The recent openings of the Avalon Bowery Place, Whole Foods Market, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art have made of Manhattan’s legendary and notorious Bowery something we could scarcely have imagined just a few years ago. In 1892 Charles H. Hoyt wrote, in lyrics for Percy Gaunt’s “A Trip to Chinatown”:

Oh! the night that I struck New York,
I went out for a quiet walk;
Folks who are “on to” the city say,
Better by far that I took Broadway;
But I was out to enjoy the sights,
There was the Bow’ry ablaze with lights;
I had one of the devil’s own nights!
I’ll never go there anymore.

The devil, at that time, had not descended on the Bowery as he soon would. Where once the thoroughfare was known for the Bowery Theatre, which stood, in various incarnations, on the Bowery near Canal Street from 1828 to 1929, in 1895 the notorious concert-saloon known as McGurk’s Suicide Hall would open. That establishment attracted sailors who came for liquor and live entertainment — and prostitutes.

For the prostitutes, McGurk’s represented just about the furthest they could fall, and the “Suicide Hall” moniker refers to the appalling number of young women who killed themselves there. In 1898, allegedly, seven prostitutes committed suicide at McGurk’s. The concert saloon became a restaurant in 1902, but not until it and similar establishments had redefined the Bowery in ways that would reverberate to — well, just a few years ago. The very name of the Bowery indicated life’s nadir. As the historian Kenneth Jackson points out, by the beginning of the 20th century, the Bowery was so awash with alcoholic men living in flophouses that even the prostitutes fled. In 1907, an estimated 25,000 men resided in Bowery flophouses. Mr. Jackson cites a fascinating statistic: In that year, 115 clothing stores operated on the Bowery. Every one of them sold men’s clothing; none sold women’s clothing.

The Bowery (the name derives from the Dutch word for farm) begins at Chatham Square, where Worth Street, Park Row, and East Broadway converge in Chinatown. The Bowery is the northward extension of Park Row. It continues a mile or so uptown where, at 4th Street, it passes through Cooper Square to emerge on the other side as Third Avenue. Between the 1870s and the 1950s, the Third Avenue elevated railway loomed over the Bowery, adding to the sinister atmosphere.

McGurk’s building stood until 2005, when it was demolished, amid protests, for the Avalon Bowery Place apartment building at the southeast corner of 1st Street. In describing the neighborhood, Avalon Communities, the developer, promises on the building’s Web site “excitement around every corner.” While the same claim might have been made in McGurk’s day, one presumes today’s excitements are of a different order.

A block south, at Houston Street, Avalon has struck again. Avalon Chrystie Place is the site of the Whole Foods Market. The presence of Avalon on the Bowery is, to a New Yorker of a certain age, even more startling than the presence of Ernst & Young in Times Square. Avalon is famous for its more than 100 “communities” — as it calls its rental apartment complexes — across the nation. They are overwhelmingly in suburban areas, and are the high-end option for suburban young marrieds before they decide to have children and buy a house. In other words, until recently, no two more opposing terms than “Avalon” and “Bowery” existed in America. But we live in a time, and in a city, where opposing terms melt into each other.

Further change has come to the Bowery one block south, just below Stanton Street, where the New Museum of Contemporary Art opened in its slick new building in 2007. The museum, founded in 1977, moved to the Bowery from Broadway in SoHo — in part, one may presume, to get away from its old neighborhood’s Mall of America character, which was out of keeping with the museum’s avant garde mission. In a twist, the New Museum has settled on the grungy old Bowery just as it itself undergoes SoHo-ization. The eye-catching building, of six precariously stacked blocks that look as though they are set to tumble, sheathed in gray metal covered with a wire mesh, comes courtesy of the Tokyo architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, who call their firm SANAA. The architecture critic Paul Goldberger says they “have designed a building that is just right for this moment of the Bowery’s existence.” Indeed, the Bowery comprises a hodgepodge of buildings, from the swank to the decrepit, along a scaleless thoroughfare. It’s one of those places in Manhattan — West Street is another — where object buildings seem oddly contextual.

To underscore the transformations along the Bowery, the old Bowery Mission stands just to the south. The Christian mission dates to 1879, and has been in its current building, at 227 Bowery, since 1909, when the Protestant architects Marshall and Henry Emery remodeled a five-story coffin factory into the charity’s new home. The mission continues to minister to the destitute, reminding us that the Bowery is still, at least in part, the Bowery. The mission building features a bold half-timbered second-floor bay, fanciful lintels, and a strong cornice, again telling us that even the Bowery needs its architectural anchors, lest the New Museums of the avenue be thoroughly unmoored.