The Bowery: A History of NYC’s Oldest Street, First Entertainment District, and Cradle of American Popular Culture

The Bowery: A History of NYC’s Oldest Street, First Entertainment District, and Cradle of American Popular Culture with David Mulkins and special guests.

In the 1800s, the Bowery was the working-class main street;  the architecture consisting of a rich, jumbled timeline spanning from circa 1807 Federal-style row houses to Gilded Age classical banks. Mr Mulkins will discuss this and how it evolved into the stomping ground for sailors, shopgirls, sporting men, gangs, gays, grifters, and the newly arrived immigrant population. The street has seminal ties to tap dance, minstrelsy, vaudeville, Yiddish theater, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin, modern tattooing, Harry Houdini and Mae West. By the 1900s, the Bowery had also become America’s notorious skid row, but late in that century it helped foster Abstract Expressionism, Beat literature, free jazz, and punk rock.