Like Moths To A Bowery Flame...

The Bowery - 1973 (Click on photo to see larger version)
(Photo by Photoscream via Flickr.com)

Excerpt from:
"How The Other Half Lives" (1890)
by Jacob A. Riis

The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle to the moth. It attracts them in swarms that come year after year with the vague idae that they can get along here if anywhere; that something is bound to turn up among so many. Nearly all are young men, unsettled in life, many - most of them, perhaps, fresh from good homes, beyond a doubt with honest hopes of getting a fresh start in the city and making a way for themselves. Few of them have much money to waste while looking around, and the cheapness of the lodging offered is an object. Fewer still know anything about the city and its pitfalls. They have come in search of crowds, of "life", and they gravitate naturally to the Bowery, the great democratic highway of the city, where the twenty-five-cent lodging houses take them in.

Bowery History Continues HERE...