Observations Made by "St. John of The Bowery" (1940)

A late 1800's view of the original Bowery Mission, located at 36 Bowery.
(Graphic via : HomelessNewYorkers.Wordpress)

Excerpts from:

"God On The Bowery"

by Dr. Charles St. John (Superintendent, Bowery Mission)

(1940)

[p.11 - 18]

Chapter 1: Initiation

I saw the Bowery for the first time on a Sunday morning, and that was bad. The Bowery is bad enough any day of the week, but on Sunday - ! If I'd planned for fifty years to arrive on The Street at the worst possible moment, I couldn't have planned it better. The instant I turned the corner of Spring Street and looked up and down this "Boulevard of Bums", I knew I'd arrived on the dirtiest, foulest, most disreputable and draggle-tailed ten blocks in the civilized world.

The Bowery! All my life I'd heard of it, just as you have. As a youngster in the clean, sunny South I'd learned to sing, with my tongue in my cheek:

"The Bowery, the Bowery,I'll never go there any more."

It was probably the lilt of that tune, or the stories about the Bowery glamour boys of the [18]90's that we heard in those days that made us think there was something funny or even romantic about it. This was the spot where old Peter Stuyvesant had his garden and his apple orchard; the fruit and blossoms of his garden were such a joy to the hearts of his doughty old Dutch burghers that they dubbed it "The Great Bouwerie." Then there was Steve Brodie, who hit the Bowery long aftre Stuyvesant and who had a great gleaming noisy bar and who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge - or did he? And there was another saloon, in the [18]90's with the floor paved with silver dollars, and gambling joints for the Four Hundred and the pitiful little "hotel" where Stephen Foster died. Romance, glamour, lights, color and a life that was short and sweet, and high, wide and handsome - that was the Bowery!

But when I looked it over that Sunday morning in October of 1931 I didn't find that kind of Bowery at all. No Steve Brodie, no silver dollars, no gleam. A stabbing October wind came knifing it's way down The Street and went through my thick overcoat like a knife through paper, swirling the dirt up into my eyes and blowing a sheaf of dirty newspapers out of a doorway. Something wriggled under the papers that had escaped the wind; a man with blood-red eyes stood up in clothes that looked as though they had been dragged through a hog wallow, shivered, rubbed his hands and turned up his coat collar and shuffled off down the street.

I left the sun and walked down a canyon of deepening shadow, dusty, dank, dangerous. An empty street car clanged by; an elevated train roared past overhead, throwing a film of silt to the street below. This might have been Hell itself, I thought, but for the occasional ambitious sunbeam that penetrated the network of the "El" overhead and broke through to leave a tiny spot of light here and there on the pavement. Nauseating odors leaped out of dark hallways and took me by the throat. I saw feet sticking out of alleys. I stepped over men still asleep on the sidewalk, or piled up like pigs trying to keep warm over the hot-air vents in the sidewalk. I looked at them and I watched the sun trying to get at them through the El, and I wondered if even God could penetrate this medley of misery and ever really reach one of these men.

The street wasn't exactly dead, as most New York streets are dead in the early hours of the Sabbath. There were men drifting. Drifting, on the "morning after" - the morning after Saturday night, when they had spent whatever they had. A nickel for cheap whiskey; a dime for "smoke", that deadly concoction of raw denatured alcohol and water that will burn the hide off a rhinoceros. Sunday morning they were having the aweful aching head that follows all that, the dark brown taste, the longing to die and get out of it. Some of them were standing shivering before the barroom doors, waiting for the barkeeper to open up! Filthy saloons and filthy men: these have a natural affinity. No one smiled. Men who had never seen me before glared and cursed at me. Why, I didn't know. A bundle of rags and stench that had once been a man finally mustered up courage enough to ask me for a dime. "Fer a cup 'o coffee, Bud." He got it. He had hardly palmed it when I was run down by a stampede of other dime-seekers who had watched him make his "touch". They came, like a great uncertain flood against a rock on a beach. I had two dollars in change when I turned out of Spring Street; three blocks later I had just fifteen cents left. It was my first lesson; it never happened again; you learn not to let it happen, on the Bowery.

A police siren screamed and the men in the street dived for cover. From either end of the street came cops, blue-uniformed, nightsticks out. A man near me hurled a bundle wrapped in greasy brown paper and took to his heels; an officer collared him, dragged him back to the refuse can and pulle dout the package. He kicked it open; out fell a pair of pants, 20-odd pairs of socks and a pair of spats! The vagrant was on his way to Thieves Market, where such things are sold at auction.

