The Bowery in the 1960s: Rare Photos From a Changing New York

The city’s approach to the street in the early 1960s was the same as it had been in the 1950s — periodic police sweeps that arrested men for public intoxication, held them overnight, and released them the next morning onto the same block. New York State law still classified public drunkenness as a criminal offense, which meant the police were the primary response to what was clearly a public health problem. The Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice reform organization based in New York, began studying the Bowery’s population in the mid-1960s specifically because the arrest-and-release cycle was so obviously pointless. Their research eventually helped build the case for decriminalizing public intoxication in New York State in 1967 — one of the few concrete policy changes the decade produced for the men who lived there.

The restaurant supply trade that had always shared the street with the flophouses continued operating in the 1960s with no interruption. The blocks of the Bowery between Delancey Street and Houston Street were lined with restaurant equipment dealers, lighting fixture wholesalers, and commercial kitchen suppliers. Chefs and restaurant owners from all over the city made regular trips to the Bowery to buy stoves, refrigeration units, shelving, and flatware at prices far below retail. This part of the street’s identity — unglamorous, entirely functional, completely separate from the Skid Row reputation — drew working people into the neighborhood every single weekday and kept a legitimate commercial economy running alongside everything else.

The shift that would eventually define the Bowery’s future began quietly in the early 1960s and accelerated toward the end of the decade. Artists and musicians — most of them priced out of Greenwich Village, which had become expensive enough by the late 1950s to push working artists further downtown — began moving into the loft buildings just off the Bowery and into the blocks immediately south of Houston Street. The rents in these former light industrial buildings were extraordinarily low by Manhattan standards. A loft that ran 2,000 square feet could be had for under $100 a month in the early 1960s because the buildings were zoned for commercial use and technically illegal to live in. Artists moved in anyway.

CBGB did not open until 1973, and SoHo as a recognized neighborhood did not fully coalesce until the early 1970s, but the groundwork was laid in the 1960s. The artists who moved into the blocks immediately west and south of the Bowery during this decade — painters, sculptors, experimental musicians — created the density of cheap creative housing that SoHo would eventually be built on. The Fluxus art movement held performances in loft spaces near the Bowery throughout the 1960s. Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street, a few minutes’ walk from the Bowery’s southern end, was a regular performance space from 1960 onward. La Monte Young, the experimental musician and composer, held concerts in his loft at 275 Church Street that drew serious figures from the New York avant-garde through the mid-1960s.

These two worlds — the flophouse men and the loft artists — occupied the same physical geography without much overlap. A man drinking outside the Sunshine Hotel and a sculptor carrying materials into a Canal Street building passed each other regularly and had essentially no connection. The Bowery in the 1960s was not yet a neighborhood in transition in any way that the men living in the cage hotels could feel or benefit from. The property pressure was building in the blocks just around them, not yet under their feet. That would come later. Through the 1960s, the flophouses stayed full, the missions stayed busy, and the street maintained the identity it had held since the Depression — just with a new set of residents moving into the buildings on the edges, drawn by the same thing that had always made the Bowery tolerable to people with very little money: the rent was cheap and no one asked too many questions.