About this Event
The Forgotten History of the Bowery:
From Tap Dance & Vaudeville to SkidRow and Punk Rock
An Illustrated Talk by David Mulkins with Live Music and Tap Dance
With Special Guests: Ramona Baker, Calvin Booker and Gavin Rice
Tuesday, October 20th at 6:00 P.M
PLEASE NOTE THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY PROGRAM
The Program will conclude with a Book-signing and Reception
The Bowery was originally a Native American Trail, a Dutch Farm Road, a place for Free Black Homesteads, the route Washington took during the British Evacuation, however by the 1800s, it was the main street of the working class and immigrants. The architecture then included Gilded Age Banks and New York’s oldest brick houses.
David Mulkins will discuss this, in a talk inspired by his book: The Bowery: Images of America and describe how it evolved into the stomping ground for sailors, shopgirls, sporting men, gangs, gays, grifters, and the newly arrived immigrant population. The street has seminal ties to tap dance, minstrelsy, vaudeville, Yiddish theater, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin, modern tattooing, Harry Houdini and Mae West.
By the 1900s, the Bowery had also become America’s notorious skid row, but late in that century it helped foster Abstract Expressionism, Beat literature, free jazz, and punk rock.
Special guests: Ramona Baker (Ragtime Pianist), Calvin Booker (tap dancer) and Gavin Rice (Singer & Banjoist) providing live entertainment!
Ramona Baker is a professional guide who gives tours of the Bowery, Chinatown, Little Italy, and themed tours on the Pirates of New York and the Gangs of New York. She is a free-lance ragtime pianist who has appeared at festivals and events on both coasts; most recently at Bryant Park. She is also an illustrator, a clothing designer, an historian of the ragtime era, and a contributing writer for The Syncopated Times.
Calvin Booker has trained in dance since age seven, studying African dance, Afro-Caribbean, Barre a Terre, Capoeira, tap dance, and modern dance under such teachers as Traci Mann, Shirley Black-Brown, Obediah Wright and Wilehmina Taylor. Named to Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch, he originated the Tap Dance role in the Tony award-winning Broadway musical Fela, directed by Bill T. Jones. Calvin is also a dance teacher and a celebrated DJ.
David Mulkins taught history and cinema studies for 25 years at the High School of Art and Design. He is president of the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, and editor/contributing writer for the historic signage project and book Windows on the Bowery: 400 Years on NYC’s Oldest Street. His book The Bowery is a new pictorial history. He has given illustrated Bowery talks at the Yale Club, Players Club, Salmagundi Club and Cooper Union.
Gavin Rice is best known as a banjoist, but is a singer and multi-instrumentalist who plays the piano, saxophone, violin, tuba, flute, mandolin and guitar. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Gavin is a musicologist and teacher, has recorded an album and has performed with Wynton Marsalis, Vince Giordano, Colin Hancock, Mike Davis’s New Wonders, and Miss Maybell and Her Ragtime Romeos.
The Bowery is available to purchase on the night of the talk and through this link
General Admission: $15; General Society Members and Senior Citizens: $10; Students: $5
Advance registration required.
The General Society Library, 20 West 44th Street, New York City,
www. generalsociety.org
Event venue & nearby stays
The General Society Library, 20 WEST 44th Street (BETWEEN 5th AND 6th AVENUES), New York City, New York, United States
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