Downtown

by Pete Hamill

  The facts didn’t matter. The myth was born. In some ways, Big Mose was a precursor of the superheroes of twentieth-century comic books, presenting images of power to people who had no power at all. But he was also an example of the way the popular imagination works with the materials at hand. If there had been no Five Points, with its wretchedness and dangers, if there had been no culture of toughness and honor, there would have been no fictional Mose. On those streets, the young needed myth, and the myth of Big Mose would last for decades.

  One foggy spring night, crossing Forsyth Street, I saw a huge figure moving through shreds of fog. Here he comes, I thought, out of the nineteenth century fog: Big Mose. As the figure drew closer I saw that he was a black man carrying a bass fiddle in a leathery case. He nodded and moved on. Fearless. Just.

  Theater was also a business, then as now, and the impresarios knew that one way to sell tickets was to offer the forbidden. This wasn’t easy, since the official culture was in the grip of an imported, heartless Victorianism. Preachers and editorial writers were always on beady-eyed alert to the presence of temptation and sin. But the impresarios came up with a variety of dodges: Adam and Eve tableaux, “statue girls” with bare legs, or dramas of seduction made acceptable by tacked-on sermons. Sometimes the cops closed the shows. The young men lined up for the next one the following Saturday night.

  Then, on September 12, 1866, with audiences longing for escape from the lingering horror of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, along came a show that really was something new. For the first time all the Bowery specialties were assembled in one extravaganza: a melodramatic story line, torrents of music, many jugglers, about eighty dancing girls, continuous suggestions of sins of the flesh. The Black Crook did not open on the Bowery, but it was a Bowery child. The actual theater was Niblo’s Garden, in the Metropolitan Hotel at Broadway and Prince Street. The producer was an Irish immigrant named William Niblo, and his theater offered three thousand seats. The primary author of the show was Charles M. Barras, and it would run for a then-astonishing 475 performances and earn a million dollars.

  Everybody, it seems, went to see it, including a thirty-one-year-old Samuel L. Clemens. He was then rising to immense popularity as Mark Twain. Clemens wrote about the show: “When they put beautiful clipper-built girls on the stage in this new fashion, with only just barely clothes enough on to be tantalizing, it is a shrewd invention of the devil.” He summed up: “The scenery and the legs are everything.”

  The Broadway musical was born. More than a century later, the critic Hollis Alpert elaborated: “Barras’ melodrama, originally designed as an opera libretto and containing noticeable echoes of Faust and von Weber’s Der Freischutz, allowed for many scenic effects: a mountain storm, a flaming chasm, a grotto of golden stalactites, gilded chariots and angels descending through mist and clouds, and, not the least, a grand masquerade ball.” The convoluted plot was full of preposterous characters, and the show’s music is never heard anymore. But The Black Crook was to be revived again and again for the rest of the century. I wish it could be revived one final time, so I could get to see it.

  One of its revelations was about the attitude of the New York audience. They simply refused to be lectured about sin, and that refusal remains part of the New York character to this day. For generations, severe Protestant preachers continued railing at the theater as a kind of vestibule of Hell. For generations, New Yorkers ignored them, as they generally ignore such jeremiads today. There were church steeples everywhere at the time, but New York was becoming a triumphantly secular city. Even today, New Yorkers prefer dancing girls to jeremiads.

  There was, to be sure, some substance behind the rhetoric of the preachers. According to historian Edward K. Spann, in The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857, sin was widespread. In the 1850s, there were an estimated ten thousand prostitutes in the city, some of them part-timers, some desperate streetwalkers trying to pay rent, others residing in brothels of various levels of elegance or degradation. There were probably seventy-five thousand residents with some form of venereal disease. But there was little that most ordinary citizens could do about such evidence of human weakness or desperation, except murmur a few prayers or offer simple acts of kindness.

