Bowery Updates: Money, Landmarks & Songs
Bowery Historic District effort gets $10,000 grant from National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Kudos to Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, which is co-sponsoring this effort and wrote the grant! HDC wrote in support of this proposal, as well as 4 others, most of which were awarded.
Two letters just went to City Planning endorsing the East Bowery Preservation Plan:
The East Village Community Coalition was one of major forces behind the recent East Village/Lower East Side Rezoning Plan, and is a prominent voice in landmark/preservation issues.
Peter Quinn is a novelist/editor/essayist, who has written about the Bowery, and is familiar to anyone who has seen Ric Burns’ masterfully eloquent New York, New York: A Documentary. His novel Banished Children of Eve, is set in the Bowery.
HDC sent in a letter of support a few months ago.
Cabaret star Poor Baby Bree has just recorded a powerful rendition of “The Bowery”, the rousing late 1800s hit that manages to be both cautionary tale and celebratory anthem. She is graciously making this available for our website. Watch for her at LaMama in October. To hear it and read lyrics: http://www.boweryalliance.org/listen_to_poor_baby_bree_sing_the_bowery
Landmarking: At last month’s hearing on two federal style bldgs from the early 1800s, 135 and 206 Bowery, supporters filled the room and testimonies were submitted from historians, preservationists (including HDC), etc. Special thanks to Margaret Chin’s office! No decision yet.
An East Bowery Preservation Plan powerpoint is now available at: www.boweryalliance.org
The Amato Opera building to get renewed life as a theater:
News comes that this beloved building, one of the last in a long line of Bowery performance spaces is to yet again become a theater! Exact details are not yet known….
The Film Forum will show On the Bowery, the restored classic 1957 Lionel Rogosin documentary for a week in September. It’s one of the first documentaries voted into the National Film Registry.
The Lower East Side History Project and Bowery Alliance of Neighbors will be creating an exhibit celebrating the history & cultural coolness of the Bowery at Whole Foods Market gallery in the Fall.
Historic Bowery monument – the Sullivan Fountain – awaits restoration and relocation on the Bowery. Kent Barwick alerted us to the existence of this monument which once stood at Bowery and Delancey, and served as watering hole for the city’s hardworking horses The NYC Parks Commission’s Art and Antiquities director, Jonathon Kuhn, kindly supplied us with a wealth of documentation, including then and now photos, and an assessment of the monument’s prospects for rebirth. Named for Tammany Hall figure “Big Tim” Sullivan, who was known as “King of the Bowery,” the fountain has generated a significant amount of interest, including that of two writers who have written about Sullivan, Peter Quinn and Sullivan biographer Richard Welch (King of the Bowery, 2008). Welch has promised to contact some of Sullivan’s descendants.
Watch for Bowery events at Dixon Place and the Tenement Museum later in the year!
Vaudeville historian/showman Trav S.D. (Travis Stewart) will be curating a Bowery vaudeville later in the year.