Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America

Introduction

INTRODUCTION IN 1961, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner announced a major renewal initiative for the city’s infamous skid row. Based on research conducted by social scientists, Operation Bowery would develop and implement policies designed to end urban homelessness. Explaining the plan, Wagner asserted , “We will be rebuilding men and making possible the rebuilding of a blight area at the same time.” Wagner’s comment revealed the rhetorical fusion of the city’s “broken” men and the street where they lived. In a period of optimism and faith in governmental research and programs, officials were confident in their abilities to survey, analyze, and repair the poor as well as their decrepit neighborhood. The ambitious project followed on the heels of the federal urban renewal program, which had similarly attempted to revitalize the nation’s skid rows, but focused on their buildings rather than their occupants. Homeless individuals dutifully cooperated with researchers and officials in both initiatives, but expressed little hope for change, or even much desire to leave skid row. As one homeless man remarked, “I won’t leave the Bowery ’till I die.”1 By the 1960s, homelessness seemed a permanent feature of the Bowery, having defined the street since the turn of the twentieth century. As the city’s skid row, it housed religious missions, public shelters, cheap hotels, greasy restaurants, dive bars, pawn shops, used clothing stores, and, of course, the homeless men and women who frequented them. These businesses and their patrons lined the Bowery’s sixteen blocks, from Chatham Square in Lower Manhattan north to Cooper Square, giving shape to a distinctive, if poorly understood, culture of homelessness. Reformers and politicians had long criticized the Bowery. As far back as the nineteenth century, when it had housed theaters and amusements for the 2 Introduction working classes, some of the city’s respectable citizens had decried it as a den of sin. Police raids during the 1880s and 1890s temporarily closed the poolrooms and gambling halls, leading to the regular arrests of dozens of area prostitutes. Investigators were horrified by the lodging houses for homeless men. In the words of one observer, “The filthy bed-clothing, scarcely more filthy floors, the offensive odor resultant from a lack of ventilation, and the foul air laden with the odor of poor gin and poorer tobacco, makes the places vile and unhealthy resorts as it is possible to conceive of.” Investigative journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis offered similar commentary, describing the area’s cheap lodging houses as sites of corruption for naïve young men: As a matter of fact, some of the most atrocious of recent murders have been the result of schemes of robbery hatched in these houses, and so frequent and bold have become the depredations Figure 1. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Bowery was home to many organizations serving the homeless, including the Hadley Rescue Hall, which offered a free supper and invited guests to “come as you are.” George Grantham Bain Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Introduction 3 of the lodging-house thieves, that the authorities have been compelled to make a public demand for more effective laws that shall make them subject at all times to police regulation.2 Such graphic narratives told of cheap, dirty accommodations used by desperate men of limited means and questionable motives.3 Despite this critical attention, the neighborhood remained remarkably unchanged for decades. What explains the tenacious longevity of such a filthy and dangerous district? This book answers that question by analyzing the experience and politics of homelessness. Skid rows were established in response to changing economic conditions, as increasing numbers of migrant workers and unemployed men took up residence in urban centers. Their continued existence over the ensuing decades resulted from the overlapping and conflicting solutions that were offered to “the problem of homelessness,” each reflecting a distinct understanding of the situation and construction of the problem. For the homeless, the problem often centered on insufficient food and shelter, as well as the callous indifference of politicians and the general public alike toward their plight. As a result, the homeless crowded onto the nation’s skid rows in search of meals, beds, showers, bars, and companionship. Many politicians identified the problem as that of potential crime and disorder perpetrated by the homeless. In response, they supported crackdowns on panhandling , vagrancy, and public drunkenness, and invited policing practices...