The great New York tradition of slumming it

Of course, there’s nothing new about the rich and privileged partying it up in poor sections of the city: It’s been a popular activity since at least 1884.

That’s when The New York Times (arguably in one of its first Styles section–type pieces) wrote about this latest rage.

“Slumming in This Town,” the Times headline read. “A fashionable London mania reaches New-York.”

“‘Slumming,’ the latest fashionable idiosyncrasy in London—i.e. the visiting of the slums of the great city by parties of ladies and gentlemen for sightseeing—is mildly practiced here by our foreign visitors by a tour of the Bowery, winding up with a visit to an opium joint or Harry Hill’s.”

Harry Hill’s, (above sketch from the NYPL digital collection), was a renowned East Houston Street saloon that featured theater and bare-knuckle boxing.

“It is safe to conclude under the circumstances that “slumming” will become a form of fashionable dissapation this winter among our belles, as our foreign cousins will always be ready to lead the way.”

[Above, a photo from Valentine’s City of New York guidebook of the East Side’s “Italian Quarter”]

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.