The Bowery Of Today As Envisioned In 1961

The Bowery as it looks in 2009 - Out with the old, Up with the new
(Graphic via VillageVoice.Com)

Excerpt from:
"The Bowery Man"
by Elmer Bendiner
(1961)[p. 182-183]

What then is to be done to such an insulent, mocking street? It must be destroyed, of course, and replaced with a sober, business-like, no-nonsense avenue that will share the current American Dream - whatever it happens to be. (Like $800.00 Ramones t-shirts!!)

Now the reformers speak not in missionary but in architectural terms. They will cut through the street at this point with a cross-town speedway. Here they will condemn the flophouses and throw up a middle-income housing project. Eventually the old buildings will be replaced one by one and the Bowery will be no more.

It is beginning to look as if the architects and engineers will in fact rebuild the avenue in brick and steel.

It seems now that in a little while the Bum himself may be torn down and a middle-income, white-collar, brief-case-carrying, up-and-coming, bourbon-and-soda man will be constructed in his place.

The trouble is that condemneed people, unlike condemned houses, do not simply lie in an orderly pile of rubble waiting to be carted away. The bum who is replaced on the Bowery is still a bum. He may leave The Street when the last flophouse is torn down, when the Muni reverts to a YMCA, when the last bar becomes a coctail lounge, but he will drift through the city until he finds another street where the liquor is cheap.

Bums will carry the banner all over town. The ten thousand homeless may disperse up and down Riverside Drive and Brooklyn Heights, mocking the smug and the respectible in their own doorways...