JOHN BROWN HOUSE

BEFORE Broadway became Manhattan’s signature Mother Road, the lane that would become the Bowery wound to the island’s upper reaches. It was a dirt trail etched by the bare feet and moccasins of the Native Americans before the Dutch arrived and situated their farms, which they called “bouwerij” (we get our English word “bower” from the same root) and the road was, naturally, called “the bowery road.” The Bowery’s first residents were ten families of freed slaves in about 1645. It was extended on a winding path north to ferries crossing the Harlem River and then on to Boston. It was also extended south, in the early 1800s, to connect with Pearl Street in a section at first called New Bowery and then St. James Place.

As Luc (now Lucy) Sante writes in Low Life, the amazing chronicle of 19th-Century life in New York,

…until fairly recently the Bowery always possessed the greatest number of groggeries, flophouses, clip joints, brothels, fire sales, rigged auctions, pawnbrokers, dime museums, shooting galleries, dime-a-dance establishments, fortune-telling agencies, lottery agencies, thieves’ markets, and tattoo parlors, as well as theaters of the second, third, fifth and tenth rank. It is also a fact that the Bowery is the only major thoroughfare in New York never to have had a single church built upon it.

Of course, you have heard of the Bowery’s rep as the place where down-and-outers gathered, for its SROs, flophouses, and cheap bars throughout much of the 20th Century. The 3rd Avenue El rumbled overhead from the 1880s through 1955. Gradually the Bowery shucked off its old trappings and even when it was the home of the so-called “Bowery bum” it was also NYC’s center of wholesale kitchen supplies, lighting and cash registers and to this day, many kitchen supplier still call it home.

Most of the Bowery, except for a few buildings here and there, has never been designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, but even among the nondocumented buildings, there are some ancient gems, such as #206 opposite Rivington Street. It was constructed around 1825 and according to Bowery Alliance & Neighbors its first owner was butcher John Brown, who operated John Brown’s Porterhouse, a tavern serving area butchers in what was then a slaughterhouse district. An LPC report disputes this and claims that in 1826 a Walter Keeler opened a shoe store at #206. It also claims that the house was “a speculative investment associated with the family and heirs of the wealthy English-born leather merchant James Meinell.” Whatever the story behind it, the tiny building with twin dormers was once part of a row of similar buildings of which it is the lone survivor.

At present, #206 Bowery is home to one of the aforementioned kitchen suppliers.

Reference: Ephemeral New York

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8/11/25