Bowery Boogie | A Lower East Side Chronicle

There is another twist in the saga of 206 Bowery.  Despite the owners’ wishes to “make a case for destruction at a later date,” as revealed at the LPC public hearing Tuesday morning, the unconfirmed word on the street is that a new ground-level commercial tenant is in the works.

Ralph Lewis, one of the last remaining tenants inside 206 Bowery was kind enough to send along a report on the Landmarks Preservation Commission public hearing from earlier this morning.  The overall vibe with regard to these two Federal-style row houses was reportedly positive.  Good news!

Theater artist Ralph Lewis is hanging on by a thread at 206 Bowery, but is nevertheless fighting the good fight to obtain landmark status for his beloved home.  He’s lived there for nearly a decade and believes “it [206 Bowery] stands for the small and intimate that we just don’t value enough in this town.” [...]

Good news.  The Landmarks Preservation Commission has set the date to hear, amongst other contenders, the case to landmark 206 and 135 Bowery.  Now that’s emergency action!  Both are examples of Federal-style houses built in the early 1800s.

264 Bowery is a four-story tenement building sandwiched between two active restaurant supply companies – Globe Slicers to the north and Hawaii Restaurant Equipment to the south.  The narrow ground-level storefront has been dormant for years, but was once the home of Sosinna’s Cafe, an Ethiopian-Latin-Caribbean fusion joint, which originally opened back in mid-2001.