Bowery Pavilion

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant. This is Tori Paulson. I’m calling from Wyoming.

Hi, Tori. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Tori.

Hey, Martha. I had a word that came up recently. We live in a small community in Rollins, in Wyoming, Rollins, Wyoming. My wife works for the city here in Rollins, and they were discussing maintenance on city parks, and she referred to Bowery at a park that needed maintenance. And no one else knew what a bowery was. They all referred to it as a pavilion, which we know as well. But the word bowery has never been used by anybody around here. We’re originally from Salt Lake City, Utah. And bowery is a common term down there. We looked it up in the dictionary, and it’s not even listed in the dictionary in the way we use it.

How do you use it?

As a pavilion. A bowery is equivalent to a pavilion where we grew up.

So a covered sitting area, something like that, or a covered performing area?

A covered area with open sides.

Well, Tori, I’m so glad you brought up this word because it has a really interesting and kind of surprising history. The word bowery comes from an old Dutch word that sounds similar. It’s bowery, and it means farm. In the 17th century, the term Bowery was applied to an area of lower Manhattan that at that time had a lot of farms, and it was mostly Dutch. For a time after it got built up some, the Bowery became this very fashionable area. It was a really desirable place to live. And at that same time, in the 18th century, this term that originally meant farm was moving across the northern part of the United States. And it began to acquire a more specific meaning, exactly the kind of thing that you’re talking about, an open structure. And sometimes it had a roof of tree boughs or vines that was used, you know, to keep people out of the elements at a big temporary gathering like a concert or a wedding or a party or something like that.

You’re absolutely right that the term Bowery for pavilion is pretty localized. You hear it in the north and north midland of the United States, and particularly in the Rocky Mountain area. So I’m not surprised that you grew up hearing it in Utah. And then there’s the overlap with just bower, right, Martha, which is kind of a woodland shelter, kind of away from the noise and the sun, kind of a, I don’t know what you say, kind of a recess or a secret area.

Yeah.

But that’s a separate word. It took a different path. And so there’s probably some overlap and reinforcement there of the Bowery from New York and from the Dutch and then the Bowery of kind of a secret quiet place in the woods or in the garden.

Excellent.

It sounds like she surprised everybody with that term.

Yes, nobody else had even heard the term before, and it seemed so common growing up in Utah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if other people in Wyoming knew it, though. As Martha said, much later in the Rocky Mountains, people, the term kind of stuck more there than it did in the rest of the country. I mean, it’s never been all that common, but it did kind of last there more than did other places. And it seemed to be centered more around a religious background because churches having a Bowery behind the church was very common.

How interesting.

Well, that’s what we know. Maybe she’s going to introduce it and Wyoming will become a hotbed of Bowery speakers.

Perfect.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thanks for taking my call.

It’s our pleasure, Tori.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Yeah, that word Bowery from the Dutch is spelled B-O-U-W-E-R-I-J, and it goes back to the early days of New Netherland and New Amsterdam when the Dutch had a foothold with a colony in the New World, which didn’t last very long. And Peter Stuyvesant was the governor of that colony in the mid-1600s. It just goes back a long way. It was his farm, which the Bowery led to, one of his farms anyway. And so it’s got that word, the Bowery, boy, hundreds of years to get to this meeting at a parks department in Wyoming. We’re all about those connections. Give us a call, 877-929-9673.