{"id":2187195,"date":"2026-10-09T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2187195"},"modified":"2026-10-09T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T06:00:00","slug":"the-new-museum-spotlights-nycs-first-working-class-entertainment-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2187195","title":{"rendered":"The New Museum Spotlights NYC\u2019s First Working-Class Entertainment Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Bowery_10.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cA walk down 14th Street is more amazing than any work of art,\u201d Allan Kaprow wrote in 1959, the same year he staged 18 Happenings in 6 Parts<\/em> in a loft a block off the Bowery. What might he have said of that mile-long boulevard, \u201cone of the great highways of humanity\u201d per Theodor Roosevelt (the only New York police commissioner ever elected US president)?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe greatest architectural hodgepodge of its borough, the Bowery (from the Dutch bouwerie, meaning \u201chomestead\u201d) recapitulates the history of lower Manhattan. First a Lenape trail and then a sylvan lane, it was a briefly fashionable suburb before it morphed into New York City\u2019s first working-class entertainment zone, a precursor to Times Square and Coney Island. In the late 19th century, the Devil\u2019s Mile was an avatar of urban development\u2014the site of an elevated train that cut a clamorous swath through the teeming neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan. By the early 20th century, the Bowery was the most famous skid row in America. A hundred years later it is the subject of a bold hybrid show at the New Museum.<\/p>\n

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View of the 2026 exhibition \u201cThe Bowery: Devil\u2019s Mile\u201d at the New Museum in New York.<\/span>Photo Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Bowery: Devil\u2019s Mile\u201d opens with what might be a simulation of a show at the New York Historical Society\u2014vintage maps and a 200-year-old marble milestone join 17th-century prints, among romantic views of no-longer-extant or never-existing Native villages. An imperious early 19th-century oil portrait of New Amsterdam\u2019s irascible, much mythologized Director-General Peter Stuyvesant is upstaged by another, less decorous canvas from the same period by an unknown artist of the infamous Five Points slum, just a few blocks west of the Bowery. It\u2019s a copy of George Catlin\u2019s 1827 print, presenting a blurry Brueghelian tumult from a Caillebottesque perspective, that became something of an icon: Catlin\u2019s image emblazoned the cover of Taylor Einbinder\u2019s 2001 history Five Points<\/em> and informed the design of Martin Scorsese\u2019s 2002 passion project Gangs of New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\tTopical print images of newsworthy riots and fires give way to all manner of ephemera\u2014tickets, handbills, souvenir postcards, stereo views, broadsides, and songbooks, not to mention advertisements for the dime museums and variety theaters that lined the Bowery from Chatham Square to Cooper Square throughout the 19th century. While much of the earlier material is culled from the New York Public Library, the most sensational paper artifacts mainly come from the collection of local archivist Adam Woodward, who has also provided the gallery\u2019s centerpiece: a resplendent enameled 1836 pump wagon that once belonged to the volunteer firefighters known as the Lady Washington Engine Company No. 40.<\/p>\n

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William Louis Sonntag, Jr.: Bowery at Night<\/em>, ca. 1895. <\/span>Museum of the City of New York<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe pump wagon\u2019s relevance to Bowery culture will only be apparent in the exhibition\u2019s final gallery, which is dominated by a comparable artifact, Brad Kalhammer\u2019s installation Bowery Nation<\/em> (1985\u20132012). A m\u00e9lange the actual Devil\u2019s Mile may be, but its representation is disinclined to break with historical chronology. This becomes clear when, moving on from ephemera, the exhibit turns cerebral. A ten-minute slideshow of the Danish journalist Jacob Riis\u2019s photographs of hovel-housed immigrant families, accompanied by excerpts from his 1891 book How the Other Half Lives,<\/em> is juxtaposed with Martha Rosler\u2019s cool photo-installation, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, made some eight decades later. Whereas Riis uses documentation to expose, Rosler questions conventional representation. There are no people in her piece, simply 45 silver images of Bowery storefronts and gutters, typically littered with empty bottles. In lieu of captions, these are paired with placards giving slang terms for alcoholic intoxication. Nevertheless, Riis\u2019s reportage washes over Rosler\u2019s grid.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne feels the absence of Lionel Rogosin\u2019s 1956 hybrid documentary On the Bowery.<\/em> Instead, the show\u2019s lone motion picture is a loop of the 1902 Edwin S. Porter comedy, How They Do Things on the Bowery,<\/em> in which a visiting rube is lured into a Bowery saloon to be drugged and robbed. But the show more than makes do with the photography that comes to the fore in a long gallery featuring WPA work by Berenice Abbott and the photojournalist Weegee, as well as the younger street photographer Harvey Wang. There\u2019s also a spooky Reginald Marsh canvas The Bowery Strokey\u2019s Bar,<\/em> painted in 1953 (the year before the artist died), in which a tabloid lies on the spectral pavement with the headline \u201cAtom Bomb Burns Out Ghost Town.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTaken by David Gadis, late 1970s photographs of the landmark punk venue CBGB (but not curiously an example of the club\u2019s aggressive DIY handbills) segue into a small room devoted to Nan Goldin\u2019s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency<\/em> (1979-96), heralded as a barker might by its curated soundtrack. The outstanding artwork of the exhibition, Goldin\u2019s slideshow, largely devoted to candid portraits of friends, many shot in her Bowery loft, remains stunningly raw. The emotion-charged images are simultaneously immediate and elegiac.<\/p>\n

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View of the 2026 exhibition \u201cThe Bowery: Devil\u2019s Mile\u201d at the New Museum in New York.<\/span>Photo Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tExiting The Ballad,<\/em> the viewer comes face to face with a white wall of 28 portraits in a variety of mediums by a fellow diarist and Bowery artist Billy Sullivan: The juxtaposition of these two vibrant portrait galleries is one of the show\u2019s big ideas. The wall is flanked by works by Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse and Tom Wesselmann, presumably produced in their Bowery lofts. (Context makes them newer iterations of the 1822 milestone.) The centerpiece is Kalhammer\u2019s assemblage of 22 spidery birds and perhaps a hundred kachina dolls fashioned from found objects and refuse mounted on a sawhorse-supported twenty-five-foot-long wooden plank. Kalhammer\u2019s Bowery Nation,<\/em> which could have given its name to the exhibition, conveys the show\u2019s intensely personal civic pride\u2014its Campanilismo. Broadway is for tourists and celebrities, but every New Yorker has a Bowery connection. As for me, I can brag that, before World War I, my Polish-born grandmother was a 19-year-old barmaid at a dive near East 2nd Street, site of the Tin Palace jazz club, now an upscale pasta joint closed for renovation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDevil\u2019s Mile\u201d is a relatively compact exhibition but, in the tradition of the Bowery\u2019s bare-knuckled boxing saloons, it punches above its weight. The show\u2019s audacious yet unstated premise is that, as assertive a presence as anything else on the street, the physical New Museum is of a piece with the concert halls, curiosity cabinets, menageries, sideshows, beer gardens, Yiddish theaters, and Christian missions, not to mention nickelodeons, tattoo parlors, pawnshops, barber colleges, flop houses, wholesale lighting joints, and jazz clubs that have lined Roosevelt\u2019s highway of humanity from Cooper Union to Chinatown. That it is, in other words, not only new, but a continuum.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Bowery_10.jpg?w=1024″] \u201cA walk down 14th Street is more amazing than any work of art,\u201d Allan Kaprow wrote in 1959, the same year he staged 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in a loft a block off the Bowery. What might he have said of that mile-long boulevard, \u201cone of the great highways of humanity\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2187195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2187195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2187195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2187195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2187195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2187195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2187195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}