215 Bowery Charles Kinkel 1872 This limestone-faced building was built for the New Amsterdam Savings Bank in 1872, which failed by 1876. It then became Germania Bank, reflective of the large German population near this area at the end of the 19th century. This building was constructed on an irregularly narrow lot, and the heavy stonework and quoins enhance its narrow façade.

"The Bowery, north from Rivington Street, showing a bread line extending to the Salvation Army Memorial Hotel No. 223 -225 Bowery, ca. 1932." The Salvation Army Memorial Hotel, the final destination for the men waiting on this bread line, moved into the 10-story building, known as Booth House in 1913. From this location they provided a variety of service to the changing lower Manhattan populations over the 101 years they occupied the building. For the first decade and half the Army location largely served the vagrant population that lived and passed through the Bowery, but as the Great Depression took hold, the Army realized they could no longer function only by handing out meal tickets. The needy population was growing exponentially to include out of work men from common laborers to white collar workers. Knowing that food was one of the most important needs, by 1931 the Army location at Bowery started collecting unserved food from local restaurants to serve in a makeshift dining hall in the basement. This photograph depicts the lines for that service.

The Great Depression changed the everyday fabric of New Yorkers' lives and the composition of the city. These images, from the collections of our partners, bring the depression and its trials to life.

In October 1929, the prosperous Roaring Twenties crashed to an end. In the 1920s the Stock Market boomed. Shares in companies soared and millions of ordinary Americans invested their life savings, in the hopes of turning a profit. Some people even began taking out loans in order to invest in the Stock Market. While things looked good on the surface, the 1920s were plagued by deeper economic issues. Industrial production declined, unemployment crept upwards, and the agricultural sector struggled. The Stock Market bubble popped on what became known as "Black Tuesday." The sudden drop in value of stocks led to billions of dollars in lost revenue. Many banks shuttered as a result. This fueled panic among Americans who rushed to the banks to withdraw their lifesavings. Before the Great Depression, people's money in the bank was not insured. If the bank closed, people lost all of their savings! So many people went to the banks looking for their money and many banks simply did not have enough cash on hand to meet the demand. In a chain reaction of events, people lost their jobs, life's savings, and homes. From 1929 throughout the 1930s, the Great Depression wrecked havoc on the lives of Americans, and New Yorkers in particular. It would take the immense industrial demand of WWII and a dramatic increase in government regulation and spending to really get the United States out of this economic rut. During this decade of depression, Americans' lives transformed dramatically. New York Social Studies Scope and Sequence Standards 8.5b,c, & 11.7c. For Teachers: Great Depression Lesson Plan

The Bowery is one of New York’s most storied streets with a rich and varied past that reflects the hurly-burly history of New York City itself. As Manhattan’s oldest thoroughfare, the Bowery began as a Native American trail and originally extended the length of the island north to south. New York’s early Dutch settlers widened the trail for their own use to connect New Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan with their farms, or bouweries, farther north. This “Bouwerie Lane” became simply “Bowery Lane” under the English in 1813 and the name has remained unchanged since. By the 1830s, the Bowery was mostly developed into single-family Federal-style rowhouses inhabited by New York’s wealthy merchant class. Remarkably, some of these buildings still survive today. Massive immigration to New York beginning in the 1840s led to new residents, and Germans became a large presence just east of the Bowery in an area which became known as Kleindeutschland. Many prestigious institutional buildings from this era survive today on the Bowery and reflect this German presence. As immigration continued to increase in the decades before the Civil War, the upper class who resided in the townhouses moved northward, and the rowhouses were then converted to multiple dwellings and businesses like beer halls and saloons. By the end of the Civil War, the Bowery had become a primarily commercial area with little new residential development. To accommodate the waves of returning and homeless veterans, the area increasingly became home to flophouses and other types of cheap lodgings. During this period, it also became a major theater and nightlife district, where vaudeville and other popular entertainments were developed. The Third Avenue elevated line opened in 1878 and cast the street into deep shadow, further discouraging new residential development. Regardless, due to prevalence of affordable lodging, at the turn of the 20th century the Bowery was housing more than 25,000 men per night. With this large transient population came a host of social ills and during this period, the Bowery gained a national reputation as a “Skid Row” and a “Thieves’ Highway.” The area upheld this reputation until the Second World War, when the draft depopulated the area. The G.I. Bill and other social programs of the post-war era greatly reduced homelessness and the seemingly permanent transient population of the Bowery never returned to its early 20th-century peak. The street developed into a thriving light fixture and restaurant equipment district, although many of those businesses have recently closed in the face of new hotel and commercial development. The Bowery remains an architecturally rich area with a unique mix of Federal-style rowhouses, grand institutional buildings, tenements and commercial loft buildings, each type speaking to a different era in the boulevard’s storied history. Many of these buildings were spared because the elevated rail line, which was removed in the 1950s, deterred speculative development for decades. In recent years, however, new large-scale development has increased and is putting the built heritage of the Bowery greatly at risk.

After the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression, selling apples became a popular way to help now-unemployed New Yorkers eke out a living.