The Bowery, long home to restaurant supply stores, obscure furniture emporiums, and single-room occupancy hotels is undergoing a transformation as new luxury developments rise along the busy commercial thoroughfare.

Stretching from Astor Place to Canal Street, more than a half-dozen mid- and high-rises are rising, adding at least 1,100 hotel, condo, and rental units to a strip that was considered, at best, nondescript and, at worst, sleazy.

“The demand is high,” a broker at Warburg Realty, Bella Alhanati, said. “There are a lot of young professionals moving into the area and so there are a lot of gut renovations and new development.”

Experts say the long-mythologized corridor is undergoing its biggest shift since the 1920s. More than six years into the area’s growth, new rental and condo units are fetching $800 to $1,200 a square foot, according to brokers. Three luxury hotels are planned, including a 22-story high-rise at 25-33 Cooper Square, the 17-story Bowery Hotel at 335 Bowery, and an eight-story hotel at 250 Bowery. On the site of a former parking lot at 235 Bowery, the seven-story New Museum, designed as a stack of white, rectangular boxes, says it will be the first art museum to rise downtown in more than a century. A 15-story condominium is going up at 351-353 Bowery and several others are planned nearby.

The Sunshine Hotel, an SRO at 241 Bowery, is moving toward demolition to make way for more market-rate apartments. In July, an application for a new 12-story residential and commercial building was disapproved by the Department of Buildings. An architect for the firm MG New York, which is handling the project, Michael Gadaleta, said each resident would likely be offered a $50,000 to $70,000 buyout.

“The plan is actually objection-free, but it’s a catch-22. We need to knock the building down to get approval, but because the building’s an SRO, we can’t knock the building down until we deal with the existing tenants,” Mr. Gadaleta said. The Bowery is seen as a key link between thriving neighborhoods.

Its development would meld Little Italy and NoLiTa with the Lower East Side to the south, and NoHo with the East Village to the north. A concentration of restaurants, bars and fashion retailers are taking hold, fusing culture and nightlife east of Broadway.

“People always felt safe, but they were going to a place that, to them, was edgy. Now, it’s just mainstream,” said the owner of Capitale, an event space at 130 Bowery, the site of the old Bowery Savings Bank, Seth Greenberg, said.

The Bowery has a rich history. In the 1800s, it was one of the birthplaces of the American entertainment business, with the emergence of vaudeville, minstrel shows, and Tin Pan Alley. By World War I, with the advent of the subway, Lower Manhattan residents dispersed to the Bronx and Brooklyn, leaving in their wake the bum bars and fleabag hotels for which the Bowery was popularly known. An explosion in Chinese migration in the 1960s and 1970s led Chinese businesses north from Chinatown along the Bowery. In the late 1990s, the area became more popular with young professionals who migrated east from the Lower East Side and west from SoHo.

“Twenty years ago, it was a place where artists like Kate Millet got a great deal on city-owned property,” said a guide of New York City history tours, Joyce Gold. “It was a place where few people wanted to go because it was considered dangerous. The only things to buy there was used restaurant equipment.”

While restaurant supply stores still occupy much of the retail space along the Bowery, six to eight such shop owners recently have closed or moved elsewhere, according a local owner, who estimates the restaurant supply district will disappear entirely in the next few years.

Those retail shops, with their high ceilings and big windows, increasingly are desirable, says Capitale’s Mr. Greenberg. “I have a feeling that a lot of those spaces are attractive for hospitality purposes,” he said. In March, a long-awaited Whole Foods will open near Bowery at the residential tower, Avalon Chrystie Place. That building’s developer, AvalonBay Communities, is involved in three Bowery projects totaling more than $300 million. The developer is hoping to attract young designers to fill more than 36,000 square feet of retail space, which it hopes will feel like NoLiTa boutiques.

Some say emerging downtown districts, like the Bowery, need to be preserved more carefully given the chaotic growth of new buildings downtown. The Bowery merely borders the Department of City Planning rezoning plan for the Lower East Side and the East Village, to the dismay of some residents and developers.

“The scale of the neighborhood has to be figured out,” said the architect-developer of 250 Bowery, the eight-story, 63-room hotel at Prince Street, Peter Moore. “This is a pre-war environment and there should be a broader net to protect it. These high-rises are not appropriate.”