the Bowery

the Bowery [Dutch Bouwerie =farm], section of lower Manhattan, New York City. The Bowery, the street that gives the area its name, was once a road to the farm of New Amsterdam Governor Peter Stuyvesant, who is buried at St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie, an Episcopal church. The mail route (est. 1673) to Boston traveled this road. In the late 19th cent. the Bowery was one of the city's leading entertainment areas and was notorious for its saloons, dance halls, swindlers, and petty criminals. By the early 20th cent. legitimate entertainment had moved elsewhere and the Bowery was left with a substantial homeless population. In the 1960s a portion of the area was rehabilitated and several middle-income housing projects were built. Although the Bowery still has many retail stores and a growing Chinese population, the neighborhood still has an unsavory reputation.

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.

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).