Gentrification erasing the celebrated squalor of New York's Bowery

BY LEON LAZAROFF

Chicago Tribune
NEW YORK - (KRT) - Gus Chuises isn't wistful for the old Bowery.

"When I first got here, it was just winos and derelicts," said Chuises, 79, a longtime resident of the Bowery, the wide boulevard in lower Manhattan long synonymous with Skid Row. "Now, you have all sorts of people."

Indeed, as the gentrification of lower Manhattan continues, a much different Bowery is emerging.

This summer, five multimillion-dollar residential buildings, two luxury hotels and a giant Whole Foods Market will open on the thoroughfare that begins in Chinatown and ends 16 blocks later on the eastern edge of Greenwich Village.

Fifty years ago, so-called Bowery bums filled more than 100 grim flophouses. Today, just seven of these single-room-occupancy hotels, or SROs, remain.

Chuises, a retired waiter who battled alcoholism for most of his life, has lived on the Bowery for most of the past 40 years in an SRO called The Palace. Now he has a small, clean apartment administered by the Bowery Residents' Committee, a nonprofit group providing services for the homeless.

Having seen the Bowery become more dangerous in the late 1970s, as homelessness, drugs and street crime soared, Chuises is quite pleased with the avenue's new wave of fancy condo developments, fashionable bistros and hipster nightclubs.

But, as is often the case when old, distinctive neighborhoods show signs of stark change, these newer, glossier buildings of steel and glass have put many longtime residents and business owners on edge.

"I can't stand the thought that this neighborhood will turn out looking like any other neighborhood," said Phil Hartman, creator of the annual Howl! Festival of East Village Arts and owner of the Pioneer Theater, an independent movie house.

Hartman said he fears the upscale developments will destroy the diversity and eccentricity of a neighborhood whose former affordability long attracted a colorful mix of new immigrants, young artists and left-wing activists.

Drawn by then-cheap rents, such notables as painter Mark Rothko and photographer Robert Frank lived just off the Bowery in the 1960s. Rockers Joey Ramone and Patti Smith got their starts at the rock club CBGB, which in a bit of dark irony is locked in a rent battle with its landlord, the Bowery Residents' Committee.

While Hilly Kristal, CBGB's founder and owner, says the Bowery Residents' Committee is bent on kicking the bar out of its longtime home on the Bowery and East Second Street, the committee's executive director, Muzzy Rosenblatt, counters that the club has long failed to make timely rent payments or comply with basic health and safety standards.

Many city residents long avoided the Bowery as dangerous and squalid. But Luc Sante, author of "Low Life," a sympathetic history of New York's dissolute and dispossessed, said the street provides a gritty counterweight to more upscale thoroughfares such as Broadway and Fifth Avenue.

"Every city needs its dark conscience, a forbidden place where most of its respectable citizens don't go, but go there anyway," said Sante, a visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College in upstate New York. "In a generation, the Bowery will be a misty memory."

A symbol of the new Bowery can be found at its busy intersection with Houston Street.

There, the Alexandria, Va.-based AvalonBay Communities Inc. has nearly completed a $350 million apartment development that features a block-long, 14-story, glass-paneled building scheduled to open this summer. An 85,000-square-foot Whole Foods Market will occupy the ground floor. AvalonBay also has two additional nine-story residential buildings under construction on the Bowery.

One building AvalonBay is razing for its developments once housed an infamous saloon and brothel known as McGurk's Suicide Hall, so-called because several women were said to have committed suicide while working there in the 1890s.

At the Bowery's northern end, a futuristic, 21-story residential tower that calls itself "The Sculpture for Living" features lofts at prices from $3 million to more than $12 million for the penthouse.

At the street's opposite end in Chinatown, 11 stories of luxury lofts are being built atop a five-story brick building dating from about 1830. Prices there start at $825,000; the penthouse is tagged at $4.1 million.

Many of these new structures tower over the Bowery's primarily low-rise landscape of 19th century tenements, the ground floors of which still house many restaurant suppliers and lighting retailers.

