High-brow ... inside the boutique Bowery Hotel.
Late last year, two different billboards sprang up at the corner of the Bowery and Delancey Street in downtown Manhattan. One read: Welcome to McHattan. The other: Where have all the junkies gone?
They were the work of free alternative weekly newspaper The Village Voice and expressed what many New Yorkers felt. Just about everywhere in the city, no matter how dingy, will one day be gentrified.
The Bowery was long thought to be like a New York cockroach. It was dirty, downtrodden, disgusting and nothing would kill it. Running defiantly diagonally like a small scar on Manhattan's largely symmetrical grid, the street had been associated with flophouses, drug addicts, alcoholics, the homeless and high crime rates since the 1860s.
It's no coincidence that in the 1970s the epicentre of New York's punk explosion was at CBGB, a club that opened smack-bang in the middle of this skid row and provided a place for the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith and Television to crawl out of their rehearsal spaces and make their mark. CBGB was all the more notorious for its disgusting bathrooms, rickety floorboards, walls covered with layers of band posters and flyers and its edgy location.
In October 2006, the club - which admittedly had been living on its glory days for some years after being superseded as a cutting-edge venue - closed its doors. But when I visited the space recently, I was in for a rude shock. It had been taken over by clothes designer John Varvatos as an upmarket boutique, complete with a hulking doorman. A couple of sections of wall were glassed over to display the old tattered posters and black and white photos showed various bands of the past posing outside the famous awning. But in front of these were racks of jackets priced between $1500 and $3500. When I asked the manager if I could have a quick chat to him about the store and the area, he grunted a surly "no" in response, then scribbled down the name of a publicity person I could call. Welcome to McHattan, indeed.
Although the Bowery still has a much more downtown feel than you'll find in the "tourist New York" of midtown, it has been transformed in the past few years into a destination for travellers to consider. To find out how much it had changed, I stayed in two hotels in the area and walked the Bowery from one end to the other over the space of a few days, stopping in at stores, galleries, cafes, restaurants and bars along the way.
Even a few years ago, if you said you were staying on the Bowery people would assume you were homeless. There are still homeless shelters on the street. In fact, there is one right next door to The Bowery Hotel, where I stayed for a night. Opened in 2007 by Eric Goode and Sean MacPherson, the duo behind the swanky Maritime Hotel in the Meatpacking District, the 135-room hotel is made to look like a New York establishment that's been here for at least a century. The spacious bar and lounge area on the ground floor is like a scene from Casablanca crossed with an old gentleman's club. Large, slow-moving fans circulate the air under the low, wood-inlaid ceiling, while deer heads and oil paintings of dogs look down from the walls on to plush, mismatched couches and lounge chairs. Dotted throughout are glass-fronted cabinets of curiosities, from stuffed animals and apothecary bottles to top hats and antique books ranging from Aesop's Fables to a two-volume set on rattlesnakes.
My corner room was similarly old-school, right down to the key (no swipe cards here, please) with heavy brass ring and tassel. A wooden four-poster bed sat on a faded Persian rug, concertina-frame lamps were mounted on the walls and two velvet armchairs with lace doilies sat against the floor-to-ceiling windows, with views to the east across Alphabet City and downtown along the Bowery.
The following night I moved across the street and one block uptown to a slightly different Goode-MacPherson property, Lafayette House. It has only 15 rooms, housed in a converted19th-century brownstone building. There's no big sign outside, no reception desk and no lifts in the five-floor building - but it's perfect if you like the more intimate atmosphere of something akin to a guest house in the Blue Mountains.
The Bowery is not so much an area as a conduit that starts in the East Village at Cooper Square, skirts NoHo, NoLIta, Little Italy and the Lower East Side and finally reaches Chinatown when it intersects Canal Street. Venture less than a block east or west into the side streets and you'll find plenty of diversions, like Dave's Quality Meat (a store that looks like a butcher shop but sells sneakers), John Derian Company (old-world design), La Sirena (Mexican toys and artefacts), Dashwood Books (photography books) and the Bowery Ballroom (alternative rock venue).
There are many great places for weekend brunch in downtown New York and many great hidden bars for a late drink. But it's not so easy to find the two housed in one institution. Great Jones Cafe is such a place, nestled in a bright orange building on Great Jones Street, just off the Bowery. For my money they make the best huevos rancheros in the city and at night the jukebox gets cranked and the drinks start flowing, sometimes served by the former bass player of indie heroes Pavement.
Opposite the old CBGB site is the Bowery Poetry Club, a cafe and performance space with the motto "Books Coffee Democracy" and a range of smoothies named after Joey Ramone, Patti Smith and Joe Strummer. The cafe's manager, Sander Hicks (who is also an author and political activist), was putting out the blackboard menu the day I visited. He told me he came to live in the East Village in the early '90s for the punk rock and the art scene. He shifted to Brooklyn in 2001 because he felt that it had moved on.
"This neighbourhood is going through a crisis of identity and a crisis of the soul right now," he said. "The Bowery has completely changed. I mean, look at the Bowery Hotel and what they've done to CBGB. I'm concerned for my ... old neighbourhood."
Some things haven't changed. Walk further downtown along the Bowery, cross Houston Street and just about every shop for the next few blocks sells restaurant supplies - meat slicers, pizza ovens, stools and cash registers.
It seems like a strange area to erect a museum but that's exactly what they did with the New Museum. Two Japanese architects designed the building, which opened at the end of 2007 and looks like six aluminium mesh boxes irregularly stacked on top of each other. The day I visited there was a pretentious exhibition by young installation artists and a Werner Herzog film that at first appeared to be about a post-apocalyptic planet but then turned out to be footage of post-war Kuwait.
Later that afternoon I witnessed a plainclothes cop monstering a cyclist he'd cut off in his car and then took exception when the rider slapped the fender to avoid being hit.
"I'll be a witness if you like," another rider told the hapless victim, who was visibly shaken. "I saw the whole thing."
"And who are you?" asked the cop.
"I'm a lawyer," he said.
Lawyers on bikes, boutique hotels next door to homeless shelters and a museum between restaurant supply stores.
This is the new Bowery.
TRIP NOTES
Qantas flies from Sydney to New York seven times a week. Flights are priced from $2812 (low season, including taxes). The Bowery is located in downtown Manhattan on the east side and runs all the way from Cooper Square (close to the Astor Place subway stop) in the East Village, south through to Chinatown.
The Bowery Hotel, 335 Bowery Street, phone + 212 505 9100, see boweryhotel.com. Lafayette House, 38 East 4th Street, phone + 212 505 8100, see lafayettenyc.com.
Great Jones Cafe, 54 Great Jones Street, greatjones.com. Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery Street, bowerypoetry.com.
The New Museum, 235 Bowery Street, newmuseum.org.
Dave's Quality Meat, 7 East 3rd Street, davesqualitymeat.com.
John Derian Company, 6 East 2nd Street, johnderian.com. La Sirena, 27 East 3rd Street, lasirenanyc.com. Dashwood Books, 33 Bond Street,dashwoodbooks.com. Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street, boweryballroom.com.
Sign up for the Traveller Deals newsletter
Get exclusive travel deals delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up now.