THE BOWERY.

[FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.]

New York, December 28, 1866. MUCH has been written about Broadway, but in all the many books of travel in the United States that I have looked through, I have, found nothing, or next to nothing, about The Bowery. This street issues from Broadway at a point about a mile from the Battery, which is on the southern point of the island, and making a great bend to the eastward and again to the west- ward, comes into Broadway again at Union Square, which is about two miles above the point first mentioned. Broadway being per- fectly straight, and the Bowery an almost continuous curve, the latter is an arc of which the former is the chord, the bisecting radius being about half a mile in length. Pearl Street, which before George the Third put Royalty out of favour here was called Queen Street, also begins and ends in Broadway, going out at the Battery and coming in about a mile and a quarter above, and describing in its course almost a semicircle. Curves and crooked streets were common enough in the old quarters of our cities. The lower part of the Bowery has long been called Chatham Street, and the lower part of this, again, has lately been dubbed Park Row; and the upper part of the Bowery has also been made a part of the Fourth Avenue ; but the street in spite of these changes of name is one, and has throughout a remarkable unity. It marks the line of an old road which led to the " Bouerie Farm," a good broad piece of land, which, at a time when land here was worth a few blankets and beads the square mile, came into the possession of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam ; and who is known to some of my readers perhaps as Irving's wooden-legged hero, " hard- kopping Piet." Not a little of the land remains in the possession of his descendants to this day, and makes them wealthy people. 'I'he Governor, a gallant old fellow, in spite of the somewhat ridi- culous light in which Irving places him, lies buried under the Church of " St. Mark's in the Bowery," so called because it stood not on the street, but on the tract of land in question, and which twenty-five or thirty years ago was as remote from town surroundings as St. Martin's-in-the-Fields was when it was built. Now solid blocks of brick houses stretch more than a mile beyond it. Around this church, for a space of about half by a quarter of a mile square, is one of the handsomest and pleasantest quarters of the town, which is in a great measure occupied by people to whom the distinction of living in the Fifth Avenue, or thereabout, is not a great desideratum. This is worthy of notice, because, excepting this neighbourhood, the whole Bowery quarter is occupied by the poorer and the poorest class of dwelling- houses. It is a region rather than a quarter, for it covers one- third of the whole city. It is sedulously shunned not only by fashion, but by culture. Many attempts have been made by owners of unimproved property in this quarter to induce wealthy and cultitivated people to live in it, tUe means used being of course the erection of rows of handsome houses. But, with the exception named, these efforts have been in vain. People of a certain grade of social culture, and, yet more, those who without culture have money and the desire to be thought persons of fashion, avoid the Bowery and, the Third Avenue and the streets which lie beyond them ; so that this quarter seems to be hopelessly given over to the occupation of those in inferior conditions of life. Indeed, with us Broadway and the Bowery are distinguished somewhat as with you are St. James's and St. Giles's. This similarity of distinction exists, however, only in a measure. For although this vast Bowery region, or East part of the town, as

we call it, contains the worst part of the population of New York, thousands and tens of thousands of its inhabitants are among our worthiest, although not our richest or most cultivated citizens.

The lower, or down-town extremity of the Bowery, called Chat- ham Street, is given over to the Hebrew race, and is the Holywell Street of New York. Ever since it was built up it seems to have been the haunt of "old-do" dealers and pawnbrokers. They have held their own against all changes, and there, almost within a stone's throw of Broadway, are little grimy houses with the front of the ground floor all open for the better display of half-worn coats, and trousers, and cheap finery ; and before the doors lounge unctuous men unfamiliar with water, black-bearded and hook- nosed, who will seize upon a shabbily dressed wayfarer, and harangue him upon the gloriousness of the raiment within, and the " sheepneas " thereof. 8ometimes two of them will lax, hold of one man, and between them tear one coat off his back in their struggle for the privilege of selling him another. The scene of these proceedings is separated but by a single block of houses from Broadway. But the crooked street soon trends widely away from the straight one, and between them there appears what was once the very worst quarter of the city, and what is now one of the worst,—a place the ill-repute of which may have reached London—the Five Points, so called from the intersection there of five streets. This quarter—not a large one— is filled with the lowest and vilest part of the population of a great seaport. The air reeks with abominations, the walls of the decrepit houses sweat filth ; the streets between the kerb-stones are filled with a paste of mud and garbage ; noisome holes in which rum and rot-gut whiskey are sold abound, and there are other holes in which articles are exposed, it would seem for sale, were it credible that any one could want them and pay money for thsnr. The men and women who lean against the doors and loll out of the windows, and the children who measurably satisfy the demands of decency by eking out the scantiness of their rags with a redundant covering of dirt, look at you with a stolid wickedness of stare which frightens a sensitive woman, and would give a sensitive man a heart-ache. Where do these people come from? You know : we do not. This country breeds no such creatures. It would be safe to lay a large wager that except the children playing around, not more than one person in a hundred of those living within a quarter of a mile of the "Points" was born in the United States. Not long ago I took two English gentlemen and a Hollander through this quarter. They said, " Well, this is pretty bad, but it's nothing to what we have at home" (saying this, I thought, with a slight tone of melancholy boastfulness). " These people have light, and can get water if they choose, and as much as they like, and all seem to have enough to eat. It isn't quite so bad as you seem to think, after all." A little farther north, and on the east side of the Bowery, is a quarter which was, and indeed which still is, very different in character from that which we have just visited. It is a quarter through which runs a street called East Broadway, and which was a favourite place of residence for many years with the Quakers. Twenty years ago East Broadway and the cross streets near it were full of houses that were models of prim re- spectability, and of comfort carried to such a pitch of refinement that it was luxury in spite of its studious plainness. A quarter so silent, so clean even to the cobblestones of the carriage way, so soberly rich, it would have been hard to find, in this country at least, outside of the Quaker city, Philadelphia. But the effort to appropriate this, part of the Bowery region to such residences had to be abandoned, even by people who care so little for fashion as the Quakers do. The great uncultured and unwashed mass swarmed around and overwhelmed them, and the good Friends are fast removing their little leaven, which failed to leaven the great lump. From the point where East Broadway puts off, the Bowery to its termination is a broad street, the broadest in the city, of little houses, occupied on the ground floor as shops, and on the single floor and attic above as dwellings. But the cross streets, twenty-four in number, are filled with objects that would strike the eye of the British traveller with won- der. They are filled in fact with small, private dwelling- houses, which are inhabited by Americans ! Yes, this part of the city, which covers considerably more than a square mile, is filled chiefly with small comfortable brick houses, in which live the smaller traders, salesmen, clerks, but chiefly artisans ; each house being generally occupied by a single family, and the master of the house being not unfrequently its owner. On the west side of the town—west of Broadway—and high up, there are also acre after acre of endless rows of private dwelling-houses. But those are houses of people of more or less wealth and culture ; these are the dwellings of what you call in Europe the lower classes, the corn-