The raid went like clockwork; two by two, the police took their prey, one carrying the head and the other the heels, and threw them bodily, like sacks of grain, into the patrol wagon. Within five minute's time they had their load; the wagon was a bedlam of plain and fancy cursing, a most complete Babel of denunciation and condemnation heaped on the heads of all policemen in general and these policemen in particular. Loaded, there was still room for a few more. All the good seats were taken, but there was the floor; out of the alleys and doorways came the cops carrying those who couldn't get up. One old fellow on an air vent twisted and moaned as they approached him. Out came the nightstick; he was slapped, hard, a dozen times, on the soles of his paper-thin shoes. That hurts. Try it. The old fellow opened his eyes and his lips went tight with pain.

Come on, bum, on your feet! I was sick at my stomach, weak in the knees. I wanted to run, to get out of there, to get as far away as I could. I wished I was back in Mississippi, where the sun was bright and men were men and things were clean. I'd been a fool to come here. I just hadn't known what I was letting myself in for, when I was daydreaming, back home, of becoming Superintendent of Bowery Mission.

The Mission was just across the street; I walked over and stood looking up at the Mission sign and I heard voices. "Go back, you chump, before it's too late. You can't do anything against this flood; you might as well try to dam the Mississippi with a sieve. Who do you think you are anyway? Go back. Get yourself a nice little church somewhere, with decent people in it. Or go joint the Marines. You weren't meant for this. You're not the type, are you?" Questions, questions, questions. I knew them all, I'd been asking them of my soul for years. But it was no good. For I knew that while I knew all the questions, God knew all the answers, and God pushed me in through the door of the Bowery Mission with the words, "I sent you here, didn't I?"

The Mission chapel was jammed. Remember, this was October; in October, when the weather begins to get cold, you can always count on a capacity audience on the Bowery. Every seat had been taken for over an hour and there was standing room only. A staggering stench hit me in the face, the stench of the unwashed, whiskey-sodden humanity of The Street. I moved down the aisle and stepped on some fellows foot. He didn't mince his words: "Watch where you're going, you big lunk, or I'll crown you." He didn't know he was talking to the new Superintendent; it probably wouldn't have made any difference if he had known it. I went up into the pulpit and looked at them. Dear God in Heaven, were these men? Edwin Markham's line ran through my mind:

"Is this the thing the Lord God made to have domination over sea and land?"

To have dominion! I thought of the cop slapping the old man on the soles of his shoes. "Come on, bum, on your feet." Could anything, anyone, any power on earth ever get these men on their feet? They were licked; they were through; they had hit bottom and not one in a carload of them had enough fight or man left in him to get up. Or so I thought, that morning.

I realized with a start that I had announced a hymn and that they were singing. It was pretty terrible, that first song, worse than the singing of any fifth rate chior I had ever heard of. Not one in ten even tried to sing; why should they? What did they have to sing about? An old fellow on the front seat dropped his book and reached for it and fell sprawling on the floor; two men near him grabbed him by the seat of the pants and jerked him back; the old fellow wanted to fight, but they laughed and held him down. The crowd snickered.

I threw open the Bible on the pulpit and tried to swallow the lump, as big as a grapefruit, in my throat; I began to read. "Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob begat Judas..." There was a silence deeper than the silence of the tomb. I'd blundered. That passage - how did I ever light on that? - that passage had about as much meaning to this crowd as the theory of relativity has to a Hotentot. There was only one thing to do, and to my dying day I'll never cease thanking God that when He made me, He gave me a good sense of humor. I laughed.

"Sorry, boys. You don't care very much about who begat whom, do you? Neither do I." It broke the ice. One young fellow on the aisle whacked his neighbor over the head with his hymnal and looked up at me with the brightest, keenest pair of blue eyes I've ever seen. I didn't just throw open the Book again; I leafed it carefully back to the passage that began, "Come, ye blessed of my Father...I was an hungered and ye gave me meat; I was thristy and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in..."

Silence fell again. I knew they were listening to this; I had that fifth sense of the preacher who knows when he has his audience. Even the old tramp on the front pew lifted his rheumy eye and cupped his ear and looked up at me with an expression that screamed: "Well, let's have it. Let's hear what you've got for us." The boy with the blue eyes pinned them on me, and I found myself staring back at him, quoting Scripture from memory and saying to myself, "He's young. He's got some fight left in him. He doesn't belong here. I'll send him home. Come on boy, on your feet."

I had been - initiated.

