Publisher's Weekly Review
This anecdote-laden urban history of New York City's Bowery by Alexiou (The Flatiron) makes for addictive reading. Throughout the 20th century, the street ("synonymous with despair") in lower Manhattan was once a key thruway in old New Amsterdam, built on an old Lenape Indian footpath north of the colonists' original settlement, along which rich settlers built their estates. In Alexiou's hands, the history of the Bowery---from farms to grotty nightlife to bums and back to high-end real estate for the wealthy-is a slice of New York City history. The chapters on the city's tumultuous early days are top-rate urban history, yet Alexiou hits her stride in describing the 19th century, when the Bowery-with its immigrant riots, gin joints, whorehouses, and attitude that "everything was for sale"-was "America's center of sin." Astutely written and smartly researched (this isn't the same shopworn collection of old anecdotes from Herbert Asbury's 1928 Gangs of New York), the book dives deeply into such Bowery notables as Tammany Hall boss Tim Sullivan and continues through the early 20th century (which she covers too briefly) before coming to life again with the punk music scene at CBGB. This is a fascinating micro-take on New York's cycle of boom and bust. Agent: Wendy Schmalz, Wendy Schmalz Agency. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A lively portrait of New York's "other street," once a byword for urban degradation and now just another site of gentrification.It was in the cards a long time ago that the Bowery, Manhattan's roughest, toughest street, would one day be cleaned up. After all, observes journalist Alexiou (The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City that Arose with It, 2010, etc.), "the Dutch founded New Amsterdam not as a religious refuge but as a place to do business, and this remains Manhattan's ethos to this day." Now, says Bowery resident and advocate Adam Woodward, "every fifty years, the city tears down, and rebuilds." That cycle seems about right. In the late 1960s, the Bowery, that stretch of road that begins at Houston Street and descends south into what used to be tenements full of Irish and then Chinese newcomers to the city, was just on the brink of becoming a cultural icon of a different type, courtesy of Hilly Kristal and his raw-boned nightclub CBGB, which helped launch "four kids from Queens who sported spiky haircuts and black leather jackets." Alexiou's cast of characters includes Patti Smith and Lou Reed, to be sure, but also figures from the past who shaped the city in various ways, from theatrical entrepreneur Henry Astor, the bane of his richer brother John Jacob, to Tammany politician and proud Bowery patois speaker Timothy Daniel Sullivan. In 1957, the area was the setting for the semidocumentary On the Bowery, another cultural milestone that "endured among the art house crowd" and influenced the filmmaking styles of Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes. Now such a film would be impossible, given an ever growing number of high-rise luxury apartments, tony restaurants, expensive boutiques, and other signs of hipsterism.New York buffs, especially those nostalgic for a grittier time, will find this a learned pleasure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* For much of the twentieth century, simply to say the Bowery conjured up images of urban decay and of the social ravages of alcoholism and mental illness: the Bowery was Manhattan's skid row. Created in the days of New Amsterdam, the Bowery, along with Broadway, was one of the main thoroughfares leading north out of the Dutch settlement at Manhattan's southern tip. After the American Revolution, farms of wealthy Dutch settlers gave way to rapid urban expansion. Land speculators, including the nascent Astor family, began to develop the Bowery, and it became the city's nighttime playground, full of bars and theaters competing for audiences. A magnet for newly arrived immigrants, the Bowery saw Italians, Irish, Chinese, and Jews dominate in turn. America's vibrant Yiddish theater thrived, and the Irish came to control political life. Now, gentrification transforms this thoroughfare with high-rise condominiums and chic boutiques. New York historian Alexiou (Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, 2006; The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose with It, 2010) enlivens the street's history with insightful portraits of the street's denizens. A very valuable addition to any urban-history collection.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE BOWERY is a street that has lost its character and been reincarnated - again and again. While today it sprouts luminous towers with multimillion-dollar condos, it would not take an archaeologist to find traces of its time as the definitive boulevard of broken dreams, lined with flophouses and evangelizing missions that catered to boozed-up "Bowery bums." There are also remnants of the 19th century, when the street was the city's raffish entertainment hub that, for better or worse, produced early blackface minstrel shows, vaudeville variety acts and the sometimes schmaltzy offerings of the first Yiddish theaters. Cognoscenti might even uncover vestiges of its time as a pastoral lane, one of New Amsterdam's main roads, lined with farms - "bouwerie" is Dutch for farm - including an estate belonging to Peter Stuyvesant, who is buried in the graveyard of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. While until the last decade or two the Bowery was a street you surely didn't want to end up on, there were periods when it represented the height of gentility and the peak of showbiz stardom, and in "Devil's Mile" Alice Sparberg Alexiou guides us through this checkered history with gusto. I particularly admire the book's shrewd narrative approach: The street is used to recount much of the history of New York, a strategy that could be adapted to Broadway and positively to 4th Street. The writer, though, sometimes overplays this hand, with the history of the city meandering for pages beyond any relevance to the street. Alexiou, the author of books on Jane Jacobs and the Flatiron Building, fills her story with colorful sketches of Bowery luminaries, from the Calvinist martinet Stuyvesant, with his disdain for other faiths, to Thomas "Daddy" Rice, the white song-and-dance man whose "Jump Jim Crow" act became a synonym for brutal racism, to the punk diva Debbie Harry, a mainstay of the lamented nightclub CBGB, a Bowery fixture from 1973 to 2006. Stephen Foster composed "Beautiful Dreamer" while drinking himself to delirium in a Bowery boardinghouse. The body of the fiery abolitionist John Brown, hanged for the deadly Harpers Ferry raid, was prepared for burial at a Bowery funeral home. With his opening of a Bowery saloon, Steve Brodie capitalized on the 15 minutes of fame he earned in 1886 by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge on a $200 bet. As a state senator, Big Tim Sullivan, a graft-taking Tammany Hall stalwart whose largess to supporters made him the "King of the Bowery," wrote one of the nation's strictest gun laws - the Sullivan Law. Youngsters of the 1940s and '50s who chortled to Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall in the Bowery Boys comedy-adventure films will be charmed to learn that the gang's moniker dates back to the early 19th century, when "Bowery b'hoys" - a pronunciation that reflected their Irish roots - were roguish volunteer firefighters who defended their turf against rival fire brigades and left us such earthy phrases as "going on a bender." Before Europeans settled America, the Bowery was a Lenape Indian footpath. That geographical DNA, like another footpath that became Broadway, gave it pride of place. So wealthy merchants laid out esBut as Manhattan expanded northward, the chic moved uptown. The Bowery was ceded to poor immigrants - Irish, then Jewish, then Chinese - and eventually the downand-out. Alexiou informs us that it was the shuttering of saloons during Prohibition that turned the street into a symbol for seedy ruin. Those watering holes would let inebriated patrons sleep in their back rooms, but once gone, the drunkards stretched out on Bowery sidewalks, visible to a scornful public. The bleak trajectory seems to have ended. Artists moved in when SoHo, TriBeCa and Greenwich Village became too expensive - among them the poet LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, and the writer William Burroughs. Where the creative settle, bankers and lawyers soon follow, and today two-bedroom condos are going for $3 million. As the song says: "They do strange things, on the Bow'ry, the Bow'ry." Joseph berger, a retired reporter/or The Times and the author of "Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust," is writing a biography ofElie Wiesel.
