest of Lower Manhattan, this storied strip is well on its way to becoming a playground for the rich and cultured. The old New York is once again about to get squeezed out by the new New York.
And the only thing that surprises John Lo is that it's taken so long. The manager of Bowery Home Supplies is bemused by the current flood of NYU students, loft-dwelling investment bankers and tourists who are colonizing the neighbourhood. When his store moved here in the early 1980s, things looked a bit different. “We were here when the addicts ruled the area,” Lo says. “They used to throw used syringes under our gate.”
Then, through the city's resurgence in the 1990s, he saw development come slowly to the surrounding blocks. “I think it started with the bars,” Lo says. “It's a natural convergence. You have Little Italy that's always had restaurants” – just to the west – “and then all that development over around Rivington Street” – to the east, where a new boutique hotel towers over the Lower East Side. “So it all came together here. It's a natural connection.”
Indeed, the remaining grime of the Bowery seems like an anomaly. Over the past two years, the street itself has started to lose its flophouses and shelters, which have provided a refuge to thousands of troubled citizens.
Now, the Bowery neighbourhood, a loosely defined strip a few blocks long, feels like a leftover slice of the city as it was a few decades ago.
To be sure, the Bowery had many other ups and downs since it was laid out in the mid-1600s by Dutch settlers. (The word bouwerij is old Dutch for “farm.”) The wide street has been the gathering place for all kinds of business. In the early 19th century, when the area was one of New York's most fashionable residential neighbourhoods, the Bowery was a main street with a growing number of theatres.
A few decades later, the entertainment was minstrel and peep shows, as the neighbourhood became an immigrant district of tenements and factories. The Bowery Boys gang, dramatized in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, also called it home. Here in the oldest of North American cities, there's always another layer of history to be turned over.
And the recently openedBowery Hotel is ready to capitalize on the tension between past and present. Savvy hoteliers Eric Goode and Sean MacPherson have delivered a new building that's the tallest in the area. It enjoys sweeping city views yet feels a bit like the 19th century. The bellhops wear red jackets, and the lobby is a warren of Oriental rugs, brocade fabrics and heavy timbers. (Guests can even have breakfast on a terrace that overlooks an ancient graveyard, a rare stretch of green.) The rooms blend “pre-war” character, hardwood and brass taps with 21st-century luxury in the form of 400-thread-count linens and flat-screen TVs. It's a mix calculated to appeal to the “downtown” New York visitor of today, for whom money is not a problem and culture is the object.
