Passing by #330 Bowery on the NW corner of Bond a short time ago, I was marveling at the new paint job. I hadn’t seen something so purely white in a long time. Remember those Pepperidge Farm 3-layer cakes? They still sell them in supermarkets, and as a kid, I’d always gravitate toward the 3-layer vanilla, which I believed was also as blindingly white. The building sports a refurbished exterior and new paint job after a 2-year restoration.
The building has undergone a number of uses since the 5-story Italianate went up in 1874 as the Atlantic Savings Bank, soon after the Bond Street Savings Bank and by 1879, the German Exchange Bank. After years of mixed use, one of which was for fabrics storage space, it finally was converted to the Bouwerie Lane Theatre (using the old Dutch spelling) in 1963, and it remained a theater building until 2006, when rising rents forced it out (the fate of other Bowery venues such as the Amato Opera and CBGB).
The building was purchased by a developer as a private home in 2007, while the ground floor hosted the Rogan Boutique from 2008-2013.
9/30/15
2 comments
It does look good enough to eat except for the port-a-potty out front. Great neighborhood for building buffs !
Thanks Kevin for this lovely picture. It is great to see the old building look so well, although my wife and I will always have a very bittersweet reaction to this place. From the early 1990’s when we became subscribers until its awful demise about a decade later, we saw many wonderful classic plays performed by the Jean Cocteau Theater. The place worked so well as a theater that you would never have guessed that it was initially built to host a bank!
It was not – at least directly – increased rental costs that drove the Cocteau from this venue but a pretty nasty split between the management and the leading members of the troop. Once the latter had departed to found a new company – the Phoenix Treater, which does wonderful work and clearly merits your ongoing support – the remaining organization just could not provide a consistently good product and eventually had to give up the ghost. Since we were friendly with members of both factions, my wife and I just considered the whole thing to be a terrible – and very avoidable – loss.