Author David Mulkins (with music by ragtime pianist Ramona Baker) offers a lively Illustrated talk about nearly 400 years on this storied “cradle of American popular culture.” The Bowery was a Native American footpath, Dutch farm road, site of the first free Black homesteads, and site of Lincoln’s epochal anti-slavery speech. The city’s first entertainment district, it has seminal links to tap dance, vaudeville, Yiddish theater, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin, baseball, Houdini, and modern tattooing. The stomping ground for sailors, shopgirls, sporting men, gangs, grifters, and the immigrant Irish, Italians, Chinese, Jews, and Germans, it later became America’s iconic skid row, but rebounded in the late 20th century, impacting Abstract Expressionism, Beat literature, free jazz, and punk rock.
New York City, NY; NYC