The Bowery: Devil's Mile

Tracing the rich history and culture of New York's oldest thoroughfare

Published with New Museum.

Once known as the world's most notorious skid row, the Bowery has, over five centuries, had many incarnations: a Lenape footpath; a home to farms and cattle drives; the site of racetracks and pleasure gardens; and a center of popular entertainment with theaters, concert halls, tattoo parlors and dime museums. Known for its extremes and for its vibrant, risqué rowdiness, muscularity and grit, the Bowery--the street that the New Museum calls home--was once known as "Devil's Mile."
In more recent years, the Bowery has been the spine of a thriving artists' community, which ushered in yet another new era for the iconic street. Here, the lingering grit of the old Bowery clashes with the wealth of the now long-gentrified area straddling Manhattan's Lower East Side and East Village.
Accompanying the eponymous exhibition at the New Museum, The Bowery: Devil's Mile underscores the Bowery as a site of ongoing experimentation and perpetual reinvention: the haunt of gangs, performers, entrepreneurs and artists, and a host of prominent characters from Peter Stuyvesant, P.T. Barnum and Jacob Riis to William Burroughs, Eva Hesse and Keith Haring. This remarkable book gathers artworks and artifacts that explore the Bowery as a street, a neighborhood and a state of mind.