mon people. Yet these, like those, are not hotels, or boarding- houses, but private dwellings, homes ; in which, if the house- holder can possibly afford it, no other person lives than the members of his family. For the first and foremost need of an " American " is a home, a house sacred to himself, his family, and his friends.

I have mentioned this fact before, and I now reiterate it at sug- gestion of an Englishman who has lived here many years, and of whose judgment and powers of observation the editors of the

Spectator justly think much. He told me that he even had difficulty in making an Englishman, a great friend of " America," who visited us about a year and a half ago, believe that it was

the almost universal custom here for families to :live in their own homes. The gentleman alluded to, " like all of them in England," believed that " Americans " herded in hotels and boarding-houses. " Whereas," he added; " the truth is that, although rents are more than twice as high here as they are in England, there are more single families here, in proportion, who live alone in their own homes than there are there." That is an Englishman's testimony, not a Yankee's. I took the two Englishmen and the Hollander whom I have previously mentioned through the whole Bowery

quarter, and saw that they looked at it with curiosity and interest. As we passed through one of the humblest but most respectable

neighbourhoods, the Hollander said to me, in a doubtful tone,

" And these people I suppose eat meat frequently ?" " Yes ; every day." " Every day !" " Yes ; twice a day." He opened upon

me grey eyes of silent wonder, and after musing a minute said, " And our professors and clergymen, I am afraid, do not eat meat oftener than twice a week."

One marked characteristic of the Bowery quarter is the look of age in the houses. They are, of course, not old. That they could

not be, and be where they are ; but they are not new. They are,

with comparatively few exceptions, the first houses that were built upon the ground on which they stand. This is a characteristic which they share with the houses in another part of the city, on the opposite side of Broadway, which are also the houses of people in the humbler walks of life. In these two quarters, which com- prise two-thirds of the city, houses are sometimes burned ; but excepting the new ones which take the places of those thus destroyed, most of the others are the original erections, and have seen the Broadway quarter rebuilt once or twice in the course of their existence. Trade does not disturb them, and fashion pushes on ahead of trade up town, setting up its brown-stone mansions also upon virgin ground.

In the Bowery region are the haunts of many of our worst gangs of rowdies. Besides the Five Points there are other like delectable quarters known as lklackerelville, Cow Bay, and the Hook. A Boweryboy and a rowdy are almost synonymous terms. The Bowery boys have a physiognomy, a style of dress, and also of speech pecu- liar to themselves, and yet very hard to describe. The countenance is hard, defiant, and almost brutal in expression, without being coarse in feature ; the dress comfortable, good in quality, not at all flashy, but yet taking from the wearer an air of salient vulgarity. The speech is not only indescribable, but inexpres- sible by letters ; foe its peculiarity is merely in the tones and

inflections of the voice, which no combination of vocal signs known to me will represent. Otherwise I should try and give you here some notion of the vilest and most hideous style of speech ever heard from the lips of civilized man, compared to which all the provincial dialects and intonations of the Old England and the New that I have heard are, to my ears, music. This style of speech is not confined to the rowdy, or Bowery " b'hoy," as he calls himself, but in a measure infects the whole Bowery quarter. It is worthy of remark that although there is in New York an East Broadway and a West, and that many of the new cities all over the country have their Broadway, the name of the great avenue of the humbler quarter is not thus ap- propriated. It is felt that to give this name to a new street would be to condemn it at the start. There is in the whole country, and probably in the world, but one Bowery. A YANKEE.