The Bowery: Devil's Mile

Before it was the Bowery, it was the Bouwerie, a Dutch country road leading to Peter Stuyvesant’s farm. Four centuries later, it’s the street that runs outside the New Museum’s front door.

The show walks it forward. George Washington rides in to take it from the British in 1783. Abraham Lincoln launches his presidential campaign with his 1860 speech at Cooper Union. A few years later, New York soldiers march from there to the Civil War.

Then, the streets get loud: department stores, theatres, beer halls, and a dime museum. For a few cents, you could see wonders, frauds, freaks, and a “mermaid” stitched together from a monkey and a fish.

The money moved uptown, and poverty moved in. Jacob Riis, Weegee, and Berenice Abbott photographed the people and places the rest of the city wanted to forget. Half a century later, Martha Rosler shot the street’s empty storefronts, pairing them with an encyclopedic variety of words for getting drunk.

Cheap rent brought the poets and musicians. Allen Ginsberg’s snapshots catch the Beats in black and white. David Godlis got the punks inside and outside CBGB, while Nan Goldin recorded what happened behind closed doors in her now-famous slideshow with soundtrack, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

The painters took the lofts. Billy Sullivan’s wall of paintings feels like stepping into his living room, crowded with artists, writers, and the who’s who of the 1980s and ’90s downtown art scene.

Back on the Bowery, listen closely. It’s still there, all those beats reverberating just beneath the sidewalk’s surface.

Lisa Phillips ran the New Museum for 26 years. She moved it from SoHo to the Bowery in 2007, and saw it through the expansion that opened this spring. She organized this show with curatorial assistant Thalia Stefaniuk, drawing on two decades of research, including the museum’s archive and its Bowery Artists Tribute oral histories. It’s her goodbye, and a portrait of the street the museum calls home.