Working-class kids have a deep-rooted fear of winding up out on the street. We were told as tiny tots to be good, otherwise we’d wind up in the gutter. And to drive this point home, well meaning parents and teachers took us on field trips by bus to the Bowery. The Bowery was more than a long street or a neighborhood winding north to the East Village in New York City. The Bowery represented the land of the poor, the drunk, the sick and nearly gone, the dead.
Riding on a bus through the Bowery was a good thing and as educational as a visit to the Tenement Museum. The bus slowed through the thickness of idle bodies sprawling along the sidewalk, some spilling over the concrete lip into the road, others strewn one step up from the curb.
I want to believe the Bowery, as we once knew it, belongs to a bygone era but now it’s so near to me that it follows me everywhere I go.
I see poverty everywhere. Neighborhoods like the Bowery are called Skid Row, and it is not the place where the poorest of the poor live to manifest their dreams. Skid Row does not conjure the image of the robust hobo and his dog riding the rails on the night train. The people who dwell in Skid Row are down-and-out, and dirty, sick. For them, it’s the end of the line.
Many American cities have a Skid Row. L.A.'s Skid Row is often called The Nickel; Portland, Oregon has its Old Town Chinatown; San Francisco calls its Skid Row The Tenderloin; and Seattle offers its Pioneer Square district as the original Skid Row.
While the Bowery was known as New York City’s Skid Row, today it is a hot market for luxury real estate developers. The Bowery wends through several neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan, from Chinatown on the south to North of Houston Street, (which wasn’t fancy and called NoHo when I was a kid). The new luxury building located at 347 Bowery used to be a Salvation Army shelter. The stacked townhouses are priced between $5 and $10M. One triplex penthouse is in the $10M+ range. The building housing another former Salvation Army shelter at 223-225 Bowery was lost to a $30 million sale. The new site is the location for the Ace Hotel and has luxury condos on top.
The Bowery’s low-income tenants have been putting up a noble fight to stay in their rent-stabilized tenements, but too much money is being put up for a land grab. The new landlords have been doing very mean things to low-income tenants, forcing them to move out. It takes a lot of money for low-income tenants to win a battle against real estate developers and they don’t have any. The Bowery is Skid Row no more.
Betwixt and between New York City and Seattle, the former sites of Skid Rows are quickly becoming fodder for real estate developers. Even though the poor have been forced out, they have not gone away. Skid Row has metastasized everywhere. There are more homeless than ever, but they have splintered off into small clusters. They live in the most harsh and frightful way: Tucked under blankets, tarps and sleeping bags, in between alleys and in the empty spaces of retail parking lots, loading docks, storefronts, and on the greenbelts along side freeways.
The homeless have become mobile. Here today, chased away by the cops and gone tomorrow, Skid Row is perpetually on the move. Some well-heeled people liked having a Skid Row because it kept the downtrodden in their place. And when it kept them confined to one place, the well-heeled knew exactly where not to go, so they would never have to see them.
But we do see them. We see the homeless with our own eyes and if we’re inclined to listen to them, we hear what they are saying. We have to wonder why the job reports are so heavily politicized, citing record numbers of low unemployment, when there are so many more people living on the street.
There was a quiet dignity to the way the Bowery had once been a refuge for the homeless. Being homeless means encountering rejection everywhere in the world, but in the Bowery the homeless could find a friend. The Bowery offered a sense of place, a genuine community, somewhere to live. The Bowery, or any Skid Row, protects human beings who have been tossed out as garbage. Many missions and shelters have labored to stop human beings from dying on the street.
Now that the homeless have been evicted from Skid Row, we see them up close every day. All of us have walked along a street only to step around a prone body. We have no way of knowing if the person is dead or alive. Many of us care. We want to help, but we don’t know what to do. The Bowery now dwells among all of us and many of us can no longer look away.
“The Bowery Among Us” is excerpted from a collection of Essays NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS by Patricia Vaccarino.
The Bowery Among Us
by Patricia Vaccarino