BlackBook Magazine

Men's lodgings, drunken sailors, and food lines have made way for luxury hotels, drunken hipsters, and fancy cafés. Our man in the hobo hat weighs the odds and ends.

By Peter Pavia

Sammy’s Bowery Follies, above, December 1944.

In Low Life, his now classic chronicle of the fabled, bedraggled Bowery, author Luc Sante describes the area on the east side of southern Manhattan as coming into its own, as it were, in Gilded Age New York.

The gaslit ether was haunted by hooligans and whores, home to arcades that ran fixed games, and rancid dives where the Mickey Finn, a knockout drink, took pride of place on the cocktail menu. The degeneration continued through the 20th century, and with the advent of rock cocaine, fresh miseries were born: the crackhead wino; for his grim pleasure, the crack hooker.

It’s been a long time coming, but a hard change is gonna fall. Well, it already has. In tentative fits, much has been gained, not all of it good. Much has also been lost, not all of it bad. As real estate interests gyrate, can New York’s latest destination neighborhood avoid becoming the next Meatpacking District?

The Bowery’s new anchor is The Bowery Hotel, at the corner of Third Street. The building’s elegant design harkens back to an era that may never have been, its hushed lobby suggesting an English drawing room, its arch-entranced bar a Moorish hunting lodge of dangerous-game curio. Gemma, the trattoria-style restaurant occupying the ground floor, bustles with swells untroubled by the Salvation Army residence across the street or the Third Street men’s shelter next door. Soon to be competing for those who can afford more genteel shelter is the Cooper Square Hotel, under construction three blocks north.

Ten years ago, the only address on Bond Street worth visiting was number 6, site of the eponymous restaurant and lounge. (That, and what was the just-opened BONDST sushi eatery, which wisely kept its signage non-existent; it still thrives today in its low profile.)

Now, the two-block stretch is the epicenter of the New Bowery. Between Bowery and Lafayette, no less than four sites are in various stages of
construction. A jackhammer punished the cobblestones in front of hotelier Ian Schrager’s first residential property, 40 Bond. The structure’s cartoonish façade, featuring molded glass window frames and a cast aluminum gate, seems poised to usher in a hopeful, playful future. And a deliriously prosperous one: The 27 units are retailing for an average of $10 million per.

Hard-pressed by the Schrager building, another residential property, 48 Bond, stretches skyward. Down the block, the more sedate number 25 appears ready to move into. The well-heeled will be well-fed. Open since 1993, NoHo pioneer Il Buco is still serving charm and Mediterranean cuisine at number 47. Mercat, the Spanish entry next door feels polished and assured enough to enjoy a long run, too.

Occupying prime real estate between Houston and First, how long before the Bowery Poetry Club capitulates to the bulldozer? The funky hangout seems destined to suffer the same fate as the grandfather of all things wanton, CBGB. Closed in 2006, the punk Mecca never lost its squalid Bowery charm, although all that remains is the aluminum frame that once supported its pigeon-scarred awning.

Nobody would have laid odds on the rise of this hardscrabble area, or imagined what the dizzying cost could be. But the history of the city of New York is one of constant reinvention. And as Sante ruminated in one of Low Life‘s final observations, “The past can be seen as through a smeared window.” That past continues to recede.

Photography: Weegee (Arthur Fellig)/International Centre of Photography/Getty Images.