The Bowery, like Bellevue, is a nice name gone bad. Originally denoting an embowered pleasance, it has come to mean Skid Row, the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Gotham’s answer to London’s Gin Lane – except that here, in the popular mythology, the locals quaff shampoo and rubbing alcohol, rather than the juice of the juniper tree. Now, as you surely guessed, all that is changing. You can almost hear the flophouses shutting down and in their place the increasingly fancy residences going up.

In the not-too-distant future, one of Manhattan’s trendiest cultural outlets, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by the Japanese firm SANAA, will open its doors. Meanwhile, at the northern limit of the Bowery, on Saint Mark’s Place, Gwathmey Siegel has almost completed one of the better new residential buildings in the city. That being the case, I am surprised at how dowdy and down-at-heels the Bowery remains.

As you head north from Chinatown, it is not clear how or if gentrification will ever take root. Unlike that of the East Village and Harlem, the Bowery’s building stock is rather paltry. Worse, it is so irregular, both in height and in style, that there will never be a signature “look” to the neighborhood. While we’re at it, how many lighting stores do we really need between Delancey and Broome? And how much longer will we see those restaurant outlets, purveying ice machines and dough retarders, before they give way to inevitable fusion restaurants and designer eyewear boutiques?

So far, the new residential buildings that have been or will soon be completed in the neighborhood are not very inspiring. Nolita Place, at 199 Bowery, was designed by the firm of H. Thomas O’Hara, which collaborated, or perhaps we should say colluded, with Michael Graves in the creation of both the Impala on East 77th and 425 Fifth Avenue. It should come as no surprise that it is a rather unlovely pile.

The design consists of a base with granite cladding, as well as a few drab decals of postmodern classicism slapped on to the surface: metallic bosses and a diminutive glass canopy over an all-too timid entranceway. Behind this base is a 12-story setback, faced with dark, ugly, glazed brick, punctuated by a passage in white. Thoroughly undistinguished, the setback damages the street-line integrity of the Bowery, one of the few elements of this avenue that had been left undisturbed.

The Avalon Chrystie building, which will open several weeks hence on East Houston Street and stretches all the way from the Bowery to Chrystie Street, manages the small gifts of not being downright ugly and looking vaguely expensive, too. The architectural firm is Schuman, Lichtenstein, Claman & Efron, whom we have to thank for such drab slabs as the Whitney House Apartments and the Plymouth Tower Apartments, both in the east 90s.

The present building, whose base is covered in stone facing, rises some 12 stories, predominantly but irregularly in red brick, with glass curtain walls at the corners. A Whole Foods supermarket is going to open soon on the ground floor, which serves as final proof of the area’s gentrification.

Slightly better than either of these buildings is the structure at the southeast corner of 2nd Street and the Bowery. I was not able to learn the name of the architect of this large, red building with a six-story base and gray bay windows. The most distinguishing characteristic is a water tower that rises far above the irregularly angled gray setback; the isolated water tower, which our architects once exerted all their imagination to conceal behind some classical camouflage, has now become the symbol of a mythic, honky-tonk New York and, as such, is easily exploited by realtors.

Yet this building appears to have opted out of the rage for real estate now rampant in New York. The only evidence of this – but it is telling – is the apparent absence of a main entrance or exit. Indeed, the building appears to have nothing more than two diminutive back doors. The punchline is that this is an NYU dorm, and the working hypothesis seems to be that any expense of time, effort, or treasure on embellishing the building would be lost on the likely inmates – which may very well be the case.

Finally, a word of hesitant praise for the six-story building that has just gone up across the street from the dormitory, on 57 Bond Street, occupying the corner of Bond and the Bowery. It was designed by the worthy, if small-scale, local firm of Meltzer/Mandl Architects, and recently won the firm an Award of Excellence in the New York Council Society of American Registered Architects.

The metallic facade invokes the industrial idiom that has long characterized the neighborhood, while its black stone base is adorned with diminutive metallic columns. The cladding of the second through fourth floors is a silvery substance called Alucobond, a composite panel covered in aluminum. The top two stories are clad in blue Alucobond, as are the second through fourth floors at the southeast and northwest corners.

What results is a complicated, angled structure that may well start to look rather run down in a few years. For the time being, though, it is decidedly more distinguished than any of its neighbors.