Old (Stereo)Views of New York City I

"The Famous Bowery as it is today"

(Image via NYCDreamin Archives)(Click on image to view full size)

Fleeting Glimpses of the Bowery, NYC - Circa 1972 - Courtesy of the Rolling Stones

The song is a classic - heard it many, many times over the years. But I'm just seeing the video for the first time this week thanks to Alex, who is always on the lookout for more photographic and video images of the gritty New York City of yesteryear and so kindly posted it over at his site Flaming Pablum. He says of this clip:

"...in this clip we see Messrs. Jagger, Richards, Watts et al. slumming around the Bowery in 1972 (interspliced between shots of them doing same in Los Angeles). Under normal circumstances, I'd play "spot the address" and try to divine what specific locales are being depicted, but the editing was far too quick for me to attempt. I think there are some shots filmed on the cross-section of Bowery and Houston, but I can't be sure. In any case, it's great stuff -- despite Bill Wyman's laughably ridiculous hair. Crank it."

We did, Alex. And we will do so again, probably several more times this week alone.

Depression-Era Breadline On The Bowery

(Image by: Photoworld - via NYCDreamin Archives)

"The depression began settling on the nation in 1930. It's effect on any person during the next several years would depend on his financial resources or his ability to hold a job when those about him were losing theirs. Above is a bread line in New York's Bowery, a scene duplicated in almost every cityy of any size during the depths of the depression."

1981 - Morning Light On The Bowery

"Morning Light" On The Bowery - Photo by Jay Maisel
(Originally Published: National Geographic - 09/81)

Morning light casts a hard eye on a store-front in the Bowery, where a brother of the loose order of skid row sizes up the day ahead.

1975: First Class Accomodations on the Bowery

"I might be a dishwasher up in the mountains but I'll tell you something...In New York I go strictly first class..."
(Photo by Michael D. Zettler)

The above photo originally appeared in the long-out-of-print book "The Bowery" by Michael D. Zettler (1975). The book is a stunning B&W photographic look at conditions on the Bowery circa 1974-1975.

In the above photo, a man, with suitcase in hand, walks south along the Bowery. Destination: The Palace Hotel - in his mind, first class digs. One wonders what his usual arrangements were if he thought the Palace was "first class." Just beyond the man and above his head is the new, white, graffitti-free awning that hangs over the doorway of the neighboring CBGB, which had been open for just over a year at the time the photo was taken.

The Bowery On The Bookshelf

THE HISTORY OF THE BOWERY- SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

"Flophouse: Life On The Bowery" by David Isay/Stacy Abramson
"God On The Bowery" by Charles J. St. John
"New York Night" by Mark Caldwell
"Old Men Of The Bowery" by Carl I. Cohen/Jay Sokolovsky
"On The Bowery -Confronting Homelessness..." by Benedict Giamo
"Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser
"The Bowery" by Michael Zettler
"The Homeless Transient in the Great Depression" by Joan Crouse
"You Cant's Sleep Here" by Edward Newhouse

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...

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.

The Bowery - Back In The Day - A Brief Socialogical History

"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...

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...

Ghosts of The Bowery

Here, as promised yesterday, are a few more photos from the 1975 book "The Bowery" by Michael D. Zettler. I wonder what ever became of these men...sadly, I think I know their eventual fates.


"The Bowery" (1975) by Michael D. Zettler.
(All Images via this book)


"I'm here by choice...that's right...gotta make a choice, the wine or the job...I used to have a good car, lots of clothes...Yeah me! One time my girl says to me, "Artie, it's either me or the wine!" I says, "I hate to tell you this sweetie...but so long!"


"Not '58! The last time I fought in the Garden was 48. 1947!! I fought on some damn good cards then...I was never a boxer though...a fighter. It's all I know how to to. If I ever lost it was because I didn't hit 'em, cause when I hit 'em they stayed hit."


"Naw. The kids don't fuck with the Bowery bums...and it ain't just because we ain't got nothing...they respect us. They know we seen it all. Their parents tell 'em not to fuck with the bums too. They respect us. That's the truth too...what good is it anyway, we ain't got nothing, we ain't nobody...just bums."



"Naw...things ain't going too good. I seem to let my emotions carry me away...I can't seem to get ahold. I try to. Thanks for asking...I appreciate that."


Thanksgiving Day 1974
"What have I got to be thankful for? I'm still alive, that's one thing...but I didn't even get a good meal down at the mission."




There is no caption for this set of photos. I think an apt one would be:
"I've fallen and I can't get up!"

Back (In Time) to The Bowery

A little over a year ago, I became aware of this great, long out of print book titled "The Bowery" written by Michael D. Zettler that was published in 1975. I managed to obtain a copy through an intra-library loan at my local library and once I saw it, I decided I had to have my own copy. So I dug around the internet a bit and found a copy in really good shape for $25.00 (including postage). I'd seen it going as high as $50.00 or more, so I thought this was a pretty good price. The seller was "The Better Book Getter", 310 Riverside Drive - Suite 202-3, NY, NY 10025. They were very pleasant and helpful on the phone and my book arrived in just a few days. I actually made the purchase exactly one year ago today.

I thought I'd share a few of the images contained in the book and maybe, like me, you'll decide you have to own a copy of this amazing and sad story of the culture of homelessness, alcoholism, poverty and desperation that used to be so commonplace on the Bowery. Today we'll look at a few of the Street scenes from the book - tomorrow I'll post a few images of the haggered faces of some of the men who, in 1974-1975, called the Bowery home.


Cover of "The Bowery" - by Michael D. Zettler - Published: 1975
(All Images via this book)


Old men drinking inside a bar. The address can be seen on the column outside (on the left of the photo) - #232. If this is indeed 232 Bowery, HERE is a view of what is there today.


The Confidence Bar and Grill Restaurant. This fine establishment can be seen in the 1956 documentry film "On The Bowery" by Lionel Rogosin. I've looked around to see if I could find any footage from this film with no success. If anyone knows where I might be able to obtain a copy, please leave a comment.


On the corner, outside the J&M Delicatessen, a group of "working girls" try to hustle up some business.


A street scene from the corner of Stanton Street and Bowery. A sign for the Prince Hotel can be seen hanging over the sidewalk in the distance in this photo. There is, today, a Prince Hotel at 220 Bowery but I don't believe it's the same place. The current Prince Hotel is listed on various websites as "a welfare hotel/temporary shelter" and "a bedbug paradise." And then there's this alluring description of the place.


A scavengers cart (belonging to a guy named Phil?) sits on the street outside Joey's Junk Shop. One can only imagine the kinds of items that were offered for sale here.

To be continued...