The Bowery

Welcome to the Lower East Side. Before we start, one clarification: this is a walk about food, but it is not a lunch tour. I will not recommend anything, and by the end you may not be hungry at all.

We begin here on the Bowery and finish about eighty-five minutes from now on East Houston Street, nine stops and roughly 1.8 kilometres away. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, this district absorbed several hundred thousand people, most of them Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, from Galicia, from Romania, into blocks that by 1900 were among the most crowded on earth. They arrived poor. Most stayed poor for a long time. That poverty is not a charming detail to be softened; it is the reason the food of these streets took the shape it did.

So the two questions I will keep asking are these. Why did this particular food exist at all? And who could actually afford it?

The tour is called Appetizing and Delicatessen. Two ordinary English words. On these streets they were never used interchangeably, and no shopkeeper here would have mixed them up. Why not is what the walk is for.

Stand here and look down the length of the Bowery, and you're standing on the oldest road on this island, older than the grid of streets around it by roughly a century and a half. Before Europeans arrived, the Lenape used this route as a trail running north out of their settlements toward the interior. The Dutch inherited it, widened it into a farm road, and gave it the name that stuck: bouwerij, Dutch for farm, because it led out to Peter Stuyvesant's own farm at what's now roughly Stuyvesant Street. Everything else in this neighborhood, the tight grid of side streets, the block numbers, was laid down later, imposed on top of a road that was already old business.

By the middle of the 1800s the Bowery had become something else entirely: the loudest, cheapest, most unapologetically working-class entertainment strip in New York. Where Broadway, a few blocks west, served up respectable theater to people who could afford box seats, the Bowery ran variety halls, melodrama houses, dime museums, and beer gardens that stayed open past midnight. It had its own slang and its own style of dress. The Bowery b'hoy, with his soap-slicked hair and pugnacious swagger, was a recognizable New York type decades before anyone had heard of a flapper or a hipster. Respectable New Yorkers considered a night on the Bowery something between a thrill and a moral hazard, and plenty of them went anyway, precisely because it was rougher and funnier than anything Broadway would allow itself to stage.

That reputation curdled hard by the century's end. By 1900 the Bowery held dozens of flophouses and lodging houses, stacked one after another for blocks, renting beds, sometimes barely more than a chalk outline on the floor, for a few cents a night, with cheaper wire-cage bunks stacked above them for men who couldn't afford even that. This stretch effectively invented what the rest of the country would come to call skid row: a concentrated district of cheap, transient, often desperate housing, serving men who had run out of other options. It's also where the word bum settled permanently into the city's vocabulary, attached specifically to the men who drifted along this street. The Bowery gave New York both the institution and the insult in the same few blocks.

Overhead, for seventy-seven years, none of this happened in the kind of daylight you're seeing now. From 1878 until 1955, an elevated railway ran the length of the avenue, and its structure threw the street into permanent shadow, a dim, girder-striped tunnel of noise and soot that darkened every storefront beneath it. Look up now at the open sky over the street: that's a relatively recent condition. When the el finally came down in the 1950s, the Bowery didn't spring back to life. For decades afterward it stayed a byword for skid row, its flophouses still operating under a suddenly sunlit street. The avenue's more recent turn toward galleries, restaurants, and condominiums is barely a generation old, a blink against four hundred years of the road doing something else.

So this is the ground the rest of the walk sits on: a route the neighborhood didn't choose so much as inherit, running along the edge of the streets you're about to enter. Everything on the other side of it grew up as its own separate world, hemmed in against a road that was already ancient business by the time any of it existed. Turn now, off the Bowery and onto the street where that world actually earned its living.