Bowery 2007,Part Two

The Bowery 2007 Walk: Bummer Street Then and Now

When the Third Avenue El operated along the Bowery from the 1870s to the early 1950s, the tracks plunged the street into shadowy gloom, making it easy for bad things to happen in the dark. The Bowery became for many the home of last resort, a collective magnet for degradation and shame.

From The WPA Guide to New York (1939):

"Thousands of the nation's unemployed drift to this section and may be seen sleeping in all-night restaurants, in doorways, and on loading platforms, furtively begging, or waiting with hopeless faces for some bread line or free lodging house to open."

From the Michelin Green Guide, 7th edition, c. 1984:

"It is best known for its 'bums' – homeless alcoholics, drug addicts, the chronically disturbed and the unemployed. A walk along it is not dangerous but depressing, and may make you feel uneasy. Derelicts lie on the sidewalks or in doorways and wait for handouts. The Bowery is also a great center for buying electrical goods especially lighting apparatus, and all types of restaurant equipment."

When I read the quote above, I had an image of someone stepping over derelicts to go into a store to buy a margarita machine.

Walking Off the Big Apple is not nostalgic for derelicts or streets filled with the unemployed, so I do not mourn the passing of a sad era. But I am uneasy with assumptions that the Bowery is languishing or even that a degree of languishment should be a bad thing. I'd like to see the community boards plan for a street devoted to collective melancholy, a place where all of us could go and find some solace after a really really bad day.

Image at top: The Bowery near Grand St., New York. Created/Published [ca. 1900]. "708-5" on negative. Detroit Publishing Co. no. 012678. Gift; State Historical Society of Colorado; 1949. Library of Congress. Image below: The Intersection of Bleecker and The Bowery. October 29, 2007. WOTBA

The Bowery 2007 Walk: Crying in Public

More on my advocacy of The Bowery as the designated Melancholy District:

With a metropolis so large as New York City, it's not unusual to witness strangers crying in public. While I was working on the Upper East Side last year, I cried a few times myself as I was walking down the street. On one of these occasions I passed a woman who had just left her place of employment, and she was crying, too.

Most often public grieving manifests itself in the form of a twenty-something crying and pleading on a cell phone to someone I cannot see. I also overhear people on the verge of tears apologizing on the phone to their immediate supervisor. Then, after hanging up, the flood gates open.

See, wouldn't it be great if all the sad people just headed to The Bowery on these bad days? The temporarily saddened could wallow in the misery of others. Retail stores that market to these needs would flourish - chocolate stores, shoe boutiques, saki bars, and Pinkberry. But we shouldn't depend on consumer habits to handle our melancholy needs. Maybe if people knew that they could freely walk up and down the Bowery and cry in public, then that would be enough.

Images: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, scheduled to open December 2007, a restaurant supply store, the Bowery Mission, and in the foreground a pressure cooker on the sidewalk. All of New York is a pressure cooker.

 The New BAD (Bowery art district) Springs Up Along Bummer Street

As all-in-the-know are aware, the Bowery has recently awakened from its famed languid derelictions to embrace the life-affirming values of art. On the side streets of NoLita and the Lower East Side, galleries big and small jockey for positions around the New Museum's big ghost mothership on the Bowery. Essex, Eldridge, Rivington, Spring, Greene, Chrystie - yes, all these streets come together to form the BAD.

Artists and writers have lived along the Bowery for a long time, and I'll cite just one example here. 222 Bowery, a loft coop between Spring and Prince, is home to all sorts of fascinating living people, but among its deceased denizens we can count the likes of Fernand Leger, Mark Rothko, and William Burroughs.

Everyone, including WOTBA, is sad about last year's closing of The Bowery's famed punk palace, CBGB's. But life is looking up along Bummer St, the heart of the melancholy district, with BAD.

WOTBA has an idea. If the Bowery is the new Chelsea, then it needs its own High Line. Let's rebuild the old Third Avenue El along the street, convert it immediately to a rails-to-trails project and then plant some native grasses along the new BAD high line. Here's our marketing slogan: "Down on the Bowery, we know how to get high."

Image: See the famed film of the Third Avenue El from the 1950s (before the line was demolished) HERE. Internet Archive.