  On the Bowery, other stage inventions were not as endearing as The Black Crook was on Broadway. The most important was the creation of racial and ethnic stereotypes. The Stage Irishman made his appearance, often to the secret, conspiratorial delight of Irish audiences. On stage, the Irishman was a version of the Victorian-era cartoons and caricatures that showed him with simian features, a fringe of whiskers, a hat that didn’t fit his head, patchy clothes, smoking a clay pipe. His speech was full of bejase and begorra interjections, his apparent genetic stupidity deepened by drink. But the best of these performers added another level to the act: a sly, smart, sometimes witty subversion of the stereotype itself. The performer often spoke a certain barbed wisdom, directed at the people who wanted to believe the stereotype, and the Irish in the audience knew exactly what he meant. They laughed with the Stage Irishman, not at him.

  With some exceptions, the African Americans did not collaborate with stereotypes in the way that Irish performers did. When the first African American theater was opened by William Brown off Duane Street in 1821, the troupe performed Richard III. Brown was a serious man, a former ship’s steward and free man of color (as noted, slavery endured in New York until 1827). In an extraordinary career, Brown opened a series of theaters, including one in Greenwich Village, encouraged integrated audiences (often to his regret when white hooligans showed up to heckle), and promoted an honorable African American presence in the theatrical version of the New York alloy.

  The stereotype of the shuffling, ignorant black man—first called Jim Crow, later joined by Zip Coon—was, of course, the creation of white men. They donned blackface and performed in minstrel shows, those bizarre entertainments that were invented outside New York but soon became a basic moneymaking genre in the theaters of the Bowery and Broadway. Since the principals were white versions of black people, there was clearly a secret fear at the heart of the shows. In New York, as in Ireland itself, Stage Irishmen made jokes of themselves to keep themselves safe from people with power. If the ruling parties were laughing, they wouldn’t hurt you. But white performers in blackface were helping white audiences believe that blacks (particularly black men) were harmless. The vast majority of New Yorkers were white. The underlying idiocies of even the best minstrel shows helped them feel better about the continued degradation of actual living and breathing African Americans. Nobody wanted to face the fact that the great tides of European immigration were good for the Europeans but not good at all for the descendants of Africans. They lost many jobs, began to sink into poverty, and endured many small humiliations. A few exploded into sudden violence. Better to believe they were harmless.

  Minstrel shows began losing their mass appeal after the Civil War, as other forms of competition came to the theaters. But in various forms, they lasted for a very long time. There were, of course, modifications, with a reduction in the most blatant racism and a greater emphasis on the music (leading to ragtime). But such huge stars as Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor worked in blackface in the early twentieth century. The blacks in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) were a vile mixture of sinister, sex-obsessed black males and the harmless figures of the minstrel shows. That movie was the greatest recruiting device for a renascent Ku Klux Klan. In the 1930s, blacks were routinely presented on screen as shuffling, harmless, eye-rolling fools, particularly in B movies. But with a few exceptions, such as Jolson, they were no longer portrayed by white men in blackface. The best known of those later black performers was Stepin Fetchit. Alas, there were others.

  After the Civil War, the Bowery went into steady decline and then suffered a fatal blow. As happens frequently in New York, the blow fell in the name of progress. This sudden event was the coming of the elevated railroads.
The earliest versions, in 1867-70, were crude, using mechanical cable equipment to pull the wooden cars. At first, they were limited to the lower West Side and seldom used. Then the New York Elevated Railway Company took over, added steam locomotives and more stations, and was soon running along Ninth Avenue all the way to Sixty-first Street. In the late summer of 1878, they rammed a line down Third Avenue, right through the Bowery. Suddenly, the old street had an iron roof. With the sun blocked by the steel structure, the street went into a permanent twilight. Cinders often fell upon pedestrians on the street, igniting women’s dresses, spoiling men’s hats and overcoats. Smoke poisoned the air. Even the Saturday night toffs started going elsewhere for laughter and music. The Bowery was claimed by the most squalid saloons, the cheapest bordellos. By 1892, the songwriters Percy Gaunt and Charles Hoyt had written the street’s sad anthem. The chorus goes:

  The Bow’ry! The Bow’ry!

