Bowery Mission ARCHITECT: William Jose DATE: 1876 The Bowery Mission is significant for its 103-year history as the home of the Bowery Mission, a religious-based organization that has fed, housed and cared for countless homeless men on the Lower East Side for more than 130 years. It is constructed with red brick and has four bays of windows with incised stone lintels and sills at the third through fifth stories. The ground floor has three arch-headed openings with keystone lintels, a bracketed cornice and stone banding.

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.

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.

The Bowery Mission was established in 1879 and was the third rescue mission founded in the United States and the second in New York City. Since 1895 the mission has been operated by the Christian Herald Association. The mission occupied various buildings on the Bowery in its early years before moving into a permanent home at no. 227 in 1909. The building at 227 Bowery was constructed in 1876 for an undertaker and manufacturer of coffins. When the Mission leased the building, it also commissioned work for the neo-Grec structure, including the addition of a Tudor Revival style mock half-timbered facade on the second floor. Fronted with four stained glass windows, a new Gothic Revival style chapel was installed behind the stained glass. This religious-based organization was well-known for its bread lines. Numerous photographs taken during the Depression depict these queues. Today, the long-running service agency continues to provide food, shelter, employment, and medical assistance to homeless men (while also working with women and children at other locations).