Entries tagged with “Bowery” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

I can't remember when I first visited Museum of Chinese in the Americas in its old location, the second floor of the big red school building at the corner of Bayard and Mulberry. One of our Writing New York TAs, a former museum employee, had offered to take members of our class on a walking tour of the neighborhood -- or was it an earlier class on The Port of New York the first time she led that tour? I can't remember. Either way, we met at the museum for a pre-walk discussion, as we have the several times I've taken that walk since then. "Walking tours are a dangerous epistemological activity," she told us as we headed out toward Columbus Park, by which she meant that as a Chinese American woman from suburban Atlanta, was she an "us" or a "them" when she talked about the neighborhood and Chinese immigration more generally?

The collection at the old space was quaint in some ways -- made up mostly of materials that had been scavenged by the museum's founders (a couple grad students, including our NYU colleague Jack Tchen) as an older generation of Chinatown residents passed away and their kids threw away unwanted old belongings: suitcases, clothing, bottles, letters, laundry signs. Curators had used this cultural detritus to create a compelling account of the issues faced by new arrivals to New York's Chinatown over several decades.

The walking tour is hands down my favorite in lower Manhattan: I continue to be blown away every time I walk through the old secret tunnel running from Doyers Street to the Bowery: once a getaway route for gangs and bootleggers (see Freeland, ch. 2), now a subterranean arcade/strip mall of herbal medicine vendors, temporary employment agencies, and English lessons. As such it continues to teach about the history of immigration to this neighborhood.

So it was with some sadness that I realized, last spring, that my class's Chinatown walks would no longer include a stop by that DIY museum space on Mulberry. But my disappointment was more than compensated for by the awe-inspiring Maya Lin-designed space on Centre street, slated to open officially this Tuesday, the 22nd.

The museum's scope and capabilities -- not to mention funding -- have expanded dramatically and the new space will host exhibitions that range far beyond the history of New York's Chinatown. The two inaugural shows suggest the range of what MoCA will now be able to offer visitors: The new core exhibit, With a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America, will focus broadly on the history and experience of Chinese immigration to the Americas. From the museum's site:

The core exhibition presents the diverse layers of the Chinese American experience while examining America's journey as a nation of immigrants--from an historical overview of Chinese immigration to the United States, to the individual stories that reveal what it has meant to be Chinese in America at different moments in time, to the physical traces and images left behind by past generations for us to consider, reflect and reclaim.

A key element of the exhibition is its dialogue with Maya Lin's architectural centerpiece - a sky lit courtyard at the heart of the museum. The exhibit wraps around and engages with the courtyard, which represents the idea of China - a collective origin, which for many after the first generation, becomes a constructed, rather than an actual, memory. Not unlike the rooms of a Chinese house, each section of the exhibit is connected to the courtyard via portals. Each one containing films of people narrating personal life stories, demonstrating how history is propelled by individual moments of decision-making in the face of circumstances larger than themselves. External walls dialogue with the inner, in order to provide the larger historical context for Chinese American struggles and achievements.

The second major exhibit opening Tuesday, Here & Now, focuses on contemporary Chinese American artists in New York:

The exhibition will also be accompanied by a series of panel discussions, artist workshops, and a full-color, illustrated catalogue that features interviews with artists Xu Bing and Wenda Gu. The exhibition is organized into three seven-week long chapters--Visual Memories, Crossing Boundaries, and Towards Transculturalism.

The first chapter, opening September 22 and running until November 2, features the following artists:

• Xu Bing (b. China, 1955; U.S. arrival, Wisconsin, 1990)
• Yun-Fei Ji (b. China, 1963; U.S. arrival, Arkansas, 1989)
• Lin Yan (b. China; U.S. arrival, New York, 1986)
• Cui Fei (b. China: U.S. arrival, Pennsylvania, 1996)

The subsequent chapters of the exhibition will be mounted on November 19, 2009 and on January 10, 2010.

In other words, repeat visits will reward you. And you can still book the walking tour I love so much. Take note: The first five days will feature free admission:

Tuesday, September 22: 1:30 pm - 4:00 pm (last entry at 3:30 pm)
Wednesday, September 23: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entry at 4:30 pm)
Thursday, September 24: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entry at 4:30 pm)
Friday, September 25: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entry at 4:30 pm)
Saturday, September 26: 10:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entry at 4:30 pm)

Given that the museum is just down the street from where I live, I'm digging the ways in which it's evolving into a vibrant artistic and intellectual center that will impact multiple neighborhoods.