[p. 34, 36 - 37, 38]

Every street in New York City ends in a river; that's one reason for the high suicide rate of Manhattan. But the Bowery begins and ends in Hell; suicide is slower there. It is just fifteen blocks long, just one mile long, and it has been called The Last Mile, the Meanest Mile, Dead End, The Street of Forgotten Men. Any of those names fit, and all of them put together don't do it justice. The Bowery is bottom; when a man comes down here he's as far down as he can go, except for the bottom of the river.

They are not all theives on the Bowery. By and large, I've found that most of the boys along The Street will take alot of punishment before they'll stael. That's the last resort. Panhandling is easier, and they know we'll take care of them at the Mission rather than send them out to steal for a meal or an overcoat. They're not thieves by nature, but by compulsion. They are old men, young men, down on their luck. They are old fellows, beaten, and young fellows who just can't get jobs. They are a cross-section of America; I'd say there were about twenty-five thousand of them on The Street.

I don't see many fights; most of the fight has been knocked out of them. They don't want trouble; they only want God and man to leave them alone.

[p. 151 - 152]

Youth beats a path to New York City. Youth sees movies of the glamorous Big Town, and youth thinks the streets are paved with gold and lined with sterling silver curbstones. Youth comes rushing in where angels wouldn't tread, finds no gold in the streets, no jobs, few friends, and fewer chances to make good.

[p. 58 - 59, 60 - 61]

Fifteen years ago, this was an old man's street. But [the] youth are different. They're not like that. They are young. Out of the twenty-five or thirty thousand men on the Bowery, I'd say twenty-five percent of them are aged eighteen to twenty-five. From fifteen to twenty per cent are college-bred. Young men. Fresh youngsters coming in to fill the places left by the veterans who die in the night and the river. Too young to know what it's all about. They fall easily for scheme and wile of the crook and the confidence man that the old fellows would laugh at. Old Father Time has done a face-lifting job on the Bowery since 1929: he's made it look tragically, unbelievably young.

These boys don't want your pity or your pennies; they aren't looking for charity. They hate being handed a pair of socks or a meal. They don't want to live like the old hoboes of yesterday; the old bum's jungle holds no allure for them. They still have their dreams and their self-respect. They've been caught up a dead-end street and they want someone to help them fight their way back and out of it. What we have on our hand on The Street today is not the problem of the old alcoholic but the problem of rebuilding the morale of the young.

About ninety-nine per cent of the boys down here are here because they found nothing to keep them elsewhere.

Many of the boys come to me from homes in which parents have been living beyond their means. Every day of my life I hear of some father who "once made a lot of dough," but who, when he fell on hard times - or more normal times - just couldn't adjust himself and live again on a sensible scale. This mechanical American idea that a man has to be rich to be successful has dropped our youth into a bottomless pit. We've got to keep up with the Joneses. Mother has got her heart set on a new fur coat. Mother goes out and buys alot of new furniture on the installment plan, on an income that just about makes ends meet as it is. Then dad gets a cut, the installments lapse, the furniture man comes and takes out the furniture, and mother, bitter because she didn't get the new fur coat, follows it out. Dad throws up his hands - and the young son "goes on the bum." If I've heard that story once since the boom days, I've heard it a thousand times from the lips of the children who really pay the bill.

[p. 147]

There's always tomorrow. What tomorrow and the future will do to the Bowery I'm not sure; that depends upon what happens in the world beyond the Bowery.

-end

*I try to stay away from adding any religious content to this blog or reccomending someone read something of religious content, but I will make an exception for this book. Order a copy here: "God On The Bowery" by Charles J. St. John (1940)

As you can see from the excerpts above, this is an amazing read. And it's not really preachy or anything, it just really paints a vivid picture of the state of the Bowery circa late 1930's - early 1940's. It also contains some stories, strikingly similar in scope, to what is happening in the United States at this moment in time, nearly 70 years later.

I must also state that I am against any form of "feeding the soul before feeding the body", as has been alleged through the years to be the practice at the Bowery Mission, and sadly, so many other "Christian Charity Relief" organizations throughout the world.

Excerpt from:

"The Bowery Man"

by Elmer Bendiner

(1961)[p. 23 - 24]

...first the [Bowery] Mission feeds your soul and only afterwards the rest of you. If you are not religious, you may look upon the hour-and-a-half service as a performance in which you must sing for your supper. In fact, though, you are required to do no more than sit in the pew and expose yourself to the Mission's ministrations.

[p. 105]

The Bowery Men on the line know the relationship between the two types of service offered. You cannot be fed, flopped, shaved and deloused without first hearing the gospel message (known on the street as an "ear banging"). The soup lines wind through the Chapel.

But, even though I may disagree with the methods, the Bowery Mission has undoubtedly saved thousands of lives, maybe hundreds of thousands, since it's inception in 1879.