  They say such things,

  And they do strange things

  On the Bow’ry! The Bow’ry!

  I’ll never go there anymore.

  That songwriters’ evocation of New York nostalgia would endure through most of the coming century. But it was not the end of the story, of course. After the el was taken down in 1955-57, and sunlight returned, and the old bums blinked at the sight of the sky, the Bowery remained squalid. Then one of those mysterious New York shifts took place. In the 1970s, the rummies and winos began wandering out into the wider city. They became known by the politer name of “the homeless,” and New Yorkers could not avoid them as they did when they were confined to the alcoholic ghetto of the Bowery. Many New Yorkers were contemptuous of ruined men, but others, charged with compassion, responded to their presence by creating all over the city a system of shelters and kitchens. Many of the damaged men never went back to the doorways and flophouses of the Bowery.

  Instead, artists arrived, moving into many of the high-ceilinged apartments on the great wide street. Some were bohemian pioneers. Some had been displaced by the escalating costs of living in Soho to the west, a neighborhood that itself had been rescued from oblivion by artists in the 1970s. The new residents could walk to Chinatown and Little Italy, and then small new restaurants began to open on the Bowery. From the Canal Street end, Chinese merchants, grocers, and fishmongers began taking over abandoned stores and apartments, and the street began to erupt with color and life. The once decaying 1874 cast-iron bank building at 330 Bowery is now gleaming with white paint, calls itself the Bouwerie Lane Theater, and houses the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater. Directly across the street is CBGB, still lively and dark and theatrically (or comically) nasty, the place where punk rock blossomed almost thirty years ago. Here performed the Ramones, Blondie, the Police, Talking Heads, and the B-52s, among many others. Who then could have imagined that in 2003 there’d be a sign renaming Second Street and the Bowery as Joey Ramone Place?

  Not far from CBGB is the place that used to house a rowdy club called Sammy’s Bowery Follies. In 1946, during a three-month visit to New York, the thirty-three-year-old French novelist, philosopher, and editor Albert Camus visited the sawdust joint several times in the company of New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling. They often dined first in Little Italy and then walked east on Grand Street, past the block in which every store sold wedding dresses. Camus was impressed (the larger city filled him with “an impatient nostalgia”) and wrote about it later:

  I knew what was waiting for me, these nights on the Bowery, where at a few steps from those splendid shops with wedding dresses (not one of the wax brides was smiling), some five hundred yards of such shops, live forgotten men, men who let themselves be poor in the city of bankers. It is the city’s most sinister neighborhood, where one doesn’t meet any women, where one man in three is drunk, and where in a curious café, seemingly out of a western movie, one can see fat old actresses who sing of ruined lives and maternal love, stamping their feet at the refrain, and shaking spasmodically, to the roaring of the audience, the packets of shapeless flesh with which age had covered them. Another old woman plays the drums, and she resembles an owl, and some evenings one feels like knowing her life story, at one of those rare moments when geography disappears, and when solitude becomes a somewhat disordered truth.

  Camus would not recognize the new Bowery. There at 308 Bowery is the Bowery Poetry Club, the sidewalk crowded with desperate cigarette smokers (smoking now banned within), the interior loud with “poetry slams” and readings of great vitality by unknown poets. They all have the confidence of youth. And yet there is an undercurrent of insecurity too. These people have helped revive one of Downtown’s lost avenues. But pause, listen, talk: There are complaints now that new housing developments, driven by the cardinals of real estate, are about to ruin the Bowery. I didn’t move here to live on the tenth floor, man.