Oh, and p.s.: If you missed City Room's three-part Q&A series on Chinatown gentrification (with Hunter College professor Peter Kwong), it might make good reading before you head down to the museum sometime this week.

I wrote a while back about attempts in the 1820s to gentrify the Bowery. More recently, a couple blogs I follow have charted current efforts to remake the street's image as a luxury shopping district with a little bit of urban edge. (That shitty Hamptons store "Blue & Cream" in the shitty Avalon building even went as far as tagging their own store with "graffiti" directing passers-by to their recession sales inside.) Most recently we've seen attempts to move away from the idea of "the" Bowery toward a "Bowery district" (spreading the faux-seedy influence and reputation?) or slips from newcomers calling it "Bowery Street" (as if to contain its once-unruly energy and long reputation as the dark twin to Broadway?).

EV Grieve directs us to another NY history blog, Inside the Apple, which has this to say about previous attempts to rename the Bowery:

The most famous Dutch bouwerij was owned by Peter Stuyvesant, who lies buried in the churchyard of St. Mark's in the Bowery on 10th Street and Second Avenue. For years, this church was known as St. Mark's in the Bouwerie, its archaic spelling not only hearkened back to the days of the Dutch, but also helped distinguished it from the nearby thoroughfare. By the late 19th century, the Bowery had become synonymous with skid row. A lot of the Bowery's reputation was deserved, but at least part of the blame for its near-universal name recognition was the musical A Trip to Chinatown, which featured the song "The Bowery." Its chorus boasts:

The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry
They say such things and they do strange things,
On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!
I'll never go there any more.

By 1916, the street's reputation had gotten so bad that civic groups battled to come up with a new name for the thoroughfare. One suggestion was "Cooper Avenue" in honor of Cooper Union founder (and Jell-O pioneer) Peter Cooper. A rival proposition recommended "Central Broadway." It's hard to imagine the chaos this name change might have brought about in a city that already featured Broadway, West Broadway, and East Broadway. Neither of these suggestions had any real traction, perhaps because there was still nostalgia for the old Bouwerie of Peter Stuyvesant. Indeed, that nostalgia was so strong that in 1956 a group of merchants suggested that Third Avenue be renamed "The Bouwerie," to invoke the charm and refinement of a bygone age. (That this would have given the city a Bowery and a Bouwerie a block apart seems not to have figured into their calculations.) Plans were underway at the time to remove the last vestiges of the Third Avenue "El," and it seemed logical to local boosters to get rid of the name Third Avenue--which they saw as intimately connected to the failure of the "El"--and replace it with Bouwerie, which would increase the street's cachet and, presumably, retail rents.

While preparing for this morning's lecture on Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick (1868), I noticed for the first time just how much the novel hates on the Bowery. In its opening sequence the otherwise industrious street urchin Dick realizes he's overslept and probably missed a few shines because he'd spent the prior evening at the Old Bowery theater. Even though the theater is one of the spots that keeps Dick in town, the novel remains pretty equivocal about the entertainment provided there: clearly Dick enjoys it, but later in the novel he reforms and promises not to waste his money there in the future. The book's less equivocal about Bowery fashions: one pair of pants is frowned on by the narrator as "very loose in the legs, and presenting a cheap Bowery look."

And Dick is fine with this dis. He's more than happy to scrub up for an imagined life as a clerk (no Bartleby is Dick!) and he continually fantasizes about having a "manshun" on the "Avenoo." At the novel's close, he and his pal Fosdick resolve to leave their little pad on Mott Street and move to "a nicer quarter of the city."

If Alger were still writing today (or if some team of underpaid ghost writers continued to churn out sequels the way someone keeps turning out new titles in the Boxcar Children series) I'm sure we'd see Ragged Dick -- ragged no longer -- ready to move back down to the Bowery now that the Whole Foods had arrived. Slumming's the new Old New York luxury craze, after all!



(h/t to Grieve for the last illustration, as well as a bunch of the links above; topmost image: Reginald Marsh, "The Bowery," 1928)

Benjamin Baker's 1848 farce A Glance at New York, which I wrote about earlier this week, concludes in Vauxhall Gardens, a "pleasure garden" situated on Lafayette between 4th and 8th. Wikipedia has a decent entry on it, drawing for the most part from Mark Caldwell's New York Night (2005) and Mary Henderson's classic The City and the Theatre (rev. ed. 2004).

