Bowl

Bow
Winding
Buenos Aires
The Bowery 

Prov. 12:15
"The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise."

Hiking Mt. Cook

Chess: "Winding" "Buenos Aires" "Bow" "Bowl" "The Bowery"

Bowery

The Bowery (pronounced /ˈbaʊ.ə.ri/ or /ˈbaʊ.ri/) is the name of a street and a small neighborhood in the southern portion of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The neighborhood's boundaries are East 4th Street and the East Village to the north, Canal Street and Chinatown to the South, Allen Street and the Lower East Side to the east and Bowery (the street) and Little Italy to the west.^[1]
Bowery is an anglicisation of the Dutch bowerij. In the 17th century the road ran from Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan to the homestead of Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherland. As a street, the Bowery was known as Bowery Lane prior to 1807.^[2] Today it runs from Chatham Square in the south to Cooper Square in the north. Its further extension, angling across the grid plan of Manhattan to Union Square, has long been renamed 4th Avenue. Major streets that intersect the Bowery include Canal Street, Delancey Street, Houston Street, and Bleecker Street. A New York City Subway station named Bowery on the BMT Nassau Street Line (J, M, and Z services) is located at the Bowery's intersection with Delancey Street.
The Bowery (pronounced /ˈbaʊ.ə.ri/ or /ˈbaʊ.ri/) is the name of a street and a small neighborhood in the southern portion of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The neighborhood's boundaries are East 4th Street and the East Village to the north, Canal Street and Chinatown to the South, Allen Street and the Lower East Side to the east and Bowery (the street) and Little Italy to the west.^[1]
Bowery is an anglicisation of the Dutch bowerij. In the 17th century the road ran from Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan to the homestead of Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherland. As a street, the Bowery was known as Bowery Lane prior to 1807.^[2] Today it runs from Chatham Square in the south to Cooper Square in the north. Its further extension, angling across the grid plan of Manhattan to Union Square, has long been renamed 4th Avenue. Major streets that intersect the Bowery include Canal Street, Delancey Street, Houston Street, and Bleecker Street. A New York City Subway station named Bowery on the BMT Nassau Street Line (J, M, and Z services) is located at the Bowery's intersection with Delancey Street.

Colonial and federal period

The Bowery is the oldest thoroughfare on Manhattan Island, preceding European intervention as a Lenape footpath, which spanned roughly the entire length of the island, from north to south.^[3] When the Dutch settled Manhattan island, they named the path Bouwerij road—bouwerij being an old Dutch word for farm—^[4] because it connected farmlands and estates on the outskirts to the heart of the city in today's Wall Street/Battery Park area.
In 1654, the Bowery’s first residents settled in the area of Chatham Square; ten freed slaves and their wives set up cabins and a cattle farm.
Petrus Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam before the English took control, retired to his Bowery farm in 1667. After his death in 1672, he was buried in his private chapel. His mansion burned down in 1778 and his great-grandson sold the remaining chapel and graveyard, now the site of the Episcopal church of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.^[5]
By 1766, when John Montresor made his detailed plan of New York,^[6] "Bowry Lane",^[7] which took a more north-tending track at the rope walk, was lined for the first few streets with buildings that formed a solid frontage, with market gardens behind them; when Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Librettist for Mozart's Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Cosi Fan Tutte, emigrated to New York City in 1806, he briefly ran one of the shops along the Bowery, a fruit and vegetable store. In 1766, straight lanes led away at right angles to gentlemen's seats, mostly well back from the dusty "Road to Albany and Boston", as it was labeled on Montresor's map; Nicholas Bayard's was planted as an avenue of trees. James Delancey's grand house, flanked by matching outbuildings, stood behind a forecourt facing Bowery Lane; behind it was his parterre garden, ending in an exedra.

Cigarette trading card featuring the Bowery Theatre; a few 3½ storey structures of the 1830s (like the building at right) remain on the Bowery today

The Bull's Head Tavern was noted for George Washington having stopped there for refreshment before riding down to the waterfront to witness the departure of British troops in 1783. Leading to the Post Road, The Bowery rivalled Broadway as a thoroughfare; as late as 1869, when it had gained the "reputation of cheap trade, without being disreputable" it was still "the second principal street of the city"

Slide from respectability

When Lafayette Street was opened parallel to The Bowery in the 1820s, the Bowery Theatre was founded by rich families on the site of the Red Bull Tavern, which had been purchased by John Jacob Astor; it opened in 1826. Across the way the Bowery Amphitheatre was erected in 1833, specializing in the more populist entertainments of equestrian shows and circuses. From stylish beginnings, the tone of the Bowery Theatre's offerings matched the slide in the social scale of the Bowery itself. By the time of the Civil War, the mansions and shops had given way to low-brow concert halls, brothels, German beer gardens, pawn shops, and flophouses, like the one at #15 in which the composer Stephen Foster lived in 1864^[9] Theodore Dreiser closed his tragedy Sister Carrie, set in the 1890s, with the suicide of one of the main characters in a Bowery flophouse. The Bowery, which marked the eastern border of the slum of "Five Points", had also become the turf of one of America's earliest street gangs, the nativist Bowery Boys. In the spirit of social reform, the first YMCA opened on the Bowery in 1873;^[10] another notable religious and social welfare institution established during this period was The Bowery Mission and Young Men's Home, which was founded in 1880 at 36 Bowery by Rev. Albert Gleason Ruliffson. The mission has relocated along the Bowery throughout its lifetime. From 1909 to the present, the mission has remained at 227-229 Bowery.
By the 1890s, The Bowery was a magnet for sporting men as a center for prostitution that rivaled the Tenderloin, and for bars catering to gay men and some lesbians at various social levels, from The Slide at 157 Bleecker Street, New York's "worst dive",^[11] to Columbia Hall at 5th Street, called Paresis Hall. One investigator in 1899 found six saloons and dance halls, the resorts of "degenerates" and "fairies", on The Bowery alone.^[12] Gay subculture was more highly visible there and more integrated into working-class male culture than it was to become in the following generations, according to the historian of gay New York, George Chauncey.
From 1919 to the early 1960s the Third Avenue El ran above the Bowery, further darkening its streets, populated largely by men. "It is filled with employment agencies", cheap clothing and knickknack stores, cheap moving-picture shows, cheap lodging-houses, cheap eating-houses, cheap saloons", writers in The Century Magazine found it in 1919. "Here, too, by the thousands come sailors on shore leave,—notice the 'studios' of the tattoo artists,—and here most in evidence are the 'down and outs'".^[13] Prohibition eliminated The Bowery's numerous saloons: One Mile House, the "stately old tavern... replaced by a cheap saloon"^[14] at the southeast corner of Rivington Street, named for the battered milestone across the way,^[15] where the politicians of the East Side had made informal arrangements for the city's governance,^[16] was renovated for retail space in 1921, "obliterating all vestiges of its former appearance", The New York Times reported with satisfaction, but the assertion that "The Bowery has turned over a new leaf" was premature:
Home of many music halls in the 19th century, the Bowery later became notable for its economic depression. Though pressure for a new name pre-World War I came to naught,^[18] in the 1920s and 1930s, it was regarded as an impoverished area. The "Dead End Kids" (aka the "The Bowery Boys") of film were from the Bowery. In the 1940s through the 1970s, the Bowery was New York City's "Skid Row," notable for "Bowery Bums" (disafiliated alcoholics and homeless persons).