1800s, Lower East Side, Old Posts, The Bowery

The Bowery & Chatham Square, Then and Now

A vintage photo of people riding in carts down the street
04
Mar

While preparing Part II of  The Story Behind the Lower East Side, I came across some old photographs of Chatham Square and couldn’t resist checking out their locations.

Here’s a photograph from Kenneth Dunshee’s As You Pass By. This is a reported funeral procession heading up the Bowery through Chatham Square in 1869.  Doyers Street would be in front of the tall building with the arched windows. Two of these buildings are recognizable today!

A black and white photo of an old city street.
A city street with many buildings and cars.

The windows have lost their pediments, and the facade has gotten a muscular brick makeover, but the unisual fenestration (window arrangement) leaves no doubt it’s the same building. (sorry about the bus)

A picture of an old building with many windows.
A fire escape on the side of an apartment building.
A building with a fire escape on the side of it.

The large building has a distinct 3-angled facade, accommodating the curve entering Doyers Street. 

A black and white photo of buildings in the city.

It has the same number of windows (three) across the middle section, and though the windows have lost their arches the corbelled cornice is still evident on the Bowery side.  The next picture shows it more clearly…

A street with cars parked on the side of it.

Different angle, same cornice details.

A picture of an old building with arches.

I couldn’t get the elevation of the photographer, but the next picture shows the street level today.

A street with cars and buses on it

To give you an idea of the area in 1869, we were four years out from the Civil War, and another two from the Draft Riots which probably still loomed large in the city’s consciousness and conscience. The Draft Riots were a nearly week-long “event” that started out as a legitimate protest against the policy of permitting wealthy people to buy their way out of military service that, over the course of days, devolved into vicious gang assaults on African-Americans, wealthy abolitionists, and Republicans. That was in the city at large.

Chatham Square had been developing as a working class entertainment district since the depression of 1837. By 1869, the upper classes had long since moved uptown, and the Bowery Theater, at one time the entertainment destination for the genteel, had long since changed its format to appeal to popular, often localized, tastes.. 

 
The Bowery at large was the middle class entertainment district. This entry from Allston T. Brown’s, A History of New York Stage from the First Performance in 1732 to 1901 (v.2), says what was going on at 7 Chatham Square in 1854 (the building to the left of the buidling discussed above).  
A page from an old book with the description of the american variety.
Gotham decribed such places: “‘Variety’ shows refused to specialize in any one popular entertainment form but mixed them all. Starting in 1865 Tony Pastor, a former clown and veteran concert saloon entertainer, ran one out of an old Bowery theater.”  Tony Pastor would go on to invent vaudeville, a cleaned up, family-oriented version of the variety show. These traffic choked, architecturally brutal blockfronts were the pre-history–the roots–not only of vaudeville, but almost all American commercial culture.
 
Also important to note is that Chinatown was just about to start. Gotham reports, “In 1872 [3 years after the original image] Wo Kee, a former Hong Kong merchant, moved his general goods store from Oliver to Mott [just down Doyers], dropping the first anchor in the area that would soon be known as Chinatown.”   
 
They’re far from beautiful or important buildings today, but it’s amazing to see how substantial and good looking they were back then.
 
Shorpy’s is a great website and had this great image of the area, circa 1905, when the 2nd and 3rd Avenue elevated trains merged in Chatham Square.  
A black and white photo of buildings in the city.

The 3-sided facade is beautiful with its unusually rounded lintels and cornice, which now completely wraps around. In 1905 it was the Chinese Tuxedo Restaurant.  It’s called machicolation and mimics the features on defensive positions in Medieval towers. 

The building to the left lis the same building as the 1869 image, but it’s gotten a fire escape which interstingly makes it look like it has a brick facade. What’s new since 1869 is the building to its right with the impressive mansard roof and pedimented window arrangement. It’s only an echo of its former self.

A building with chinese writing on it.

5 thoughts on “The Bowery & Chatham Square, Then and Now”

  3. Anonymous says:

    Is that a dirt road or cobblestones? It's hard to tell from the picture… And where did you find the picture? It's great.

  4. Robert Amell says:

    Thanks, I believe it is a dirt road. I'm not expert about street surfaces but perhaps because Chatham Square was so wide and expansive, it would have been inefficient to pave with belgian block or cobblestone. Chatham Square was the first clearing outside of the city that was on solid high ground, and the Boston stage (and others) terminated in Chatham Square. Perhaps the low risk of flooding made paving unnecessary.

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