The Bowery: Flophouses Along America's Largest and Most Infamous Skid Row (2000)

The Bowery /ˈbaʊᵊri/ is a street and neighborhood in the southern portion of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The street runs from Chatham Square at Park Row, Worth Street, and Mott Street in the south to Cooper Square at 4th Street in the north, while the neighborhood's boundaries are roughly East 4th Street and the East Village to the north; Canal Street and Chinatown to the south; Allen Street and the Lower East Side to the east; and Little Italy to the west. In the 17th century, the road branched off Broadway north of Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan to the homestead of Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherland. The street was known as Bowery Lane prior to 1807.[4] "Bowery" is an anglicization of the Dutch bouwerij, derived from an antiquated Dutch word for "farm", as in the 17th century the area contained many large farms.[2] A New York City Subway station named Bowery, serving the BMT Nassau Street Line (J Z trains), is located close to the Bowery's intersection with Delancey and Kenmare Streets. There is a tunnel under the Bowery once intended for use by proposed but never built New York City Subway services, including the Second Avenue Subway. Bowery is the setting for Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (published in 1893), about a poor family living in the neighborhood. New York School poet Ted Berrigan mentions the Bowery several times in his seminal work "The Sonnets". In Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Fantastic Four #4 (1962), the Human Torch flees to the Bowery to lose himself "among all the other human derelicts..." In one of the Bowery's flophouses, he discovers the amnesiac 1940s-era character Namor the Sub-Mariner.[40] The Wild Cards series of books sets the Bowery as Jokertown, the place where the malformed go to live after the Wild Card Virus is released over New York. Brenda Coultas' 2003 book of poetry, A Handmade Museum, contains a section called "the Bowery Project" which documents the pre-gentrification process. Over the years, the Bowery has been mentioned in the lyrics of a number of songs, including the Bob Dylan song "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", from the album Bringing It All Back Home (1965): "I walked by a Guernsey cow / Who directed me down / To the Bowery slums / Where people carried signs around / Saying, 'Ban the bums.'" The street has also been mentioned in songs by Broken Bells, They Might Be Giants, Willie Nile, Jim Croce, Regina Spektor, Dire Straits, Bill Callahan, Saint Etienne the Vancouver Twee pop band cub, Sonic Youth, Two Gallants, Steve Earle, Beastie Boys, Paul McDermott, Billy Joel, The Decemberists, Tom Waits, Ryan Adams, The Clash, the Ramones, Jesse Malin and The Foetus All-Nude Revue, The Lumineers, Deerhunter, Local Natives, Smog, Blood Orange, The Antlers among others. Bowery is mentioned as a place where love and gin can be found in the lyrics of Stephin Merritt's song "Love is Like a Bottle of Gin" from the album 69 Love Songs. Rock band Bowery Electric's name was originated by Lawrence Chandler while residing in the area. The 1925 film Little Annie Rooney takes place in the Bowery. The Bowery, a 1933 film about Brodie. The Bowery is portrayed in the 1934 Krazy Kat cartoon Bowery Daze. A popular B-movie series made between 1946 and 1958 featured "The Bowery Boys", led by Slip (Leo Gorcey) and Satch (Huntz Hall). The 1949 cartoon "Bowery Bugs" tells a fictionalized version of the Steve Brodie story, with Bugs Bunny as Brody's tormenter. On the Bowery, Lionel Rogosin's 1956 film, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. In the 2002 film Gangs of New York, Bowery is a mentioned territory of the Bowery Boys, a street gang of the late 19th century during the New York Draft Riots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowery