Once the hard times following the war had been overcome, New York and the Bowery developed fast. In the last decade of the 18th century Manhattan almost doubled its population to more than 60,000. And with that growth, the lower part of the Bowery became New York’s most elegant street. Fashionable stores abounded, the rich had their mansions built there, visitors to New York flocked to its new hotels and some very spectacular theatres came into being (the Bowery Theatre, with 3,000 seats the largest in the country, was described as “a very handsome building, unsurpassed in point of decoration”). The Bowery became the street to go to for good entertainment and excellent food.

A slow, but perceptible decline began in the 1830’s, coinciding with the first wave of mass immigration. Many of these poor newcomers settled in the cheap, shoddy tenements which were hastily erected on the Bowery’s side streets, causing the gentry to move further uptown. In time the hotels became flop houses, the mansions brothels. Yet theatrical activity continued to flourish and during the second half of the 19th century, several German theatres existed there: The Stadttheater (No. 37-39), the Neue Stadttheater (No. 43-47), and the Thalia Theatre (No. 40-44, the former Bowery Theatre). Germans in large numbers would also patronize the Atlantic Garden (No. 50), one of the most magnificent beer restaurants ever built in New York.

The inexorable push uptown was undoubtedly hastened by the construction of the “El” in the early seventies. It spanned the whole width of the Bowery, including the sidewalks: after that and until it came down after World War II, barely a ray of sun would ever pierce the streets below, and the lack of light was made even worse by the black smoke of the coal-burning “El” locomotives. Small wonder then that the Bowery became the favorite hangout for the unemployed, asocial elements and alcoholics who could still their unquenchable thirst in the many cellar dives then springing up. Of the 99 places of entertainment, which still existed on the Bowery in 1898, only fourteen were classified as “respectable” by the police; among the total there were at least 80 bars, or six to each of the 15 Bowery blocks, according to Herbert Ashbury who, in his book “The Gangs of New York,” has given us one of the most graphic descriptions of the declining Bowery.

As early as 1872 the first mission opened its doors on the Bowery, initially more concerned with caring for homeless children than for grown-up drifters. In 1877 the still existing Bowery Mission began operations, followed by the Salvation Army and other institutions. With the constant increase in the derelict population on the Bowery, they changed their focus, and for many decades they have tried almost exclusively to assist the “winos” and “bums.” These were passive, non-aggressive people; to them, alcohol did not serve to join them together, it was rather a means to fulfill their craving for personal isolation. Perhaps nowhere but on the Bowery can one find so many alienated, lonely men.

For the earlier part of the century no reliable figures as to the number of alcoholics on the Bowery are available. But a count made in 1949 netted 14,000 such men as day and night residents of the Bowery. Since then there has been a fairly steady decline; perhaps only 4,000 to 5,000 of them are now left. But with the emptying of the mental hospitals of New York State, beginning in the late sixties (their inmates were reduced from 80,000 to 20,000), many of these patients with little or none of the prescribed aftercare landed on the Bowery. Its floating population has also been augmented by a good number of younger unemployed people as well as drug addicts, forcing many of the old Bowery habitués to other parts of the city. The Bowery lodging houses, their number reduced to twelve from more than 30 in the late forties, nowadays provide only app. 3,000 “beds.” Each night the city carts homeless Bowery men to its facilities on Ward Island in the East River and on weekends to Camp LaGuardia in Westchester from where they are brought back to their old haunts in the morning.

But with this development the story of the Bowery fortunately does not end. For in recent years almost a Renaissance has set in. Businesses always existed on the Bowery: jewelry, lamp and restaurant supply stores on its lower part. But their number grew as more Bowery buildings were renovated following the discovery that behind the dilapidated facades there were sound structures. The Chinese, no longer content to stay in the narrow confines of Chinatown (here the Bowery begins on Chatham Square), buy up more and more of the houses that come on the market; Confucius Plaza, on the southern end of the Bowery, is a city-built skyscraper with dwellings for Chinese only. Another City project, which was to encompass several blocks on the Bowery, has not yet materialized for lack of money; also, since first planned, it was reduced in scope.

Moreover, artists and writers have moved into the spacious lofts, theatrical activity has resumed on, and all around the Bowery, restaurants find increased patronage and new cabarets, rock establishments and discoes have won favor among the young. Thus a new Bowery is in the making. Traces of the old persist, and they will remain as long as the City’s Men’s Shelter stays near the corner of the Bowery and Third Street. But it is not too difficult to foresee the time when the Bowery will have outgrown its recent notoriety thereby proving that in New York, where neighborhoods all too often change for the worse, they can also change for the better.