"The Bowery" at Night by W. Louis Sonntag Jr. (1896)(Graphic via Powerstandards.com)
Excerpts from:
"On The Bowery - Confronting Homelessness In American Society"
by Benedict Giamo (1989)[p.28-30]
In the early 1900s, close to twenty-five thousand men were lodged nightly along the Bowery. Their numbers increased during 1914-1915, a period of widespread unemployment. A study of fifteen hundred homeless men conducted by the city-run Municipal Lodging House at this time revealed the obvious economic factors responsible for their plight. It was found that the majority of the men were clearly willing to work if given the opportunity or requesite medical attention. Such was the case during the 1830s when economic collapse had forced the unemployed into urban skid rows as a last resort to starvation and isolation. Homelessness and joblessness were so closely linked at this time that the extant of occupancy in the Bowery Men's Shelter proved, in fact, a reliable index of the rate of unemployment in the manufacturing industry.
Improvements in the conditions of labor mandated by the New Deal and a state of economic poverty largely stimulated by wartime industries and recruitment promoted a more widespread national and per capita affluance. From the 1940s on, skid row responded by becoming less a direct consequence of capricious labor market forces wraught by an unregulated system of industrialization. Yet the homeless were prevalent on the Bowery and in other skid rows throughout the country, lending substance to an abiding state of disenfranchisement in the midst of national prosperity, middle-class suburbanization, urban renewal, and corporate hegemony. The rising American standard of living had resulted in a minority status of poverty in which the homeless constituted its base component. But though the extent of homelessness had diminished, the intensity of it's condition had not. As one Catholic Worker volunteer observed, skid row represented "perhaps the bitterest, most physical and obvious poverty that can be seen in an American city.
The population of the Bowery's skid row dwindled from 13,675 in 1949 to 3,000 in 1971, a contraction of more than three-fourths of it's community. By the late 1970s, the number had dropped to about 2,000; by 1987, it was down below 1,000. Though reduced in magnitude, the structured, institutionalized context of the Bowery still served throughout to order a well-defined subculture. But as of today (fall 1988) there are only two bars, one liquor store, one municipal facility, nine flophouses, one lunch counter, one coffee shop, one mission, and three social service agencies along he Bowery. This faded setting exists within an overshadowing array of restaurant and office equipment supply shops, lighting fixture stores, crockery outlets, hardware concerns, banks, and jewelry exchanges. But more than it's modern commercial or residential features, is the automobile traffic along the Bowery that conveys a sense of fluidity amidst the broken, statuesque figures of the homeless gathered on median stips and street corners. At best, when delayed by traffic lights, the cars offer a means of livelihood for these reduced entrepreneurs who, unsolicited, bring out their bottles of window cleaner and worn rags to clean windows in an industrious appeal for some change. The demise of the Bowery as a traditional skid row and its ascent as a residential street has been aided by the process of urban renewal. The influx of artists and other city residents into this area has been made possible by the availability of cheap rents and high vacancy rates in lofts and warehouse buildings. The rapid gentrification of neighboring SoHo as an art center, prime living area, and urban playground has extended its reach into the Bowery vicinty, giving rise to experimental and traditional theatres, restaurants, rock clubs, art galleries, and enhanced real estate values.
The altered factors and dispersed condition of homelessness in New York City today, during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, while leading to further destabilization of the Bowery as a skid row subculture, have worked to distribute rather than diminish the number of homeless throughout the city. The decline of skid row has not caused the disappearance of homelessness; instead, it has signaled a reconceptualization of its renewed force and decentralization. Contemporary homelessness, extensive (an estimated 36,000 [1988]), scattered, and incohesive, has proven to be a diffused and disoriented way of life far beyond the ordered community of skid row. In flight from its territorial base, homelessness has transgressed the geographical boundries of skid row, but in doing so it has not retained the subcultural identity endemic to its structure and affiliative network of supports. In its most recent development, homelessness has become uprooted, unearthing a subculture clinging to the arcane remnants of the Bowery like a vine to its fallen arbor.
