by Pete Hamill
Today, etched into the high face of the old Marble Palace are the words “The Sun Building,” added after the building was taken over by the old New York Sun in 1917, where it stayed until the paper died at age 117 in 1950. A cube-shaped bronze clock is still in place on the Chambers Street corner, green with age, matched by an elegant temperature gauge on the corner of Reade Street. Both bear the motto “The Sun—It Shines for All.” In that building worked some of the finest American newspapermen of several generations, including my friend W. C. Heinz, who was a splendid sportswriter and war correspondent. But even as an old newspaperman, I always think of it as the A. T. Stewart Building. His concept of a department store was the commercial engine of the move uptown, long before anyone called Broadway the Main Stem or the Great White Way. Today there’s a Duane Reade store on the ground floor and a bank. In sunshine or snowfall, New Yorkers hurry by on Broadway, walking and talking fast.
After Broadway, a second major street had carved its way into the old empty farmlands of the early nineteenth century and into our present history: the Bowery.
In truth, the Bowery was a kind of tributary of Broadway. Compared to Broadway, the Bowery was short, reaching only fifteen blocks from Chatham Square to today’s Cooper Square at Fourth Street. Originally, it stretched to Fourteenth Street, but in 1849 the well-off citizens who resided near the upper Bowery had the name changed to Third Avenue in an attempt to evade the raffish stain of the true name. That name itself derived from the Dutch word for farm, and the street existed before the Revolution. On November 25, 1783, George Washington and his triumphant army of brave amateurs waited on the corner of Canal Street and the Bowery until the British army had departed forever. The date was celebrated for almost a century as Evacuation Day. It was erased as a New York holiday by the Anglophiles who had control of such matters (although it is still celebrated in Boston in March). Nothing, alas, stays the same in New York.
When I was a boy, the Bowery was a squalid avenue plunged into moody, sinister shadow by the Third Avenue El. With the exception of those people who sold restaurant supplies (and lived somewhere else), the population was almost completely composed of alcoholics. The more prosperous could find shelter in the fifty-cents-a-night transient hotels called flophouses, where they slept in locked wire cages. Those who lacked the fifty cents often slept, and too often died, in the urine-soaked doorways of the street. At twelve, I went for my first cautious, solitary peek at the dark street, trying to see the legendary face of the “Bowery bum.” I was instantly filled with a mixture of pity and fear. I walked from Astor Place south, the el screeching overhead, and slowly began to feel that I might never escape. There were alcoholics in my Brooklyn neighborhood, of course, often solitaries, castaways from the world of home and work, men who howled at the moon in midafternoon. But here I was the solitary in the grim republic of alcohol. Most of the faces I saw were gullied and ravaged. Their eyes were scoured of life. Their clothes and bodies reeked. Shoes were often taped, or tied with rough twine and stuffed with strips of newspaper. They wore long army surplus coats or Ike jackets. They drooled, or babbled, or reposed silently in the angular bars of shadow thrown upon them by the el. Sometimes they would try to fight each other, in futile caricatures of battlers, their punches almost always hitting air. Later, as a young newspaper reporter, after the el was gone, I would sometimes wander among the dwindling number of rummies and winos (as they were dismissed by the proud drinkers of beer and whiskey), and hear the familiar tales of how they got there: A woman was almost always at fault. Or so they said. At Thanksgiving and Christmas I was usually able to get such sentimental tales into the newspaper.
But even then there were remnants of an older Bowery, a place that once had glittered. A few buildings possessed a grimy majesty. Others rose above tattoo parlors and barber colleges with decorative details cut into lintels over the boarded windows. They were like rummies dozing in frayed Edwardian clothes. I was learning that the Bowery had evolved in the mid-nineteenth century into the great avenue of New York popular culture. In a few stray books at the library, I’d seen old woodcuts of the avenue’s nightly crowds, with men in sharp clothes, and women with bustles and bonnets, and horse-drawn cabs waiting by the sidewalks. Others waited in the shadows of the gaslights, watching, poised. Along the length of the Bowery, other horses pulled omnibuses on rails. Newsboys came up from Park Row in fierce little platoons, selling the latest edition’s of the city’s newspapers. Many had been orphaned by the Mexican or the Civil War. Dime novels, scandalous magazines, tabloidlike organs such as the Police Gazette, and even crude forms of pornography were available everywhere, although most of the more salacious items were discreetly sheltered behind counters.
But it was music and theater that gave the Bowery its energy and fame. Between 1840 and 1870, in the stretch between Canal Street and Chatham Square, there were more than a dozen large theaters on the Bowery, along with dance halls, cabarets, and uncountable oyster bars and saloons. The first version of the famous Bowery Theater was built in 1826 on the corner of Canal Street (the present 50 Bowery). It offered three thousand seats and was the first American theater to be fully illuminated by gaslight. On the stages themselves, light was often provided by candles attached to barrel hoops. Gaslight was not always stable, of course, and candles were worse. Fires were common. The Bowery Theater suffered several disastrous fires but kept coming back. The customers always said it was better than ever.
