Devil's Mile

May 15, 2018
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.

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June 11, 2018
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.

Starred review from June 1, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)