Excerpt from:
"The Masque Torn Off"
by Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage (1882)
Hark! What is that heavy thud on the wet pavement? Why, that is a drunkard who has fallen, his head striking against the street - striking very hard. The police try to lift him up. Ring the bell for the city ambulance. No. Only an outcast, only a tatterdemalion - a heap of sores and rags. But look again. Perhaps he has some marks of manhood on his face; perhaps he may have been made in the image of God; perhaps he has a soul which will live after the dripping heavens of this dismal night have been rolled together as a scroll; perhaps he may have been died for, by a king; perhaps he may yet be a conqueror charioted in the splendors of heavenly welcome. But we must pass on. We cross the street, and, the rain beating in his face, lies a man entirely unconcious. I wonder where he came from. I wonder if anyone is waiting for him. I wonder if he was ever rocked in a Christian cradle. I wonder if that gashed and bloated forehead was ever kissed by a mother's lips. I wonder if he is stranded for eternity.
Excerpt from:
"On The Bowery - Confronting Homelessness In American Society"
by Benedict Giamo (1989)[p.197, 199-201]
Nicky Star (presumably a street person)
"See that gutter, man, I laid in it; see those stairs, I laid on them; see that railing, I laid against it; see that curb, that step, that sewer, that grating, I laid on them all. I've been in every gutter on the Bowery...Hey, let me tell you something now, hey, hey, listen here, the Bowery's at 43rd and 8th; the Bowery's at 30th and Lex; the Bowery's at 14th and 5th. Uptown! The Bowery's in their fuckin' room - their apartment. Hey, let me tell you something. Now you listen good and hard - the Bowery can be everywhere."
...the modern evolution of homelessness has rendered the Bowery obsolete. As I have previously mentioned, since the early 1980s when I completed my extended sojourn among its inhabitants, the Bowery has indeed become homeless, and this fact presents an irony which militates against the formation and reinforcement of subculture. The consequences of this new, uprooted form of homelessness are grave indeed, for the dissolution of a cohesive subcultural base (complete with a well-defined ecological infrastructure) puts the generative culture-making process of a distinct homeless subculture into question. This is particularly evident among the prevalent deinstitutionalized mentally ill population of modern-day homelessness, which according to the literature ranges from 20 percent to 90 percent. Being homeless is likely to have a qualitative impact on the already preexistant condition of mental illness. The complete loss of all structural affiliations and any sense of containment, the lack of involvement in any identifiable subculture, and the physical and emotional harships of living in extremis can only further the deterioration of one's psychic equipment to the point where the damage becomes irreparable.
Ellen Baxter and Kim Hopper
at a public hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development
"The received wisdom of the post-war commentators who predicted the imminent demise of skid row has, in the course of the pst decade, been proven flatly wrong. Skid row - as a way of life, not a distinct place, is flourishing in a manner not seen in this country for fifty years.
What Baxter and Hopper failed to realize, however, is precisely that requisite link between a "distinct place" and a "way of life," an intimate connection with the modern, dispersed condition of homelessness has not been able to construct. Bowery subculture could not have flourished as it did for more than one hundred years if it were not for the evocative sense of place which defined condition and character, delimited a collectivity, and determined the generative nature of symbolic action and ensuing depth of completion. All these factors contributed to the heightened tension between culture and subculture, a dialectic which served as the primary catalyst for the former's ideological position of social distance and mystification and for the latter's culture-making process. Though Baxter and Hopper are highly aware of the altered condition of modern homelessness, they do not seem to grap the consequences for the nature of the dialectic and the possibility that it too has been rendered homeless.
Life on the streets isn't what it used to be. In the first place, skid row is no longer contained by well demarcated "tenderloin" sections of the inner city, nor is it confined to the religious missions and public refuges...the subways, train and bus depots, the doorways and abandoned buildings, public parks, and loading docks, the alleys or sidewalks of an entire city, these are home to thousands of New Yorkers every evening. It is not only the Bowery anymore...
Bowery History/Observations Continue HERE...
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