The Devil's Mile Comes Home, the Bowery at the New Museum
The New Museum turns its gaze on four centuries of the street outside its own front door
In 1945, Weegee made a photograph called The Foreman Of The Devils Was Peeved... because the assistant devils were not in costume. The New Museum put that picture at the top of its new exhibition page, and it sets the tone. The Bowery has always been a little theatrical, a little unruly, and never fully dressed for the part.
The Bowery: Devil's Mile opened this week at the New Museum, which has lived on the street since 2007. It runs through January 31. The museum's press release calls it the first exhibition to trace the cultural history of New York's oldest thoroughfare. It is the closest to home of anything on view this fall. It is about the block right outside the door.
A Footpath, a Farm, a Skid Row
The show spans more than four hundred years, and the museum sketches the arc in its own materials. First came a Lenape footpath. Then farms and cattle drives. Racetracks and pleasure gardens followed. In the nineteenth century the street filled with theaters, concert halls, tattoo parlors, and dime museums. In the twentieth it earned a reputation as the most notorious skid row in the world. Artists arrived after that, and a new era began.
Even the name is a clue. Hyperallergic notes that bowerij is the Dutch word for farm. The nickname came from a rougher chapter. The museum describes a street known for rowdiness, muscle, and grit, and says it was once called the Devil's Mile. Its press release gathers two old verdicts. Jacob Riis called the Bowery "a democratic vortex." Theodore Roosevelt called it "the great highway of humanity."
Lisa Phillips, the New Museum's director emerita, organized the exhibition with curatorial assistant Thalia Stefaniuk. NY1 reports that Phillips stepped down as director in April after 27 years leading the museum. She told the station that once the museum followed artists to the Bowery, it kept turning up surprises and mysteries about the street.
They were called dime museums, they were the experience museums of their day
That was Phillips on NY1, describing the cheap attractions that once crowded the street. NY1 counts several dozen of them in the nineteenth century. The line lands with a wink. A contemporary art museum on the Bowery is, in a way, the latest tenant in a long tradition of places that charged admission to see something strange.
The Mermaid and the Fire Engine
The objects make the case. The press release singles out a Feejee Mermaid, a nineteenth century dime museum attraction of the kind that once pulled curious crowds in off the sidewalk. There is a hand pump fire engine from the 1830s. There are Jacob Riis's pictures from How the Other Half Lives, the images that used the new technology of flash to show the public rooms it had never seen.
The museum ties a long cast of characters to the street. It runs from Peter Stuyvesant and P.T. Barnum to William Burroughs, Eva Hesse, and Keith Haring. The street has been home to artists since the middle of the twentieth century, and NY1 notes that punk and new wave shook the legendary CBGB in the 1970s. That is the chapter that made this stretch a byword for loud rooms and late nights.
The Bowery has always been a little theatrical, a little unruly, and never fully dressed for the part.
The artist list reads like a map of downtown across several generations. The museum names Lynda Benglis, John Giorno, Nan Goldin, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Indiana, Brad Kahlhamer, June Leaf, Reginald Marsh, Martha Rosler, Billy Sullivan, Cy Twombly, and Tom Wesselmann, among others. The release frames them as successive waves, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop, from the Beats to the punks to the street artists. The catalog, co-published with DelMonico Books, adds reflections from Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Debbie Harry, and Richard Price.
The Street Outside
Phillips told NY1 she hopes the show will challenge what people think the Bowery is. It is a fair hope. Plenty of people know the Bowery only as a place to go out. Fewer know the flophouses, and fewer still the pleasure gardens.
That is the pleasure of a show like this one. You walk out onto the sidewalk and the street looks different. Every storefront has ghosts behind it. Every late crowd is the latest in a very long line. The New Museum is just another act on the bill.
It is not the only reason to go this fall. The Bowery show opened alongside Arthur Jafa's survey, I Am Tony, which The Art Newspaper describes as his first US museum survey and reports spans two floors of the recently expanded building. NY1 also points to Diego Marcon's Arrivederci, Piggies!, a show of the Italian artist's films and animations. Details are on the New Museum's exhibition page, and NY1's report has more from Phillips on the street's long history.
For a different view of the same street, see our photo essay The Bowery After Two, shot in the hour when the block belongs to the people still out. Then go see the history. Leave after dark. The street will do the rest.
