The Bowery El

From 1878 until the middle 1950s the Bowery lay in the shadow of the Third Avenue elevated railway, the El, and the street's reputation as New York's skid row grew up underneath it. The line opened in August 1878, and its iron structure was built out over the sidewalks to clear the streetcar tracks already in the roadway, so that sooty steam locomotives rumbled a few feet from second-storey windows. A station stood over the Bowery at Grand Street, and the City Hall branch joined the main line at Chatham Square. The El did not invent the Bowery's saloons and lodging houses, but it hastened the turn. After 1878, the National Register nomination for the Bowery Historic District notes, new building on the street ran mostly to lofts, lodging houses and places of entertainment, for tenants willing to put up with the din and the soot for cheap rent.

By 1890 an estimated nine thousand homeless men lodged along the Bowery and Park Row. Around 1900 a quarter bought a private room, fifteen cents a wooden cubicle about four feet by seven, and a nickel a place on a bare floor, the original flophouse. Service on the lower line ended in May 1955 and the structure came down over the next two years. In 1956 Meyer Berger of the New York Times wrote that the Bowery blinked in the sunlight.