What if the city really did rename the Bowery?

The first attempt to change the name of the city’s oldest thoroughfare appears to have been in 1895.

A New York Times article reported a rumor that the Bowery, an English corruption of the Dutch term for farm, bouwerie, would soon be known as Parkhurst Avenue.

It had to be a joke. Parkhurst was Charles Parkhurst, a social reformer who battled the Tammany-backed gangs and saloons that made up the tacky, crime-ridden Bowery in the late 19th century.

The next try at a less low-rent moniker, according to a Times piece from 1897, was Piccadilly. Why Piccadilly? It was never explained—but the proposal didn’t gain any ground.

Another stab at a new name to shed the Bowery stigma happened in 1916. Business owners who wanted a “fresh start” suggested Central Broadway and Cooper Avenue. Dignified, yes, but very dull.

Again, the suggestions went no where. After that, Bowery merchants and residents seem to have thrown in the towel and accepted that their street would always be the city’s skid row.

[Photo: Bowery in 1910, NYPL Digital Collection]

Subway mosaics that supply a little history

I’ve always loved the colorful mosaics that decorate certain subway stations. They give you a local history lesson while you’re waiting for your train—when the mosaics aren’t too grimy, that is.

The Borough Hall stop on the 2 and 3 line features this colonial-looking borough hall building (left).

At Christopher Street, the platform is lined with mosaics of Newgate prison (right), which jutted out into the Hudson around Christopher and West Streets until the 1820s.

Images of Peter Stuyvesant’s Bouwerie (left) adorn Union Square, close to where the original Bouwerie was in the early 19th century.

And of course, there are the train mosaics (right) at Grand Central Terminal, a tribute to railway titan Cornelius Vanderbilt, who opened Grand Central Depot in 1871.

A public execution in the East Village, 1824

In the early 19th century, the East Village of today had a country feel. The city had just adopted the street grid, and large portions of Peter Stuyvesant’s Bouwerie (in the sketch below) had yet to be parceled out and developed.

 Which made it the perfect site for a public execution in April 1824. Second Avenue and 13th Street is considered the actual corner where a man was hanged in front of 50,000 spectators.

The story is simple: John Johnson ran a boarding house at 65 Front Street. In 1823, he invited a sailor named James Murray to stay at his home. 

Murray had money on him—which Johnson wanted. So in the middle of the night, he bludgeoned Murray in his bed and tossed his body in a nearby alley.

Eventually Johnson confessed to the murder. After a quick trial, he was sentenced to die. On April 2nd, he was brought to an open field near where the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary is today and hanged.

The original Stuyvesant Town

Before the 9,000-apartment, red-brick housing development across Fourteenth Street opened in 1947, a small walk-up tenement at 219 Avenue B had the Stuyvesant name on its far more humble facade.

“Stuyvesant Apartments” is serious faded and covered in grime, but it was constructed in 1910, predating Stuy Town by 37 years.

There’s a lot of Stuyvesant in the vicinity: Stuyvesant Street near St. Mark’s Church, the old Stuyvesant High School building on East 15th Street, and Stuyvesant Square off Second Avenue in the teens.

No wonder: Petrus Stuyvesant, the Dutch-born director-general of New Netherland, had his farm—or bouwerie—here in the 1600s.

Old St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie

St. Mark’s Church has stood at Second Avenue and 10th Street since 1799. Before that, in 1660, a much smaller family chapel was put up by Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam who owned the farm—or “Bouwerie”—on that site.

This 1853 illustration, from Valentine’s City of New York Guide Book, shows the current church building with its Greek Revival steeple, just before a portico was added in 1854. Hmm, was the East Side still so bucolic back in the middle of the 19th century? This depiction seems like a bit of an exaggeration.

Here is St. Mark’s 80 years later, in 1936. The church looks kind of spooky and barren, the facade missing the stone and brick we’re used to seeing today. 

St. Mark’s circa 2008, a lovely landmark open to the public and a reminder of New York’s Dutch colonial past. There are few other places in the city where can you walk along tombstones that mark the burial sites of prominent New York citizens of the 18th and 19th centuries.