The Bowery Hall of Fame (Continued)
SAVED: GOD ON THE BOWERY
Even as the Bowery district became known
as "the premier highway of twisted mentalities and souls in
pawn, " as one newspaper columnist referred to in 1933, its
other reputation was emerging: that of a salvation strip.
The first Gospel Rescue Mission opened
on Water Street in 1872 when former alcoholic and ex-con Jeremiah
McAuley founded his "Helping Hand for Man" on the site of
a licentious dance hall. It was backed by stock trader Alfrederich
Smith Hatch, who believed in uplifting those unfit for charity,
whom he called the "undeserving poor."
The second gospel rescue mission founded
in New York, and the third in the nation, opened in 1879 at
36 Bowery. Called The Bowery Mission, it became the premier
provider of charity and evangelism targeted to the city's
"fallen classes."
Founder Louis Klopsch expressed its mandate:
"Even in mission work, it is customary to draw the line at
those who have fallen so low as to make their very touch contamination.
But the Bowery Mission, like a life-boat on its merciful errand,
plunges down into the lowest depths, if by doing so it may
bring up some poor, stinking fellow-mortal into the light
of God's love."
In addition to free meals and shelters,
the Bowery Mission provided "garments for those who need one
to shut out the piercing winds of winter" and "[sent] them
to a place where they are thoroughly cleansed, and where their
clothing is put in a wire cradle enclosed in a cylindrical
hot air chamber and subjected to a temperature that effectually
destroys the cause of discomfort."
Between 1884 and 1932, the Bowery YMCA,
housed for a time at Wesley Hall (291-293 Bowery), also provided
mission-style services and housing. Today the building houses
a Tibetan Buddhist meditation and teaching center. McGurk's
Suicide Hall at 295 Bowery also became a rescue mission for
a time during the early 20th century.
A uniquely American mix of direct social
services and religious proselytizing, gospel rescue missions
are now a staple of skid rows around the country.
THE SCIENCE OF SKID ROW
Social scientists have typically studied
skid rows in order to eliminate what is often defined as a
social, spatial, or moral pathology. One of their first questions
usually is: "who lives here and why?" In 1954, the federal
agency in charge of urban renewal commissioned Donald J. Bogue
to perform an analysis of American skid rows. The following
material is excerpted from this report:
DOWN AND OUT NATION
Skid rows around the nation have been
disappearing in the wake of urban renewal, gentrification,
and the shifting nature of homelessness. These excerpts explore
the rise and fall of some of the country's other skid rows.
LOS ANGELES (From Mike Davis' City of
Quartz, 1990)
Although city leaders periodically essay
schemes for removing indigents en masse - deporting them to
a poor farm on the edge of the desert, confining them in camps
in the mountains, or, memorably, interning them on a derelict
ferry at the Harbor - such 'final solutions' have been blocked
by councilmembers fearful of the displacement of the homeless
into their districts. Instead the city, self-consciously adopting
the idiom of urban cold war, promotes the 'containment' (official
term) of the homeless in Skid Row along Fifth Street east
of the Broadway, systematically transforming the neighborhood
into an outdoor poorhouse .. By condensing the mass of the
desperate and helpless together in such a small space, and
denying adequate housing, official policy has transformed
Skid Row into probably the most dangerous ten square blocks
in the world - ruled by a grisly succession of 'Slashers',
'Night Stalkers' and more ordinary predators. Every night
on Skid Row is Friday the 13th, and, unsurprisingly, many
of the homeless seek to escape the 'Nickle' during the night
at all costs, searching safer niches in other parts of Downtown.
The city in turn tightens the noose with increased police
harassment and ingenious design deterrents.
One of the most common, but mind-numbing,
of these deterrents is the Rapid Transit District's new barrelshaped
bus bench that offers a minimal surface for uncomfortable
sitting, while making sleeping utterly impossible. Such 'bumproof'
benches are being widely introduced on the periphery of Skid
Row. Another invention, worthy of the Grand Guignol, is the
aggressive deployment of outdoor sprinklers .. To ensure that
the park was not used for sleeping - that is to say, to guarantee
that it was mainly utilized for drug dealing and prostitution
- the city installed an elaborate overhead sprinkler system
programmed to drench unsuspecting sleepers at random times
during the night. The system was immediately copied by some
local businessmen in order to drive the homeless away from
adjacent public sidewalks.
