Buildings on the Bowery: Drawings by Joseph Papin

I discovered two wonderful resources in the process of working to correctly identify the addresses and names of the buildings in Joseph Papin’s Bowery street drawings. The Bowery Alliance of Neighbors (BAN) put together a fascinating exhibit called Windows on the Bowery that provides photos and descriptions of some of the buildings on the Bowery (available at https://www.boweryalliance.org/windows-on-the-bowery/#map).

I found the excellent Windows on the Bowery exhibit online a few years ago, and just recently discovered an invaluable resource written by Architectural and Urban Historian, Kerri Culhane. She authored a 171-page document, The Bowery Historic District State and National Register Report, listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 (United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service) and available at https://media.villagepreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/15123205/The-Bowery-Historic-District-State-and-National-Register-Report.pdf.

Using these two resources and a handful of online photos of those sections of the Bowery, I have been delighted to be able to identify almost all of the buildings.

I’ve compared the Papin drawing, done around 1957, with a Google maps image from 2016 and then a Google maps image from 2022:

This photograph, marked with the logo of the New York Public Library, provides a second view of this section of the street:

The view in 1933 is similar to the view in 1957 and provides an illustration of what Kerri Culhane wrote in The Bowery Historic District State and National Register Report (2013):

“An interesting opportunity to compare the variations and change over time is offered by 202, 204, 206 and 208 Bowery, built as a group of Federal-style buildings with party walls, ca. 1810. No. 202 was replaced by new construction in 2005, and the former two-and-a-half-story Federal-era rowhouse at 204 was reworked into a ca. 1965 commercial box. No. 206 remains an intact example of an early Federal-era building: the two-and-a-half-story, three-bay wide rowhouse retains its gambrel roof and pair of gable dormers. The one-foot thick walls are of Flemish-bond brickwork with a stone foundation.”

Note that the building at 210 Bowery is identified as the Monroe Hotel that I posted about a week ago. “210 Bowery: Lodging house by 1932; Monroe Hotel by 1955; Changed from lodging house to storage 1967” (Culhane, 2013).