The Bowery (/ˈbaʊəri/)[1][2] is a street and neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. The street runs from Chatham Square at Park Row, Worth Street, and Mott Street in the south to Cooper Square at 4th Street in the north.[3] The eponymous neighborhood runs roughly from the Bowery east to Allen Street and First Avenue, and from Canal Street north to Cooper Square/East Fourth Street.[4][5][6] The neighborhood roughly overlaps with Little Australia. To the south is Chinatown, to the east are the Lower East Side and the East Village, and to the west are Little Italy and NoHo.[6][7] It has historically been considered a part of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.[8]
In the 17th century, the road branched off Broadway north of Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan to the homestead of Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of New Netherland. The street was known as Bowery Lane prior to 1807.[9] "Bowery" is an anglicization of the Dutch bouwerie, derived from an antiquated Dutch word for "farm": In the 17th century the area contained many large farms.[3]
The New York City Subway's Bowery station, serving the BMT Nassau Street Line (J and Z trains), is located close to the Bowery's intersection with Delancey and Kenmare Streets. There is a tunnel under the Bowery once intended for use by the proposed, but never built, New York City Subway services, including the Second Avenue Subway.[10][11] The M103 bus runs on the entire Bowery.
The Bowery is the oldest thoroughfare on Manhattan Island, preceding European intervention as a Lenape footpath, which spanned roughly the entire length of the island, from north to south.[12] When the Dutch settled Manhattan island, they named the path Bouwerie road – "bouwerie" (or later "bouwerij") being an old Dutch word for "farm"[13] – because it connected farmlands and estates on the outskirts to the heart of the city in today's Wall Street/Battery Park area.
In 1654, the Bowery's first residents settled in the area of Chatham Square; ten freedmen and their wives set up cabins and a cattle farm there. Petrus Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam before the English took control, retired to his Bowery farm in 1667. After his death in 1672, he was buried in his private chapel. His mansion burned down in 1778 and his great-grandson sold the remaining chapel and graveyard, now the site of the Episcopal church of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.[14]
In her Journal of 1704–05, Sarah Kemble Knight describes the Bowery as a leisure destination for residents of New York City in December: