Some shots from around East 1st Street circa early 2000's

EV Grieve recently posted a blurb about my post from a while back tracing property lines on the block where La Mama lives. (Thanks!)  Also Grieve let me know that Vanishing New York recently wrote up a great piece titled "Loss of Mars Bar" which chronicled the change this block has gone through over the years. (Thanks!)

I'm posting some images shot probably around 2001-3 from the block....these are all just screen captures culled from contact sheet scans, nothing fancy.  I have others lurking around somewhere.  I was starting a project around that time about the neighborhood and trying to figure out what kind of camera(s) to use, so they're mostly random shots of spaces which resonated with me for one reason or another (the empty lot on 1st St. and 2nd Ave, the UHaul lot, Liz Christy Garden, etc), not formal studies of anything.

More images to come in the future, but for now here's a few that I found:

Looking into the (emptied) UHaul lot, 1st st. and Bowery, SW corner

Same lot looking south when demo of the buildings started.

Looking north from Bowery and Houston.  Note - what will become the Bowery Hotel is still yellow here.  More on that building sometime soon.

The Liz Christy Garden in all its former glory, and the old school I mentioned in the previous post.

More Liz Christy Garden with the old fence still in place.

Crappy digital camera photo circa 2006 of what was built on the site.  Looking south from the west side of the Bowery.

Lot on NW corner of 1st st. and 2nd ave.

Same lot as above, looks to be later in time.

2007 - LIz Christy Garden reopens / 2005 - 295 Bowery Demolished

In 2005, most of the block between 1st and Houston Street, Bowery and 2nd Ave, was demolished for the second phase of the Avalon Bay buildings. Liz Christy Garden, the oldest community garden in the neighborhood, was threatened, but luckily was saved.

2007 Downtown Express article 

I agree with this quote:

"To (Brandon) Krall, the loss of the fence is especially upsetting. What was once a combination of wooden posts, iron rails and a rose-covered trellis is now a standard-issue, Parks Department fence. “It is part of the homogenization that is taking place all over the city,” she said. “They took our unique fence and replaced it with a generic (Parks Dept.) one.”"

It's still a beautiful and amazing space, but the new fence took away some of its individuality.

---------------

Many other buildings on the block,  like 295 Bowery (pictured below), weren't so lucky.  Along with a few other buildings, there was an old school that was to occupied by squatters (some took care of the park I think).  A chapel was attached to the school....originally it was going to be saved but only now did I realize that it wasn't.  The building's occupants had a sort of film festival one night in the chapel back in, probably, 1994?  I remember going with some friends and showing a film....the generator supplying the electricity was almost out of gas, so the film ran much slower than the soundtrack (on cassette).  It was kind of amazing.  And, well, the space was amazing, all broken down and rotting.  Entry was though the gym of the school (the floors were shiny and the ceiling high), which faced onto a sort of parking lot space looking toward 1st street.  It was so dark in the building, I can't imagine how anyone could find their way around. 

Another memory is the U-Haul that used to be on the corner.  It was just a trailer and a parking lot full of trucks, but very convenient.  I was freelancing, I think around '99, working for an artist and moving his studio from Tribeca + DUMBO to Chelsea/East Williamsburg.  I could pick up a truck in the morning, move a bunch of stuff, then drop it off at night, then stumble home exhausted.  This was also handy for those "helping a friend move" moves, since right around this time it seemed everyone was moving to Brooklyn (which then consisted of Williamsburg.  Maybe Greenpoint.  But not Bushwick or Sunset Park.)

I have some photos before the demo of the block, somewhere.  4x5 and 6x7 actually.  Time to dig them out. (next morning....found some - will post in the next few days!)

More 295 Bowery info here at the Lower East Side History Project, and The NY Times

photo: vanishing downtown

Origins of the Avalon Bay Empire on the Bowery......

I have hazy memories of seeing some sort of rendering of the ginormous housing developments which now span Houston St - 2nd St.  It was around 2000, and in some sort of document I stumbled across in the the Cooper Union library.  According to this article, a plan had been in the work for decades, so the information I found could have been much older than what was being proposed at the time (which got built).

Memorable quotes from the NY Times article "At Cooper Square, a New Player Takes the Stage":

"TWENTY years ago -- or 30 or 40 for that matter -- the Cooper Square Committee would have scorned the redevelopment plan for three acres of urban renewal land off East Houston Street that a community task force worked out with the Giuliani administration a year ago. The committee is a nonprofit community development organization that formed four decades ago to resist the redevelopment plans of Robert Moses in the neighborhood."

---------The "suburbanization" of New York maybe can begin to be explained by things like this that started happening under Giuliani--------

"AvalonBay Communities, based in Alexandria, Va., is undertaking the Cooper Square project in partnership with Williams Jackson Ewing, a national retail developer based in Baltimore, and Blackacre Capital, a private investment firm in New York City. Phipps Houses, the New York-based nonprofit housing company, will participate as the developer and owner of a portion of the low-income apartments."


"It is unusual for a national real estate company to undertake residential development in New York City, and even more unusual for it to take the path of bidding for a city-sponsored proposal. For most such companies, the major capital investment required at the beginning of a process of uncertain duration and outcome seems daunting. Companies experienced in the vagaries of New York City development are normally the only participants."

