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1 PArt I Chinatown, Chatham Square, and the Bowery At o N E t I M E , historians assure us, the Bowery was actually respectable . When “De Bouwerij” (Old Dutch for “farm”) was still a country road leading from the settlement of New Amsterdam to Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s estate near what is now Astor Place, it presented a bucolic scene of trees and fields. During the later revolutionary period, it formed a section of the post road to Boston, and thus became populated with inns and taverns such as the Bull’s Head, south of what is now Canal Street. Then for several decades, around the time the 18th century passed into the 19th, well-to-do merchants such as Edward Mooney—whose house, begun in 1785, survives at number 18—made the Bowery their home. As mentioned, the Bowery Theater, located between Bayard Street and Canal , opened in 1826 as a showplace for these prosperous citizens, importing refined English and European drama. This phase of the theater’s life did not last long, however: in 1830 its owners installed a new manager, actor Thomas Hamblin, who would find greater success with melodramatic fare such as Black Schooner, described in an 1839 playbill as “a new Nautical Drama founded on the late extraordinary Piracy! Mutiny! & Murder !” According to historian Theodore Shank, Hamblin’s contribution lay in realizing that a three-thousand-seat house could not be filled nightly by members of the carriage trade alone. Instead, through capitalizing upon a demand for “native” American talent, Hamblin brought in a working-class, largely Irish (and anti-British) audience, and thus helped pioneer the concept of New York theater as populist entertainment.1 The success of the Bowery Theater represented an early case of a New York entertainment space contributing to a larger pattern of social change. By the 1840s, as a street and a neighborhood, the Bowery had emerged as a predominantly working-class district, characterized by identifiable New York types such as the “B’hoy” and “B’gal.” In a manner not unlike the flappers or beatniks of later generations, B’hoys and B’gals set themselves apart through habits of dress and personal style. The men, sporting tall black hats and distinctive “soap-locks”—in which the hair was combed 2 Part I forward and plastered with soap—assumed a manner described by historian Edward Spann as “rough, boisterous, pugnacious and irreverent.” Generally Irish in national origin and affiliated with the city’s many volunteer fire-fighting companies—a municipal fire service not being established until 1865—they imbued the Bowery with a fresh and picaresque spirit.2 As a geographical stem of the East Side, the Bowery grew further with the waves of immigration that spread into lower Manhattan beginning in the late 1840s, particularly as thousands of Irish and Germans fled arduous and impoverished conditions in their home countries. Other immigrant peoples, including Italians and Jews, added to the mixture of languages heard on the Bowery—to the extent that, by mid-century, New York chronicler Charles A. Haswell could recall the street as having become “a very Babel.” Largely as a result of these demographic changes, the Bowery took on a popular image quite distinct from that of Broadway, its exclusive neighbor to the west. If Broadway was an elegant thoroughfare lined with stores and restaurants, the Bowery became known, in the minds of fashionable New Yorkers, as a disreputable place of odd smells, indecipherable tongues, and unremitting commercial activity on every day of the week, including the Christian Sabbath. In a manner similar to the apprehension with which some New Yorkers later viewed Harlem, much of the Bowery’s reputation for unwholesomeness probably was not fully deserved. In 1852 the New York Times hinted at this possibility in humorous fashion: “The Bowery mud is not a bit deeper, but fouler than the Broadway. The bricks falling from new buildings in the Bowery are not so frequent, but they strike harder.”3 It is somehow fitting that the Bowery grew during the mid-1800s as an entertainment district, a hub of theaters, concert halls, saloons and beer gardens. The entire street seemed pervaded by a carnival barker’s aesthetic reflecting uncannily the hyperbolic age of show biz entrepreneur, con artist , and circus founder P. T. Barnum. All of the Bowery was a show. In his book, Reminiscences of New York by an Octogenarian (1896), Haswell wrote of a visit in the 1860s to a Bowery...

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