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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.

And even high culture is coming to the Bowery. Artists have lived here for decades, and small galleries such as the photography-focused Jen Bekman are moving in. A few blocks from the hotel, past a new Whole Foods market and luxury apartment buildings, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is set to open its new home Dec. 1. Designed by cutting-edge Japanese architects SANAA, its precarious-looking stack of white cubes will hide a new set of galleries for the museum, which has chronicled the downtown art scene since 1977.

Of course, the Bowery has been known for a different cultural landmark: CBGB, the legendary rock club at 315 Bowery that was the proving ground for the Talking Heads, the Ramones and Television. Owner Hilly Kristal, who died last month, shuttered the club last fall when the rent became too expensive. Writing about the club's 1970s heyday, Kristal said the Bowery was “a drab, ugly and unsavoury place. But it was good enough for rock and rollers.”

“The surrounding buildings were mostly industrial and the people who did live close by, didn't seem to care too much about having a little rock and roll sound seeping into their lives,” he wrote.

Nowadays, the sound of rock ‘n' roll is coming from Marion's Continental Restaurant, the retro-styled lounge just across the Bowery that's been home to local folk and rock musicians since 1990. It's got a music room, the Marquee Lounge, where the disco ball stands still and the young bartender wears a feather in his fedora. One night this spring, singer/songwriter Tony Scherr was playing to a crowd including expat Canadian musicians and an opening band of bluegrass musicians too young to have a drink. “It's good to be back here,” says Scherr, who's collaborated with Norah Jones. “It never changes.” In fact the bar owners own the building and have no plans to leave.

John Lo at Bowery Home Supplies, on the other hand, isn't so well off. “Most businesses like this are moving out of Manhattan or to the fringes,” he says. “We've started looking for somewhere else, but it's hard. All the gas stations and garages are gone.”

And no wonder: Across the street, hotelier Ian Schrager is building a super-luxury condo, where Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron have designed a facade that looks like abstracted graffiti. “Those big contractors, they don't come here for their stuff,” he says, motioning to the busy workers across the street.

But somebody's always coming to the Bowery for something: drugs, salvation, kitchen equipment, art. These days, perhaps, they visit for the vibe that comes with the collision of all these things.

PACK YOUR BAGS

GETTING THERE

The area is easily accessible by cab or subway; the 6 train at Spring Street or the J train at Bowery are the closest stops. Downtown's most stroll-friendly neighbourhoods – Nolita, the East Village and the Lower East Side – are nearby.

WHERE TO STAY

The Bowery Hotel 335 Bowery; (212) 505-9100; www.theboweryhotel.com; 135 rooms, from $510 for a queen room to $1,235 for a suite.

FOOD AND DRINK Marion's Continental Restaurant and Lounge 354 Bowery; (212) 475-7621; www.marionsnyc.com.

THINGS TO DO New Museum of Contemporary Art Opening Dec. 1 at 235 Bowery; (212) 219-1222; www.newmuseum.org. The museum, an important force in the downtown art scene of the seventies and eighties, is celebrating its 30th anniversary with the opening of a remarkable new building.

Jen Bekman Gallery 6 Spring St.; 212-219-0166;

www.jenbekman.com. Bowery Ballroom 6 Delancey St.; (212) 533-2111; www.boweryballroom.com. This music venue, just off the Bowery itself, has hosted such indie acts as the Mountain Goats and Canadian rising stars Tokyo Police Club.

ARMCHAIR IQ Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante traces downtown's rough side from 1840 to 1920.