"But the attraction is the chance to own new rental property in a market that is unlikely to become oversupplied with it. ''Our strategy is to focus on the strongest markets,'' said Bryce Blair, president of AvalonBay. ''The markets with the strongest constraints on supply over the long term will be the healthiest.''"

"The design and architectural plan is the work of the New York office of Arquitectonica, an international firm that was founded in Florida in 1977 and became known in its early days for a flamboyant condominium in Miami called the Atlantis, in which a 37-square-foot cube was cut to create a 10-story interior skycourt. Bernardo Fort-Brescia, a founder of the firm, is the chief architect for Cooper Square."

"Oh, It's Not What It Used to Be" - Bowery circa 2000

NY Times article circa 2000 about the Bowery, written by someone who spent a lot of time there as a child in the 60's probably.

Notes:

"Today on the Bowery the tallest building -- other than the 1970's Confucius Plaza in Chatham Square -- is the 10-story Salvation Army Chinatown Corps, No. 225, near Rivington Street; most are three or four stories."

"Still seedy around the edges, the Bowery is not yet gentrified -- there's no Starbucks, no Gap -- and it's not clear whether it will soon look more like SoHo, to the west."

"Old-timers gape at a two-story terraced gray penthouse, recently erected atop a dark orange brick building." ---- (While there are other seemingly older penthouse structures visible, I think this one is the first real sign of the beginning of what the Bowery has become.)

Also, another mention of its unique street arrangement:

"The Bowery interrupts the city's straightforward grid. Streets like Prince, Spring and Bleecker on the west side, and Stanton, Rivington and First on the east, end -- or begin -- at the Bowery. In some cases, the names change: Delancey becomes Kenmare; Bond becomes East Second; Great Jones becomes East Third."

"This is where streets go to die" - Bowery circa 2003

This NY Times article titled "Palimpsest Street" from 2003 gives you a mini rundown of the the Bowery's history, and details some sensibility of its different manifestations.  Originally the article probably had pictures (I wish it still did). 

During this time period there was no way of knowing that the Bowery was on the precipice of massive change, just that things were generally shifting in a more upscale direction.  No one knew if it was sustainable at this point.

I like the author's hypothesis as to why the Bowery had essentially sat unchanged for so many decades:

"One answer is surely physical. Like most of New York, the Bowery is much cleaner than it used to be, but it is still an ungainly street, singularly devoid of shade. An informal survey counted only 19 trees, many of them little more than saplings. And in its northern reaches, particularly, the Bowery is almost as broad and as busy as a highway. Trucks rumble constantly up and down its six lanes, either serving the avenue's many wholesalers or on their way somewhere else. And if geography is destiny, then the Bowery will never change. This is where streets go to die. Prince and Spring Streets from the west; Rivington, Stanton and First Streets from the east. All come to dead ends here, creating the impression that the Bowery is somehow cosmically misaligned -- an ineluctable border area, permanently detached from any of the neighborhoods surrounding it.

Or perhaps there's a simpler reason that the Bowery has remained the Bowery. Modern cities developed for the most practical of reasons, as marketplaces of goods, services and ideas. It is only when the markets leave that cities and neighborhoods begin casting around existentially for reasons to exist. On the Bowery, neither the industrial markets nor the artists ever left. The street remained more or less content unto itself. In a way, the Bowery is the only part of the ''real'' city left in Manhattan."

You can check out some aerial photos taken from different time periods by using the NYC.gov interactive map feature (super cool).

Bowery and Houston circa 1924

Bowery and Houston circa 1996

Bowery and Houston circa 2008

Dive bars in NY circa 1996

I'm working on a big piece for a show I'm doing at La Mama Gallery in January (also showing Wil Ortega's work).  La Mama is located right off the Bowery, on 1st street, near the Liz Christy garden.  Also, I suppose I should mention its also nowadays sandwiched between one of the largest (luxury) housing developments built in recent times in the neighborhood, built by Avalon Bay, who previous to this complex on the Bowery had mostly build suburban apartment complexes in places like New Jersey. Anyway, if I can pull it off, my portion of the show will incorporate some of the last 20 years of history in terms of the Bowery - pretty much the time person when I would have traversed it as a Cooper Union student, then staff and faculty, and a general NYC downtown resident.

I have a lot of memories, but they tend to be a bit fuzzy.  Images are in my heads, but dates are uncertain.  I've started doing some research, mostly using the NY Times archive, which so far has been very helpful.  I typed in Bowery and Houston and a bunch of stuff popped up.  I was tryign to determine when the aforementioned housing development was proposed, because i remember seeing a rendering in a book in the Cooper Library circa 1999?  2000? and thinking "well, thats never going to happen".  And it didn't, at least as far as I can tell. Originally it was proposed as city housing.  Then it was sold to a private developer.  So, big difference there in terms of what it represents.  Still looking into finding that rendering. 

Anyway, from time to time I'm going to post some of the articles/images I find, and my thoughts here.  

Note the date.  This one is from 1996:

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/news/lives-bar-none.html?scp=98&sq=houston+and+bowery&st=nyt

enjoy.