On the Bowery 1977

In 1962 my father had a business meeting in New York. He drove us down from Boston and we stayed at the Manhattan Hotel on West 34th Street. Between meetings we went to the Empire State Building, the Rockettes, ate at Tads Steakhouse, and saw the Statue of Liberty. On the way back by Yellow Cab we rode along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. A sunny day much like that of the photo.

Spotting a man sprawled on that narrow meridian strip, I asked, if he were dead.

“No, he’s just drunk.”

I knew what drunk was since an old man hung out at the gas station in our suburban town. Red Tate. A Korean war veteran. My father sometimes gave him a buck for a bottle of wine. There weren't many bums in my hometown. It was a dry town without any liquor stores, but Red Tate always had his bottle of Thunderbird.

In the next block were three more collapsed men. Lost to oblivion.

I later lived in the East Village and frequented CBGBs, passing countless enlistees to a state of inebriation on the Bowery. I never joined them, but not for lack of trying.

RED TATE - BAD POETRY by Peter Nolan Smith

Red Tate lies on the pavement Helpless flat on his back If his mother saw this sight Tears would fill her eyes

Red Tate drinks Ripple. Sometimes Thunderbird Red wine dulls his nerves. A bum A tramp. His mother’s second son.

1978

Clicking Your Heels Will Not Get You Home or Kansas

In the Spring of 1962 my father had business in New York City. My grandmother volunteered to take care our my younger brothers and sisters, allowing my older brother and me to accompany our parents to the great city to the south of Boston. Upon our arrival my father drove to the southern tip of Manhattan and pointed out the Statue of Liberty across the harbor.

On our way to the hotel our Ford station wagon proceeded up a broad avenue. Men clustered on the sidewalks and I spotted a man lying on the street.

He wasn't moving and I asked my father, "Is he dead?"

I had never seen a dead person before.

"No, he's a bum. He drinks too much. This is the Bowery. The Avenue of Broken Dreams."

"Why doesn't he go home to sleep?"

"Men like him don't have a home." My father didn't explain why and my mother was quiet. They looked at each other, as if they knew people like the sleeping man. If they didn't, those kind of men never came to our house on the South Shore of Boston, not even Red Tate, who Korean War veterans from our church said that he had been a hero in the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir.

Red Tate lived in the town dump.

He drank cheap wine across from the church.

Homeless.

As I got older I moved to the East Village. I realized other homeless people existed in America.

In the 1980s homeless people clustered throughout the city.

The police evicted them from squats and park encampments. City authorities put them on buses to distant cities. The housing shelter were more like cattle pens. No one was allowed to stay the day. Millions were spent on the problem, but I have never seen any of that money going to the poor, who now are displaced families displaced by luxury condos, underpaid working people, the sick, the unfortunates, the tired, hungry, and lost.

New York City spends $35,000 per annum on the tens of thousands of permanent homeless.

No new no-income or lower income projects have been build in the city. The soul of the city has been sacrificed for greed.

$35,000 a year is enough for a good apartment with money left for food and transportation.

Little escapes the grasp of the bureaucracy or the realtors planning to ethnically cleanse the outer boroughs like they did Manhattan.

I know the feeling well.

I am homeless too.

315 The Bowery Pre-CBGBs

CBGBs existed from 1973 to the summer of 2008 as a mecca for punks.

Prior to Hilly Kristal's leasing the ground-floor and basement of 315 The Bowery, the location had served as a The Palace Hotel Bar for the flophouse above it, housing as many as 600 men every night.

There was life at 315 before CBGBs and there is life after as a clothing boutique, but the Palace Hotel remains the same.

A SRO home for the forgotten men on the boulevard of broken dreams.

But not Hilly.

Photo by David Godlis