Devil's Mile

As the district of New York City that popularized minstrelsy before the Civil War and that afterward became a watchword for alcoholism and vagrancy, the Bowery is a fitting topic for a neighborhood study. In this lively popular history, Alice Sparberg Alexiou surveys its history from the settlement by Dutch colonists in the seventeenth century to the gentrification that began in the 1990s. Colonial New York City's two oldest and most important thoroughfares were the Bowery and Broadway. Both originated at the southern tip of Manhattan and followed the course of Lenape footpaths northward. But while Broadway ran along a slight ridgeline and became associated with more upscale land uses, the Bowery traversed lower-lying, sometimes-swampy ground. This trifling difference in elevation was enough for the Bowery to become “New York's dumping ground” and to become identified with a distinctive “state of mind where all manner of human interaction was permitted to take place, right out in the open,” including prostitution, slumming, and popular entertainment forms such as tap dancing and later punk rock (pp. 1, 4

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