Bowery, the

History of the Bowery

The Bowery (the name is derived from the Dutch word bouwerij meaning “farm”) began as Bowery Lane, the major road out of New Amsterdam after the Dutch founded their New World colony and, beginning in 1626, granted large plots of land adjacent to the road to wealthy landowners to induce them to settle in New Amsterdam. The largest plot went to Petrus (Peter) Stuyvesant in 1651. His farm colony became known as Bowery or Stuyvesant Village. When the English displaced the Dutch and established New York in 1664, they maintained the farms and in 1673 renamed Bowery Lane the Boston Post Road, noting its role as part of the route from New York to Boston. But the name Bowery stuck, and it has been called that ever since. It remained a mainly country lane of houses, farms, and small shops for nearly 100 years. In the 1760s, the road began to attract a rougher crowd and was the site of foot racing and horse racing, dog fighting, and cock fighting.

The first major transformation began in the 1750s and continued into the next century as the large estates bordering the Bowery were subdivided and sold off, with houses and shops replacing farms. The Bowery became a major retail street, and by the early 1800s, the southern end became part of the immigrant slum centered in the Five Points. In 1826, the Bowery Theater (the largest in the nation at the time) opened, followed later by the Park and Chatham Theaters. The Bowery population shifted from the wealthy to the middle class to workers and poor European immigrants over the century and, by the 1850s, was associated in the public imagination with a working-class lifestyle and nativism, especially in regard to conflicts with recent arrivals from [Page 33]Ireland. The Bowery Boys and Gals, Mose (an urban Paul Bunyan), and gangs such as Bowery Boys and Atlantic Guards drew attention to the Bowery and beyond.

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