By Megha Bahree
A New York University dormitory on E. Second St. seems out of place next to its more historic neighbors on the Bowery, including Federal row houses from the early 19th century and the “world’s smallest opera,” founded in 1948.
The new dormitory is seen as a symbol of commercial values arm-wrestling their way to the top, and has many locals worried that it may represent a greater commercialization of the Bowery.
The N.Y.U. residence is just one of the many new buildings to have gone up on the Bowery recently, creating what some see as a dividing line between the East Village and Noho. Another such building is the new luxury loft residence right across the street from the dorm. “You know, in any other neighborhood that building would probably be beautiful,” said Anna Sawaryn, a lifelong resident and chairperson of the Coalition to Save East Village. “But here it just doesn’t fit in next to all these small buildings. It’s an eyesore.”
In an attempt to understand the changes on the storied street and try to have some effect directing the changes that are rapidly occurring, the Municipal Art Society of New York is working with the Coalition to Save the East Village, Cooper Union, Little Italy and Noho Community Association and Asian Americans for Equality, to try to determine what they want preserved in the area and how to go about future development projects.
“The area is ripe for development since it’s built lesser than the zoning levels,” said Laura Arana, issues and advocacy coordinator at Municipal Art Society and the person spearheading the project, informally referred to as “Save the Bowery.” “We hope to put out a set of recommendations for new development and simultaneously preserve the older Bowery,” said Arana.
The group is still in the listening phase. “We have been talking to residents, the Bowery Mission, New Museum [which plans to move onto the Bowery in a new building it will construct] and restaurant suppliers,” said Arana. “We are gathering their feelings and what are the major areas of concern for them.” (To get involved or offer input, contact Lauren Arana at larana@mas.org.)
The Bowery stretches from Cooper Sq. in the East Village to Chatham Sq. in Chinatown. It was once the abode of both vaudeville and vice and the heart of America’s entertainment industry. Once infamously known as “skid row,” it’s more commonly now known as a commercial area housing restaurant and lighting supply stores, as well as a vibrant art scene. With the presence of the Salvation Army, the Bowery Mission and flophouses, the Bowery has a long tradition as a place for social services and helping men and women get back on their feet. Chinese-Americans residents from 150 years ago and a Native American trail are also part of the neighborhood history.
“If Broadway was the center of commerce, Bowery was its back door, littered with saloons, prostitutes, nightclubs — the other side of life, the two running parallel and each needing the other equally,” said Kent Barwick, president of M.A.S.
But the proliferation of new high-rise buildings is triggering a dramatic change in this area from a semi-commercial district to an increasingly elite, residential one, leaving old-timers and historians worried about the future of the Bowery. Ask Patricia Melvin, an artist who has been painting streetscapes of the neighborhood since 1980. “I can’t tell you how many times I have painted something that is gone the next year,” she said. “At times I almost think that I may be a curse because whatever I paint seems to be disappearing.”
Melvin painted the gas station on Fourth St. and Bowery, which was replaced by a bar. “Behind it used to be tenements and water towers, which you now cannot see because there’s this huge, ugly, concrete slab built in order to be a billboard,” she said. Residents have now filed a case against the woman who put up the billboard to have it removed.
One consistent sore point has been the fact that most of the new construction has been out of scale with the old buildings, which are no more than six stories high. Builders have used the guise of “community facilities” to build larger and higher than they would normally have been allowed, as seen with the dormitory. “They are called community facilities but they serve only transient members and not the Bowery community,” Arana said. And residents are worried that there is nothing barring the owners of these new buildings from selling them or converting them into luxury apartments, since they have been built for residential use.
Another problem is that the new buildings are also stretching the resources and infrastructure of the neighborhood. “Thousands of new people are coming in and using up our police department, garbage cans, streets, water supply, parking areas,” Sawaryn said. “Yet no tax dollars are coming back. Who’s going to pay for all the extra garbage cans on the streets, who’s going to pay for the cleaning up?” No overall environmental impact statement encompassing all the new structures has been undertaken so far.
The M.A.S. is also trying to create a public awareness campaign about the Bowery’s history through lectures, walking tours and is even making a “Bowery walking map” that will point out landmarks. The organizers are planning to target both the general public and city officials, feeling there is a certain amount of apathy in the latter.
One thing that is being seriously examined, said Barwick, is the potential historic preservation and regulation of features of buildings. “The zoning has to be more tailored and nuanced,” he said. “We are thinking of a mixture of sophisticated zoning, design control and community awareness.”
Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, agrees. “We are interested in seeing that the special character of the Bowery be preserved,” he said. “Right now there’s no uniformity of scale or style but there is certainly cohesiveness. But now there’s a new phenomenon of oversized structures that destroy the existing streetscapes. The new development should fit in with the existing scale.”
