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The Bowery Book Launch
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As we mentioned a week ago, our old friend David Mulkins of the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors has put together a new pictorial history of The Bowery. We’ve got copies in hand now and can report that it exceeds our high expectations.
The book is part of Arcadia’s Images of America series. I’m sure you’ve encountered this series. Most American towns larger than a whistle stop have their own volume. I’ve had occasion to thumb through a couple of dozen of them, the most disappointing of which I thought was a book about Santa Claus, but turned out to be about Santa Claus, Indiana. Ordinarily the books in the series are uneven, made up as they are largely of old amateur photographs of unremarkable localities. Very often they’re not even interesting to the people who live there.
In THIS case however we are talking about one of the most famous streets in the world, celebrated by a master of its history, with the resources of this city and his personal network of scholarly friends and collectors at his command. The pix are from places like the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, The New-York Historical Society, and similar sources, as well as private collections. So Mulkins’ is easily the best book in the Images of America series I have come across by orders of magnitude. Every picture in the book serves a function in a narrative that takes you all the way from the street’s origin as a Lenape footpath to the present day, all the while making an airtight case for the Bowery as THE birthplace of American popular culture, which it is. Something of artistic, political, or social significance happened at nearly every address the whole length of it (which Mulkins reminds us once extended below Chatham Square to include Park Row, and above Cooper Square to include what is now Fourth Avenue all the way to Union Square, where it meets up with its rival and fraternal twin, Broadway). Theatres, concert halls, museums, zoos, gardens, restaurants, saloons, sports arenas, political meeting halls. The first tattoo parlor! A sea of humanity ranging from the most famous people in the country to those at the very bottom of the economic ladder in the missions and soup kitchens. A story of cultural diversity embracing Native Americans, then the Dutch, English, Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, and Chinese who settled here in succession, and also Queers! No wonder Walt Whitman loved it.
Last night at the Grace Church School, to celebrate the launch of the book, Mulkins presented a slide show drawn from the book’s pictorial trove, aided by ragtime piano player Ramona Baker, and Kerri Culhane, Ph. D., who wrote the book’s introduction. Many notables were in attendance, including the man who saved Grand Central Station Kent Barwick of the Municipal Art Society (whom we also wrote about here); David Freeland, author of the great book Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville; magic historian/archivist Tom Klem (who contributed research to the book), old time jazz maven Neal Siegel, and many others. I took a few snaps to remember the night by:
Mulkins’ The Bowery officially goes on sale May 13. Information and purchases here.
On a completely different note, it’s just come to our attention that one of the last links to the old Coney Island, “World’s Greatest Showman” Bobby Reynolds passed away back in February. Learn of Reynolds’ life and legend here.
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