DENVER
Larimer Square
by Bruce (Utah) Phillips, not dated
The bulldozer's rollin' through my part
of town.
The iron ball swings and knocks it all down.
You knocked down the flophouse, knocked down the bars,
And blacktopped it over to park all your cars.
Chorus
Now, where will I go and where can I stay
When you've knocked down the Skid Row and hauled it away?
I'll flag a fast rattler and ride it on down, boys.
They're runnin' the bums out of town. Old Maxie the tailor
is closing his doors.
There ain't nothin' left in the secondhand stores.
You knocked down the hock shop and the big Harbor Light,
And the old Chinese café that was open all night. Well,
you ran out the hookers who worked on the street.
And you built a big club where the playboys can meet.
My bookie joint closed when your cops pulled a raid,
But you built a new hall for the stock market trade. These
little storekeepers just don't stand a chance
With the big uptown bankers a callin' the dance.
With their suit-and-tie restaurants that're all owned by Greeks,
And the counterfeit hippies and their plastic boutiques. Now
I'm finding out there's just one kind of war,
The one going on 'tween the rich and the poor.
I don't know a lot about what you'd call class,
But the upper and middle can all kiss my ass.
BOSTON (From Common Ground by J. Anthony
Lukas, 1985)
By 1900, with 37,000 lodgers, the South
End was the nation's largest rooming-house district - a drab,
dismal quarter which one social worker called "the city wilderness."
Its once peaceful squares were now hemmed in by sooty factories,
noisy machine shops, dusty brickyards, grim warehouses, and
the incessant rumble of trucks and steam engines.
The South End's deterioration was greatly
hastened by the erection of the El along Washington Street.
Just as in Charlestown, it blighted everything in its path
with soot, noise, and darkness. Nor was it there to serve
the immediate population. The El didn't even stop within the
South End... It had been built to provide the burgeoning suburban
middle class with speedy service to and from their offices,
and if, by so doing, it had to pass through Charlestown and
the South End, then the businessman from Dedham or Wakefield
could simply avert his glance and spare himself the bleak
vistas which flashed past the windows. .
When Scollay Square and the West End
were demolished in the late fifties and early sixties, many
of their denizens migrated to skid row, which, by 1963, provided
refuge to 7,000 homeless men, eleven poolrooms, twenty-four
liquor stores, and forty-one saloons. More than ever, the
South End became the principal haunt of the city's "night
people," notably the "white hunters," suburban men who prowled
the avenues of "Momma-land" in their late-model cars, looking
for black prostitutes.
SAN FRANCISCO (From "Third and Howard:
Skid Row and The Limits of Architecture" by Paul Groth)
At the sidewalk edges of Third and Howard
Streets began various retail outlets for those with low incomes.
This retail street life expanded into most ground-floor spaces
along each block. Prominent first-floor elements were workingmen's
saloons, boldly advertising their nickel beer. Along Third
Street, men found the greatest concentrations of worker's
saloons, many with backroom bookie joints, legal in California
until 1938. By 1910, San Francisco's saloons no longer served
a free lunch, but they offered hearty 10-cent to 15-cent meals
with the purchase of a glass of beer. Nearby was a distinctly
grubby class of poolrooms and penny arcades. Added to the
mix along the ground floors were occasional amusement halls;
concert saloons, with their cheerful and gladdening bathing
beauties; and, later, cheap all-night movie theaters. The
saloons and entertainment establishments were frequented not
only by the neighborhood residents but also by working men
from throughout the city and by adolescents who stole away
to see something of life other than what the purveyors of
the dominant urban culture thought appropriate for them. The
South of Market also had fifty-one secondhand clothing stores.Trunk
shops and commercial storage-locker businesses catered to
men leaving town for a season. Radical bookstores supplied
reading material aimed at a workers' revolution..There were
barber colleges offering free haircuts; medical and dental
schools offering low-cost clinics.In the evenings, some of
the shops offered exotic dance shows. Houses of prostitution
or assignation were never far away, but a typical single-worker's
zone had fewer women and children visible on its streets than
any other residential or commercial district of the city.
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