Bowery Minstrel Dies.
The Minstrel of the Bowery, in New York, is dead!
The sweetest singer that ever entertained the men of the fifteen-cent lodging houses and the five-cent eating places died with the echo of his own singing, and just as he heard a dozen men burst into applause in the saloon at 28 Bowery. And the Bowery is sad. The Bowery is puzzled, too, for their minstrel was a man of mystery, an English remittance man, and now his identity will never be revealed.
“John Sullivan, forty years old, an actor, no home, dropped dead from heart disease” is the way the police slip tells the story. Back of that simple statement is the shadow of fourteen years’ exile from home and kin, of as many years spent in cheering the unlovely hours of the outcasts that drift to the Bowery as a magnet to the steel.
When “John Sullivan” came to the Bowery fourteen years ago, his manner and voice puzzled all those he met, and it was whispered about that he was the son of an English earl. He drank, and drank steadily, but that magnificent voice of his and the ability of those long fingers to wield ivory piano keys so eloquently that their message reached the heart of every man who heard him, soon made him known and greatly admired. He wandered from saloon to saloon, from lunch stand to lunch stand during those years, pausing in each to sing and play—and to take a drink or two.
From England occasionally came letters, and then John Sullivan would abandon his singing for a time and invite all his friends to drink at his expense. When his prosperity ended, he would return to the singing.
In the pockets of the dead man there were a laundry check, a memorandum book that was unmarked, and—prayer beads, to which were affixed a cross. Nothing was there to reveal his identity. No money was there to pay burial expenses.
The body was removed to the morgue from the back room in the saloon, where he sang his last song, but later on, when news of his death spread up and down the Bowery, there was talk of saving the singer from a pauper’s grave. It was not long before a subscription list was made up, and nickels and dimes began pouring in.