All the new theaters, including the Bowery, offered a variety of productions, highbrow and low-, including Shakespeare for mass audiences. Competition was intense and sometimes deadly. On May 11, 1849, rioting erupted on the streets outside the Astor Place Opera House, between Broadway and today’s Lafayette Street. The trigger was the claims for acting dominance between the elegant Englishman William Macready, cherished by the Knickerbockers, and the roaring American Edwin Forrest, who was the hero of the Bowery. Macready was scheduled to appear in Macbeth at the white-gloves-only new opera house. Forrest was appearing in the same role at the more populist Broadway Theater. The riot was stirred up by the author of dime novels Ned Buntline, who was a vile nativist and a gifted agitator. The drama of the streets was simple: American versus Englishman.
After a riot inside the opera house on May 7, Macready reluctantly scheduled a farewell appearance for May 10, urged on by prominent New York citizens (including Washington Irving and Herman Melville). On the new date, Forrest’s fans, who believed that the Englishman had insulted their hero, began a march from the nearby Bowery. Swirling on the streets was a peculiar combination of anti-immigrant nativists, Tammany bravos, Irish immigrants protesting the appearance of the Englishman, various Bowery b’hoys out for a night’s diversion, hundreds of policemen, waiting militiamen, and many curious bystanders. The assembly seethed with class resentments. Protestors charged the police lines and broke them in a great surge. Bricks were thrown. The panicky militia opened fire. When the counting was finished, twenty-two people lay dead. Another nine would die in the following days. About one hundred fifty were wounded. One of the dead was only eight years old. Some were mere passersby or plain spectators from the neighborhood. An old man waiting for a horse car on the Bowery was among those killed. At the time, it was the worst riot in the city’s history and the worst theatrical riot in the history of the world.
That night, Macready was spirited away from the theater by friends, and he left the city itself in the dead of night. He would end up in Boston and then leave America forever, recording his furies in his diary. Forrest said nothing in public and finished his engagement down at the Broadway Theater two nights later. Ned Buntline was arrested and would eventually serve a year in prison for his part in the melodrama. The opera house itself was closed for several months of repairs, but it never recovered from the horrors of May 10. The kid-glove atmosphere ended, as the theater was used for magic shows, minstrel shows, and, again, opera. It closed in 1854 and became for many years the site of the Mercantile
Library.
Today, when I wander to Astor Place, I often gaze at the northern edge of the street, where an office building now stands. Around the corner is the New York Shakespeare Festival, where Joseph Papp in the 1970s built a permanent home for all kinds of theater, including versions of the Bard in the powerful, human style of Edwin Forrest. On certain chilly evenings, particularly in May, I can see the faces of the furious young roaring boys marching up from the Bowery, the frightened aristocrats fleeing for safety, the panicky policemen and militiamen. I can hear the groans of the dying. Some of them died right there, in front of Kinko’s. On such evenings, if there is no rain, I always walk home along the Bowery.
Most Bowery theaters offered staged versions of the stuff of dime novels: melodramas about crime, punishment, and redemption. Some were about cowboys, some detectives. We live with them today because those characters and plots became the basic material of movies and television. There were minstrel shows too, with their racist stereotypes, and sketchy vaudevilles full of dancing girls and acrobats. Much of it must have been great mindless fun. Sometimes, on my walks, I try to imagine them, to see the heroes and the villains and the damsels in distress, to hear the music and the awful jokes. I always fail. I see woodcuts. Or scenes from silent movies. But the teeming theater moments never come clear.
Except for one marvelous historical moment that helped create our present. As I go down the Bowery and cross Canal Street, I can put myself into the Five Points in the 1840s because so much of it was described in newspapers, journals, and the pamphlets of reformers. In spite of the general squalor and climate of despair, there was also entertainment. Some Five Points saloons offered cock fighting, rat-fighting, dog-fighting, and prizefighting. But a few offered an entertainment more exuberant and more beautiful: dancing.
After slavery ended in 1827, there still was no large, compacted black ghetto in the city. Harlem would not become today’s Harlem until the second decade of the twentieth century. For most of the nineteenth century, class took precedence over race, and poor blacks and whites lived together at the bottom of the social ladder in the Five Points and other slums. Sometimes they lived together as man and wife or as lovers (which contributed to the racial ferocity that erupted during the Draft Riots of 1863). The close Irish-African presence was adding to the New York alloy. It could be seen in the way they walked, absorbing each other’s mannerisms into a unique street style, and heard in the slang they coined together. But the Irish and the Africans were taking other things from each other: music and its brother, dance.
In 1842, a visiting Charles Dickens, then thirty years old and already famous for The Pickwick Papers, went down a flight of steps into Afleck’s dance hall on Orange Street and saw for the first time the young man he called “the greatest dancer known.” The dancer was then sixteen, an African American named William Henry Lane, better known as Master Juba. He was born a free man in Providence, Rhode Island, and in search of greater freedom he found his way to New York. In his book American Notes, Dickens described what he saw:
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-out, snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off his feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar counter and calling for something to drink . . . ?
