Throughout much of the 20th century, the Bowery was a synonym for despair, evoking visuals of drunken bums passed out on the sidewalk. For years, local businesses periodically asked the city to change the street's disreputable name, but as Alice Sparberg Alexiou explains here, when New York exploded into real estate frenzy in the 1990s, developers finally tore down much of the old Bowery and replaced it with lofts and hip nightclubs. Looking back two centuries to when the Bowery was lined with country estates, Alexiou describes its deterioration in stunning detail, and ends her historical exploration of this famed street in the present, bearing witness as the old buildings, and the memories associated with them, are disappearing.