The New Museum Spotlights New York City’s First Working-Class Entertainment Zone

“A walk down 14th Street is more amazing than any work of art,” Allan Kaprow wrote in 1959, the same year he staged 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in a loft a block off the Bowery. What might he have said of that mile-long boulevard, “one of the great highways of humanity” per Theodor Roosevelt (the only New York police commissioner ever elected US president)?The greatest architectural hodgepodge of its borough, the Bowery (from the Dutch bouwerie, meaning “homestead&rdqu