Unearthed: A Possible Stop Along the Revolution

Michael Appleton for The New York Times A historian believes that recent demolition at 50 Bowery has unearthed evidence that it was the site of the Bull’s Head Tavern, where George Washington made his temporary headquarters in 1783.

Maybe George Washington slept there, or maybe he only watered his horse and ordered stronger stuff for himself. Either way, David Freeland sounded excited as he crossed the threshold where a famous Colonial-era tavern, the Bull’s Head, once welcomed thirsty out-of-towners.

“There are treasures inside,” said Mr. Freeland, an author and a historian who researched the site for a book about a beer garden that later occupied the tavern’s place on the Bowery.

A lithograph of the Bull’s Head Tavern in 1783.

But all he saw was debris from the building’s most recent life, as a chain drugstore with a Chinese restaurant upstairs. He did not reach the treasures that thrilled local-history aficionados over the weekend â€" namely, some old-looking joists and foundation walls in the basement â€" because the steps were blocked by rubble. The site is to be cleared for a hotel.

The joists were discovered by a photographer and preservationist, Adam Woodward, who suspects that structural elements of the Colonial-era tavern were used in the construction of the much larger beer hall, the Atlantic Garden. It reigned as “one of the show places of New York” from 1858 on, The New York Times said when it finally shut down in 1911.

But what about the tavern where Washington established his temporary headquarters in November 1783 as the British withdrew?

“The whole issue of whether the Bull’s Head was buried inside the Atlantic Garden was one of the great mysteries of New York,” Mr. Woodward said.

Until, apparently, the other day, when he got a look inside. He saw iron work from the 19th century and I-beams from later on. And then he saw a stairway to the basement, and headed down.

“At one point there was a distinct change in the building material, from cinder block to a brick-and-stone foundation wall,” he said. “I followed that wall and found myself at the front of the building, under the sidewalk at the Bowery, and looked up and saw what looked to me like 18th-century hand-hewn and hand-planed joists and beams with extremely wide floorboards right above them.”

He said, “I was thinking, I am standing in the cellar of the Bull’s Head.”

The Bull’s Head opened around 1750 on the fringe of what was a still-young city concentrated below the Bowery. Washington and his troops marched down the Bowery and stopped there in 1783 before making “their official entrance into the city proper,” said Kerri Culhane, a historian who wrote the application that won the Bowery a place on the National Register of Historic Places.

The neighborhood “was a butchers’ district in the 18th century and the 19th century,” Ms. Culhane said. “People drove livestock down from the hinterland and the slaughterhouse was behind the Bowery. That’s where the trading took place.”

It was also a home to the ancestors of future V.I.P.’s. “The Astors started out as butchers,” she said, but began snapping up land. They even owned the Bull’s Head site.

But the tavern closed. Mr. Freeland wrote that the building became a store that sold stoves until the Atlantic Garden opened as a beer garden.

It was a popular gathering place for German immigrants in its early days, and in the 1870s and 1880s, the Atlantic Garden was raided repeatedly for selling beer on Sundays, when the city’s excise laws appeared to forbid that. Mr. Freeland noted that the laws did not mention beer, only “intoxicating liquors or wines.” The Atlantic Garden’s owner got off after one raid because the judge sampled the beer the police had seized and complained it was so watered down that “a man might drink by the gallon without getting drunk.”

Later still, the Atlantic Garden became “a place where Tin Pan Alley songwriters would go to plug their songs,” Mr. Freeland said. One tune that apparently got its start there in the 1890s was “Daisy Bell,” the song that turned the phrase “bicycle built for two” into a catchphrase.

Mr. Woodward said he hoped the demolition for the hotel could be delayed long enough for “a proper archaeological exploration.” (Calls to the owner were not returned on Monday.)

“I can’t think of another lot in Manhattan that has a more important history,” Mr. Woodward said, “and the fact that it might be intact, a couple of feet under the building, is an incredible opportunity to get on archaeological record.”