Original Hipsters

The Bowery B’hoy, a phrase coined in the 1840s, referred to the young men who belonged to New York City’s most delirious, drunk, and carnivalesque quarter, dubbed the Bowery. The neighborhood was infamous as the poor man’s section of the city—or the working-class quarter—and was known for its notorious bar scene, lurid lights, eclectic street vendors, and street performers (among them, apparently, an Englishman who could slip swords down his throat). Bowery B’hoys dressed sharply—oiled hair, silk hat, upturned collar, boots—and had a peculiar “swing” in their gate. They disdained everything bourgeois (they never dressed too sharply), possessed a sense of adventure, and took great pride in their independence. They embodied the neighborhood, and it became part of their identity. 

It comes as no surprise that Walt Whitman was infatuated with the Bowery—its bustling energy, night life and diversity would have been a constant source of fascination to him. He said that the neighborhood had “the most heterogeneous melange of any street in the city: stores of all kinds and people of all kinds are to be met with every forty rods.” Much like Whitman’s interest in the American Museum, Whitman found in the Bowery oddness, a misfit character, and a medley of social classes coalescing in the streets and bars. And like how we can think of Leaves of Grass as like the American Museum, so we can think it as like the Bowery. Indeed Whitman has been referred to as the “Bowery B’hoy of literature.”