The Spectacle of Immigrant Neighborhoods

Abstract

In 1894, Henry Cuyler Bunner published a sketch in Scribner’s Magazine, “The Bowery and Bohemia,” that was so popular that it was reprinted in Jersey Street and Jersey Lane: Urban and Suburban Sketches, itself republished three times from 1894 to 1906. This sketch overflows with his enthusiasm with slumming, which far surpasses other kinds of cultural experiences: while he admits to having neglected “art galleries and palaces and theatres and cathedrals,” he takes pride in being “an ardent collector of slums.”¹ Beginning with the acknowledgment that he has never known anyone “who thought he knew the Bowery,” he attempts to chart this famous thoroughfare, demonstrating the tensions between mystification and discovery that Benedict Giamo contends typified representations of the Bowery at the turn of the century.² After charting its geography from Chatham Square to the Cooper Union at Third and Fourth Avenues, Bunner describes the demography, which boasts “more foreigners … than walk on any other street in New York,” with close attention to the Italians of Mulberry Bend and the “Hebrew types” from Baxter Street.³ On Mulberry Bend, Bunner turns almost poetic in his description of the crowded streets and the vendors’ stands, where “there are displayed more and stranger wares than uptown people ever heard of” including “the edibles,” which are the “queerest part of the show.”⁴