Such juxtapositions of 19th and 21st century architecture on the Bowery don't sit well with Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, who called many of the new projects "hugely inappropriate designs for that street." He said he worries that many of the Bowery's oldest buildings are not distinguished enough to be granted landmark protection and will eventually meet the wrecking ball.

But Shaun Donovan, commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, sees the Bowery's transformation as evidence of the city's appeal, reflected in record-high housing prices and a 3 percent vacancy rate for residential rental units.

"There is a similar process going on in neighborhoods all around the city," Donovan said. "Because the city is doing well, and crime rates are down, people want to live here."

Donovan points out that there is a shortage of luxury housing in Manhattan, one reason that multimillion-dollar condos are being built and purchased in such formerly unlikely spots as the Bowery.

"You have a changing demographic there of highly educated, professional young people who want to live downtown, and that's great," said Benjamin Fox, an executive at the Manhattan real estate company Newmark Retail.

The appearance of high-end housing on the Bowery is the most recent step in a sweeping makeover of lower Manhattan that began in the 1970s, when bohemian artists were pushed out of their lofts and studios in SoHo, the neighborhood south of Houston Street, and replaced by high-end boutiques, restaurants and art galleries.

But, until now, this gentrification had largely bypassed the Bowery, said Ella Howard, a Boston University historian who is writing a book about homelessness on the Bowery in the second half of the 20th century. Until recently, Howard said, real estate investors skipped the Bowery because it contained many SRO hotels, working-class bars and shuttered storefronts.

"The Bowery's association with poverty and homelessness kept the development away," she said.

The words "the Bowery" also carried the stigma of a seedy past.

Soon after its beginning in the early 19th century, "the Bowery acquired a reputation as the last stop on the way down," according to Sante's "Low Life."

The avenue, he wrote, "possessed the greatest number of groggeries, flophouses, clip joints, brothels, fire sales, rigged auctions, pawnbrokers, dime museums, shooting galleries, dime-a-dance establishments, fortune-telling salons, lottery agencies, thieves' markets, and tattoo parlors, as well as theaters of the second, third, fifth and tenth rank."

In the late 1950s, its dirt and disarray prompted Robert Moses, the city's master builder, to propose that many of the Bowery's 19th century buildings be razed, but community activists defeated the plan.

When homelessness exploded in the late 1970s, not just single men, but families uprooted by rising rents and cuts in federally subsidized housing, flocked to the Bowery's soup kitchens, aid missions and the few homeless shelters established by the city at that time.

"The flophouses were effectively the shelter system," said Rosenblatt, a former acting commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Since then, New York City's shelter system has grown to 224 facilities dispersed throughout the five boroughs.

As the Bowery development moves ahead, Rosenblatt said the kind of visible homelessness that once defined the street, already far rarer than a decade ago, will largely disappear. Rosenblatt credits an expanded city shelter system for the decrease in the number of people living on the street.

But others such as Patrick Markee, spokesman for the Coalition for the Homeless, counter that the city has underestimated the number of street homeless, and that by moving its central intake center from Manhattan to the Bronx it merely moved the problem to poorer neighborhoods.

A survey of homelessness, conducted by the city and released in April, found that approximately 4,395 people live on the streets - as opposed to those living in homeless shelters - a figure roughly the same as a year ago. While the largest concentration of homeless street people was in Manhattan, the study found that there are many homeless living in Brooklyn and the Bronx, as well as in the subways.

Meanwhile, some are trying to preserve a bit of the Bowery's counterculture past. Bob Holman, a writer who arrived on the lower East Side in the late 1960s, said the neighborhood's gentrification prompted him to open the Bowery Poetry Club three years ago. Holman said his nightclub aims to feature the kind of poetry and music performed during the Beat years of the 1950s and 1960s.

"Change is an inevitable essence of New York," said Holman, outfitted in a colorful fez and loose-fitting black sports coat. "At the same time," he said, "to forget what the Bowery was would be a crime."

© 2005, Chicago Tribune.

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