According to the article, the pleasure garden -- named after the famous London entertainment spot -- was originally opened by Samuel Fraunces, proprietor of Fraunces Tavern, a version of which remains on lower Pearl Street in the financial district. His Vauxhall existed in present-day TriBeCa, at the intersection of Greenwich and Chambers, where my daughters' old elementary school, P.S. 234, now stands. It later moved to Broome Street, between Broadway and Bowery (which is where I happen to live), and then relocated to Lafayette between 4th and 8th (pictured above in 1803), where it remained until 1859. Until the middle of the 1850s its facilities included an outdoor theater and restaurants. It would have been this location represented in Glance's final scene.

Several things strike me as interesting about the gardens' final location. First, it would have been adjacent the Astor Place Opera House, scene of New York's most infamous theater riots in 1849, only a year after Glance premiered. (The land the gardens were on also belonged to Astor.) Second, its location -- with Broadway on one side and Bowery on the other -- placed it smack in between the centers of upper-class fashion and working-class life. Vauxhall also would have separated the Bowery culture from the Olympic Theater, on Broadway (though a little lower, between Howard and Grand), where Glance opened. (See my prior post for a contemporary protest against the impact the play had on the theater's audience makeup.)

According to the Wikipedia article, again citing Henderson and Caldwell, the gardens drew patrons from both elite and working-class neighborhoods until around 1850, when the Bowery folks won out for the park's remaining decade. This would make Benjamin Baker's choice of the spot for the conclusion of his play a rather interesting symbolic geography: a place where classes mingled, but one increasingly coming under working-class influence. And it does seem as if Mose and Lize are more at home at Vauxhall than are the play's upper-class characters. Harry, one of the wealthier characters, acknowledges to his new girlfriend Jane that she has "condescen[ded]" to "honoring this place with [her] presence." By contrast, Mose, with his "outré" manners, sits and delivers his famous order to the waiter: "Bring me a large plate of pork and beans. Say, a large piece of pork, and don't stop to count de beans!"

Bonus: check out the Bowery Boys' podcast on the "original bowery b'hoys," along with a group of kid actors known as the "Bowery Boys" in the 1930s and 40s.

Apropos of yesterday's post: I was reading in Wallace and Burrows's Gotham this morning while doing a little work and came across this passage on a bunch of gentrifiers buying out a dive bar and trying to scrub up the neighborhood:

Bowery Village remained notorious for some of the stomach-turning stench of its slaughterhouses and tanyards. As late as 1825, upstate drovers ... were herding an estimated two hundred thousand head of cattle across King's Bridge each year and making their way, accompanied by hordes of pigs, horses, and bleating spring lambs, down Manhattan to Henry Astor's Bull's Head Tavern and adjacent abattoirs. A butcher who acquired an exceptionally fine cow would then parade it through the streets, preceded by a band and followed by fellow butchers in aprons and shirtsleeves, stopping before homes of wealthy customers, who were expected to step out and order part of the animal.

Some of those customers, bolstered by gentry families filtering in from the lower wards, wanted to transform the Bowery into a more genteel neighborhood. Taking aim at the stink, the endless whinnying, lowing, and grunting, and the occasional steer running amok and goring passers-by, they set about driving the Bull's Head from the area. In the mid-1820s, an association of socially prominent businessmen bought out Henry Astor and dismantled his enterprise. (A new Bull's Head opened in semirural surroundings at Thirds Avenue and 24th Street and soon attracted cattle yards, slaughterhouses, pig and sheep pens, and a weekly market; the area became known as Bull's Head Village, the city's northern frontier.) Meanwhile, in place of the old tavern, the consortium set about erecting Ithiel Town's splendid Greek Revival playhouse--the New York (soon to be Bowery) Theater. Mayor Philip Hone hailed the transformation as marking the "rapid progress of improvement in our city." But neither theater nor street was destined for gentility, and the Bowery would soon evolve into an entertainment strip for surrounding communities. (475-76)

Wallace and Burrows don't cite this (I found it instead in Robert Allen's Horrible Prettiness, a history of burlesque), but when Mayor Hone laid the cornerstone for the Bowery Theater in 1826 he said he hoped the institution would "improve the taste, correct the morals, and soften the manners of the people." By this he meant he wanted to use the theater (which would conveniently siphon off rowdy audiences from the more genteel Park Theater farther downtown) as a means of social uplift and social control. I doubt the hotel and condo developers have a similar benevolent -- if condescending -- agenda for folks living around the rapidly gentrifying Bowery today.

Hone misjudged the neighborhood. Let's hope Bloomberg has too.