BOWERY

BOWERY. The Bowery is a neighborhood in lower Manhattan most often associated with the poor and the homeless. The modern street bearing that name begins at Chatham Square in Chinatown and continues north to Coopers Square where it merges into Third Avenue. The street's origins date back to the seventeenth century, when it was named Bouwerie (farm) Lane because it was a primary route of egress from the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam to the farm of its governor, Peter Stuyvesant. In 1673, a mail route using this road was established between New York City and Boston. At the end of the American Revolution, on 25 November 1783 (long celebrated as "Evacuation Day"), the Bowery provided the main route by which the last of the occupying British army marched down to the East River wharves and departed. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Bowery neighborhood had become a center for popular entertainment and was home to an assortment of theaters, saloons, brothels, and dance halls. At the same time, it became the center of the "b'hoy" movement, in which multiethnic, working-class young men affected a new image by wearing loud clothing, greasing back their hair, and frequenting the cruder nightlife centered around the Bowery. Petty crime and prostitution followed in their wake, and by the early twentieth century, most respectable businesses and entertainment had fled the area. Throughout most of the 1900s, the word "Bowery" was synonymous with the homeless and indigent. However, beginning in the 1990s, significant changes came to the Bowery. The once-squalid area became home to a new generation of artists, clothing designers, trendy cafes, restaurants, and boutiques.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Harlow, Alvin F. Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street. New York: D. Appleton, 1931.

Faren R.Siminoff

Bowery, The, street in New York City, situated in lower Manhattan, whose name derives from the fact that it once ran through Peter Stuyvesant's farm, or bouwerie as it was called by the Dutch settlers. The 19th‐century‐stage type of the Bowery boy, representing the characteristic exuberant, impudent rascal of the district, in the plug hat, red shirt, and turned‐up trousers of the volunteer fire department, was introduced in the play A Glance at New York (1848). The Bowery was long notorious for its dance halls, gambling houses, and other criminal resorts, which were fliply commented upon in a song (The Bowery! I'll never go there any more!) by a bumpkin recounting his misadventures in Charles Hoyt's play A Trip to Chinatown. Fiction about the squalid slum life there includes Stephen Crane's Maggie and George's Mother and Edward W. Townsend's Chimmie Fadden, …and Other Stories (1895).

Bowery a street and district in New York associated with drunks and vagrants. The name derives from the fact that it once ran through Peter Stuyvesant's farm, or bouwerie, as it was called by the Dutch settlers.