In 1844, Master Juba was matched with a young Irish American dancer named John Diamond, who was himself a rising master of the percussive Irish dancing of jigs and reels (as seen a few years ago in the show Riverdance). They drew huge racially mixed crowds to the Chatham and Bowery theaters, and as they merged Irish and African rhythms, blending them, topping them, adding steps, “cutting” each other the way jazz musicians would do at jam sessions a century later, they invented what came to be called tap dancing.
Other dancers, theatrical impresarios, and the audiences took notice. This was something new. It wasn’t Irish. It wasn’t African. This new form of dance could only have been forged in America, and specifically in New York. From those friendly contests and extraordinary performances came, years later, Bojangles Robinson and Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Gregory Hines, John Bubbles and the Nicholas Brothers, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Jerome Robbins, and thousands of other dancers and choreographers who might never have heard of Master Juba and John Diamond.
There was, alas, no happy ending. After touring the United States (where he was forced to wear blackface in at least one minstrel show), Master Juba became one of the first black artists to seek exile in Europe. He danced in London and in the British provinces, and performed for Queen Victoria. But in 1852, he died suddenly in London (where Dickens had made him famous). He was only twenty-seven. At the time, Juba was performing with an English company, far from the Five Points and the cheers of Bowery crowds. He lives on in theaters all over the world. Nobody now knows what happened to John Diamond.
In certain indirect ways, Master Juba and John Diamond surely added luster to the gaslit New York nights, particularly along the Bowery. But they must have caused some uncomfortable moments among the promoters, since African Americans were forced to sit in segregated sections of the “white” theaters, if they were admitted at all. This was another dreadful American tradition that would endure for almost a century (in the 1920s and 1930s black patrons were barred, for example, from the Cotton Club in Harlem, until Duke Ellington, through sheer force of character, compelled the hoodlum owners to integrate). But this we do know: After Master Juba and John Diamond, the shows in the Bowery theaters, and later on Broadway, were never the same.
The patrons of those shows—and of the Bowery itself—came from the immediate neighborhood, which included the mainly Irish Five Points to the west of the Bowery and the mainly working-class-German Fourth Ward that stretched east to the South Street waterfront. Thousands of Germans were settling there, in what came to be known as Kleindeutschland, opening beer gardens filled with singing and bawdy laughter. The Germans were, in fact, the second largest nineteenth-century immigrant group after the Irish, and they would soon have their own churches, hospitals, social clubs, and literary societies. They went to the big American theaters too, because they were handy to the Fourth Ward and in some cases dazzling. In certain ways, the large German presence helped shape the italicized styles of the Bowery performers and the physical style of the comedy. The first-generation Germans spoke imperfect English, but as Chaplin, Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy later showed, verbal comedy can’t match the glories of slapstick if the intention is to make the whole audience laugh.
But the Bowery theaters were not strictly neighborhood theaters. Increasingly, by foot or in horse-drawn cabs, audiences arrived from the emerging West Side, from what was called the Gap, and later Hell’s Kitchen, where the rising commerce of the North River was creating jobs and housing for those who had worked themselves out of the Points. The old aristocratic elites were generally entertained elsewhere, faithful to the old John Street Theater or to the splendid Park Theater until it burned down for the final time at the end of 1848. New theaters were also opening on Broadway, as it moved inexorably north.
But for a long time, the Bowery was the central location of vibrant theatrical life. Saturday night was the biggest night of all, as young men arrived with their pay packets from the labors of the six-day work week. They left behind the rooming houses, with their sour air and bleak furnishings, and did what the New York young have done ever since: They went out. They went out in search of laughter, noise, diversion, illusions, or some form of obliteration. They went out to prove that they could not be conned by confidence men. They went out to drink bad booze and smoke foul cigars. They went out to fin
d people whom they might love and who might love them back. They went out knowing that at the midnight hour they might have to prove their manhood in some brutal fight in the street. They might start the evening in the cheap seats at the theater and end up at a dance hall or a brothel. It didn’t matter. Shakespeare or dancing girls: They were better than rooming houses.
On the Bowery, the young men found myths that might make the world more understandable. Or at least more fun. One was the myth of Big Mose, who rose out of the slums as the Paul Bunyan of nineteenth-century New York. As described by Ned Buntline in 1848 and then as seen on the various stages of the Bowery, Mose was a volunteer fireman, as were so many of the young men in the audience, but he was the epitome of all firemen, and a bit more. The myth said that Big Mose was eight feet tall, used lampposts as clubs, could hurl horses halfway across the North River, was fearless and just. He was loosely based on a real volunteer fireman named Moses Humphrey, a printer who worked for the New York Sun and belonged to Engine Company 40. In life, Humphrey was the most fearsome street fighter in New York, right up until the day in 1838 when he was beaten senseless by a tougher fireman, Henry Chanfrau of Engine 15. Within weeks the real Mose disappeared in shame from the city and was said to have died in Honolulu.