  Walk on to the corner of Grand Street, and there before you is the old Bowery Savings Bank. Like so many other New York architectural masterpieces, this was designed by Stanford White. Construction began in 1893, the year of a great financial panic and a subsequent depression that was filled with terror. The mainly working-class depositors in the bank needed reassurance, a building that provided at least the illusion of security in an uncertain time. White gave them what they needed. The plot was oddly shaped, a large U with one entrance on the Bowery, another on Grand, and a third facade on Elizabeth Street. Like any great architect, White designed within the limitations of the plot and still presented a sense of grandeur and permanence. Just inside the columned Bowery entrance is a triumphal arch leading to the banking room. The interior columns (some merely painted) are elegantly placed. The light is glowing. When it was finished in 1895, White must have felt one frustration: The el was already rattling along the Bowery, blocking the full rays of the sun from falling on the white Bedford limestone of the exterior. Today, the visitor can see it in ways that even eluded its architect.

  Now in the evenings taxis pull up to the curb and discharge passengers who walk through the columned entrance into an elegant restaurant. Years of graffiti and greasy crud are gone. Columns have been repaired. The old battered steps seem new. Ten years ago, White’s creation appeared to be destined for the architectural graveyard. But in New York, even impending death can sometimes turn out to be a false alarm, as new forms of velocity come rushing from nowhere, carrying life.

  Chapter Six

  Park Row

  IN THE SUMMER of 1960, I was working nights at the New York Post, an afternoon tabloid, trying to learn my imperfect craft. I started each shift at one a.m. and finished, most mornings, at eight. Then, if I had a few dollars in my pocket, I would go to the Page One, a saloon on Greenwich Street, and wait for the first edition, which arrived fresh off the presses at nine. At the bar, in the company of older professionals, I received a good part of my professional education. They examined headlines, often with a bilious eye. They scrutinized stories, including my own. They issued fierce criticisms, savage, often hilarious indictments. They told me what I should never do again, and I tried hard not to repeat my latest published barbarism. I was never happier.

  On mornings when I had little money, or worked past the deadlines on other stories, I would leave the Post through the Washington Street exit and head for Broadway. The great street at that hour was usually thick with frantic people, bumping one another, dodging ’round one another, grumbling their apologies, then dashing across the paths of careening taxicabs. I loved plunging into the tumult, knowing that I was on my own while almost everyone else was going to work. My treks took me past Trinity and the Equitable Building, where I had lounged away so many lunch hours, then into the rushing infantry rising from the subways at Fulton Street. In a coffee shop with a street counter, I’d buy a cardboard cup of coffee and a cheese Danish. I had the morning papers with me, but usually I also had a book. On days of decent weather, I’d head for City Hall Park. There I’d bow my head in reverence to the Woolworth Building (often humming some lines from the tune “Million Dol
lar Baby”), find a bench, sip the coffee, and gaze at the vanished majesties of Park Row.

  In a way, this was another form of my newspaper education, for Park Row was once the center for all the great newspapers of Manhattan. From my bench, I could see the void where Joseph Pulitzer built a skyscraper to house his newspaper, the World. Both the newspaper and the building long ago had been smashed into memory. But the building erected by Henry Raymond and his partners for the New York Times was still there. The newspaper had departed for Longacre Square in 1904, where publisher Adolph S. Ochs had that crossroads renamed Times Square in its honor, but the newspaper’s downtown origins could never be denied. The old Times building is now part of Pace University and is beautiful to look at. Down on the right stood the headquarters of the old New York Herald, a paper now long vanished, along with the building from which it was published. Other newspapers made Park Row their homes. They’re gone too.

  The area itself was dense with history. The point where Broadway intersected with Ann Street, Vesey Street, and Park Row was a place where many strands of our character collided, erupted, or merged. It was not the city’s first plaza, but it was certainly the first New York crossroads. Clustered around the foot of the nineteenth-century City Hall Park were St. Paul’s Chapel, the Astor Hotel, the Park Theater, and P. T. Barnum’s insanely wonderful museum. The American Museum was crucial to the emerging human alloy of the city, drawing spectators from every part of the city’s life, including freshly arrived immigrants. They had never seen anything like it in the stony west of Ireland or the forests of Germany. In an 1866 guide to New York there’s an advertisement for the museum, which opened at “sunrise” and closed at ten at night, with tickets costing thirty cents, half price for children under ten. The advertisement read: