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The Bowery B’hoy

October 19, 2011 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan | Permalink

Today’s reading for vWNY is Benjamin Baker’s 1848 play A Glance at New York, best known for introducing NYC’s homegrown folk hero, Mose the Bowery B’hoy, to the American stage. The full text doesn’t seem to be available online, but you can find it anthologized here, with used copies going pretty cheap.

If you were reading along for George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light, you encountered the hero of Baker’s play in Foster’s chapter “Mose and Lize.” Writing just two years after the Bowery actor Frank Chanfrau first played Mose in Baker’s play, Foster, who wasn’t always fond of working-class culture, described Mose as, like Davy Crockett, the end-point of “free development to Anglo-Saxon nature.” He gives the b’hoys props for manning the city’s Fire Department:

Yonder we see [a b'hoy] standing fearlessly upon the very verge of a five-story roof, chopping deliberately away at some wooden spout it is desirable to sever, while the treacherous flames crawl like fiery serpents out at the window-casing, down the shingles, and at length grown bolder, come to lick his very feet. So absorbed is he in his perilous occupation that he has not heard the cries of warning which the crowd below have been sending up through the smoky din of the conflagration. In a moment more the roof is all on fire, the air has lost its last particle of vitality and can no more be breathed. Too late he discovers his peril; and, blinded by smoke, suffocated and choking with the hot air, he strikes out at random for the window whence he issued, now framed with glowing flame. For a moment his heart sinks, as he sees before him his horrible but inevitable fate. But in another he rallies — recalls the half-remembered fragments of a prayer his mother taught him, long, long ago — sends a look, a kiss and a blessing after “Lize,” who perhaps even then is dreaming of him in her tidy little garret bed-room — and disappears forever.

Whew!

We’ve built up a stockpile of posts about Mose and Glance and Bowery b’hoys over the years. (See links below.) For more, visit The Bowery Culture Archive, part of CUNY’s Lost Museum online exhibit. Also check out this blog post from NYC I SEE, which speculates that Mose may have been a prototype for Superman. Not sure what we think of that theory, but it’s a fun read nonetheless. Is there room in New York for a Mose revival? The Axis Company staged revivals of Baker’s play in 2003 and 2007. (We missed them, sadly.) And Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osborne retells his story for 21st-century children in New York’s Bravest.

Previously on PWHNY:
Paul Bunyan in Billyburg
No Dainty Kid Glove Affair
New York’s Vauxhall Gardens
“Big Mose Must of Dropped It”
City on Stage

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RIP 35 Cooper Square

May 3, 2011 in Architecture by Bryan | 2 comments

Top image (The Bowery in the 1860s, looking south from Cooper Square) via NYPL. Photo of scaffolding on 35 Cooper Sq. and final image, below, via EV Grieve.

As Grieve, Jeremiah, and Local East Village have all reported, there will be no reprieve for 35 Cooper Square, the lovely little Federal Era relic that’s a last remnant of the antebellum Bowery. (Scroll through the long and tortured saga of the building’s death warrant via Curbed’s #35coopersquare tag.)

The home was built in 1826, the same year General Lafayette made a triumphal tour of the United States to celebrate the 50th anniversary of American Independence. Think about that if you happen to walk by demolition this week.

Jeremiah wrote an appreciative history of the building back in 2008, highlighting especially its literary historical relevance in the mid 20th century as a home and hangout of Beat writers, New York School poets and painters, and jazz musicians. He quotes Diane DiPrima’s memories of her first encounter with the building:

“From the moment when I first laid eyes on 35 Cooper Square, I knew it was the fulfillment of all those fantasies of art and the artist’s life, la vie de boheme, harking all the way back to my high school years or before.”

She moved in sometime in 1962 and lived there until 1965. During those years she published the DIY literary journal The Floating Bear with the poet LeRoi Jones.

Over the last few months as preservationists have fought to save 35 Cooper Square, the general public has learned more about that building’s history than most previously knew. Responding in part to a wrong-headed opinion piece in the Local East Village, architectural historian Kerri Culhane offered the blog her own profile on the building, which is worth reading again as the walls come down. She called 35 Cooper

representative of the Bowery’s history as a whole, which itself tells the story of New York, coinciding with the period of dynamic transformation of the Bowery from a rural lane to the main business district in town, and from the pleasure district of the mid to late 19th century to the cultural center of downtown New York in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s.

If the Bowery’s development is a mirror of the history of New York, to lose these early artifacts is to be left with a distorted image of the city.

One of my favorite appreciations of the building, though, comes in the comments on the wrong-headed opinion piece linked above, from a writer signing off as “Bowery Boy”:

35 Cooper is the oldest and last house of what was once Bowery Village – a buggey ride north from nyc, which at the time still ended at Chambers street, shortly after the wall became Wall St. Do you get what the history of that means? It says so much about what nyc was and is. It’s called legacy and heritage.35 Cooper was built before the Civil War, before parks existed, and across the street from this house was a public garden – Vauxhall Gardens where PT. Barnum was later to mount his first productions.

35 Cooper is one of 6 remaining Houses on the Bowery. How rare and unique on this island of skyscapers that we still have a few actual houses. Please learn about the value of Intimacy and scale exemplified by such local gems that contrast the numbness of the gigantic buildings of midtown.

And what is important about these 6 houses is that they connect all of the other landmarked buildings on Bowery into one historic district from Cooper Union to Chatum Square. If you get rid of such linking sites, then the Landmarks Commission has wasted it’s decades of time designating the other buildings – cuz there’ll be no connection of a cohesive historic district, which, by the way, could be a tourist destination, tax driver, and moneymaker for all the other businesses along Bowery.

It’s not about the restuarant that occupied the space last month, or the artists that lived there in the last decade – it’s about 200 years of history that, if torn down, no one else will ever get to experience firsthand.

And it’s not about this one building, but more about what it means in context of all the other buildings on the Bowery. Please learn about this rich history. Bowery was originally an Indian trail, and then the High Road – it was nyc first highway out of town where trappers and hunters would stop before getting to the city to sell their bounty. This house was there then.

Please learn about Peter Stuyvesant who originally owned this land and what he meant to the founding of nyc. Whether you no it or not, probably not, just looking at this house teaches you much about early nyc.

The Bowery is where Vaudeville, tap dance and Yiddish theater began. So, if we tear down all this early history, all we’ll be left with is the Bowery’s seedy skid row days, and no one want’s that to be the Bowery’s only legacy.

Or will even that legacy be buried under another ugly upcropping of steel and glass luxury hotels?

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All in all another day with the wall

July 27, 2010 in Art, Neighborhood Scenes by Bryan | 1 comment

Obscene NYC prepared the stage-by-stage “visual history of Shepard Fairey’s May Day Mural Beef,” above. If nothing else, the wall has certainly provided a lot of bloggers with fodder, even when we’re across the country on vacation. (Most recent updates from Jeremiah and Grieve; is there anything to report about the satellite installation at Music Hall of Williamsburg? Last time I was there it was still under special security.)

I still think my favorite moments at Bowery and Houston have been when the Os Gemeos mural peeked through, bristling with life. (My photo below.) This thing, according to Deitch Projects, is supposed to be up through the end of the year. I can’t imagine it surviving the summer.



Previously.

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Ladies and Gentlemen of New York … Tear Down That Wall!

June 29, 2010 in Art, Out and About by Bryan | 5 comments

OK, I’m not exactly inciting our readers to vandalism of gallery-sponsored graffiti, but like EV Grieve and Bowery Boogie I’ve been keeping an eye on the ongoing destruction of the Shepard Fairey wall of shame at Bowery and Houston. It really is a miserable piece, especially following the brilliant Os Gemeos and the temporary restoration of a Keith Haring that had stood at the same spot long ago.

I think the little bits of Os Gemeos peeking through are a serious improvement over the dour, shouldn’t-we-be-a-little-past-this-easy-sort-of-ironic work by Fairey. Don’t they just sparkle coming through that Soviet-Target mess?

Someone else just wants the Haring back.

And here we see evidence of the floral ejaculate paste-job that Jeremiah photographed on 10th street a few days back.

Viva la street! It’s hard not to see this as the public demanding something better on that corner. Nobody messed with the Os Gemeos, did they?

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Get your flash on

February 17, 2010 in History, Writing New York by Bryan | Permalink

The aim of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was to situate Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass within the nineteenth-century city’s worlds of print, from the highbrow publishing industry to cheap print, penny presses, flash weeklies, and urban pornography. Depending on which Whitman critics you read, he hews closer to high or low. I suggested he wanted to have it both ways: ever a joiner, he wanted to bring together the best of both worlds.

At one point, while talking about the so-called “Flash press,” I did geek out considerably, telling the story of how a bundle of these rare “sporting” men’s periodicals, mildly pornographic and thoroughly anti-authoritarian, made their way from an early-20c sportswriter’s private collection into the American Antiquarian Society. For the last dozen years or so, cultural historians have been poring over them aiming to understand more about 19c New York subcultures of style, sexuality, and reading. Other rare examples of these magazines have turned up in the city’s municipal archives, where they were long ago submitted as evidence in a rash of obscene libel trials in the 1840s, right about the time Whitman was editing his nativist newspaper, The Aurora. I mentioned Donna Dennis’s account of this legal history last week; you can also read key samples of this material in an anthology published a few years ago by some urban historian whose work I admire quite a bit.

If you want to understand why I would geek out about the preservation of this sort of ephemera, let me just offer one example of the fascinating work these materials have allowed cultural historians to undertake. In the on-line quarterly Common-place a few years back, James Cook — a cultural biographer of P. T. Barnum and editor of a thoroughly engrossing Barnum reader — drew on some material from flash weeklies to tease out some new understanding of the mixed-race origins of American popular culture. He starts his piece by recalling Charles Dickens’ famous account of the a dance hall in the Five Points, which featured a black performer who later became famous as “Master Juba.” Later in his essay Cook points out that most people have assumed Dickens catapulted Juba to stardom, but some new evidence from flash weeklies helps us flesh out the story: “We now know a good deal more” about Juba than ever before, Cook writes. We know

that his real name was William Henry Lane, although he generally performed as Juba or Master Juba; that he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, during the late 1820s, part of the first generation of African Americans to come of age following emancipation; that soon after Dickens’s visit he became the first black man to break the color line in the minstrel industry; that he participated in a series of “match dances” against Master John Diamond, the leading Irish American minstrel dancer of the day; and that he used his growing fame to forge a more lasting and successful career in Britain, where he eventually performed for Queen Victoria.Most scholars have assumed that American Notes represented the starting point for Lane’s public career. But an anonymous letter to one of the flash papers offers a more complex history. An up-and-coming showman by the name of P.T. Barnum, it turns out, had recently managed a young black dancer known as Juba at New York’s Vauxhall Gardens. The letter also suggests that Barnum deceived the sporting fraternity in two ways. In 1840, he presented Lane as part of a conventional minstrel show, without informing his patrons that the man behind the burnt cork was black. In 1841, he took the deceit a step further, promoting the young African American virtuoso as John Diamond. Barnum even staged bogus “trials of skill” as part of the act, with wagers on Lane-as-Diamond to win!

For evidence of the hopelessly mixed racial origins of U.S. popular culture, this is about as good as it gets.

For cultural historians of 19c NYC, that’s about as good as it gets too. I recommend the rest of Cook’s fascinating essay, which includes topics that have turned up elsewhere in our course, from Five Points and Bowery B’hoys, to city mystery novels (including those by Ned Buntline, a guy I didn’t get a chance to mention, but who, in addition to writing racy novels was a ringleader in the Astor Place riots), to blackface and the Bowery Theatre. It’s a perfect slice of the Bowery world Whitman sometimes wandered into, eager to take his readers with him.

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Hating on the Bowery, Now and Then

February 11, 2009 in Neighborhood Scenes, Writing New York by Bryan | Permalink

am_MarshBowery.jpgI 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.

raggeddick.jpgWhile 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!

slumming.jpg

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

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New York’s Vauxhall Gardens

February 6, 2009 in City on Stage, History, Writing New York by Bryan | Permalink

New_York_Vauxhall_Gardens_1803.jpg

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.

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Amato Closing

January 13, 2009 in Music, Neighborhood Scenes by Bryan | 1 comment

1Amato Opera 009.JPG

Lots of print and digital type already devoted to the announcement that the Amato Opera, as old as the idea of the East Village itself, will close this May at the end of its 61st season. The news was delivered by the 88-year-old founder, Anthony Amato, prior to a performance of The Merry Widow on January 10.

Curbed’s revelation that the building had been sold (for a surprisingly low $3.7 million) to a developer once listed by the Voice as among the worst landlords in the city has a lot of folks worried that the Amato’s building might eventually be replaced by yet another sore pinky finger — part of the ongoing Dubaification of the Bowery.

The Times registered the community’s shock (with an audio slideshow to boot), but not as personally as Jeremiah at Vanishing New York, who has a great post from a year ago about a night at the opera.

You can also catch some video of the Amato — and more detailed background on its history — at the companion site to a PBS documentary produced a few years back.

Photo credit: Stefan Falke.

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While You Were Sleeping

December 10, 2008 in Art by Bryan | Permalink

… or studying for finals, or raising kids, or whatever it is you do, gentle reader, you may have missed a couple Deitch Projects installations that are slated to close within a couple weeks.
down_install_1.jpg
First, the breathtaking Kehinde Wiley show, “Down,” at Deitch’s 18 Wooster St. location (around the corner to the south of the old main space on Grand). I was walking back to SoHo from a doctor’s appointment in TriBeCa* with one of my kids when we stopped in for a gander. I have a hard time thinking of something I’ve seen this arresting (or cool) all year. [The piece above, "Sleep," measures 25 feet in length!] Through December 20.

6a00d8341c2c8053ef00e5520dd70e8834-640wi.jpg

Second, and also sponsored by Deitch, the recreation of Keith Haring’s day-glo mural at Bowery and Houston — installed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the artist’s birth — is slated to “close” on the 21st. Not sure exactly how that will happen, although there was some indication when it “opened” last spring that the piece would eventually be replaced by another Haring recreation.

Catch them while you can. I, for one, have enjoyed the mural’s place in the neighborhood for most of the last year.

*Do we have a style guide for this blog? I find typing the internal capitals in “SoHo” and “TriBeCa” to be a little annoying. But aren’t those standard usage?

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