A conservative investor once told me there was no better or safer property than a cheap lodging-house on the Bowery. Possibly my informant imparted his discovery to others, for the number of these establishments has increased tremendously during the last few years. But when many Conservative Investors undertake to walk the same road, the result is usually the elimination of some of them—only those, of course, who are not really entitled to be termed conservative. This sorting of the just from the unjust does not occur, however, until the Malthusian Doctrine needs a business illustration. As I walked along the east-side thoroughfare and noted the lodging-houses packed to their utmost capacity, I concluded that the number of applicants for such accommodation must have increased in a manner at once flattering to the judgment of the Conservative Investor, and satisfactory to his highest interest.
Who inhabit these houses? Well, men who have no better homes—drunken, idle and shiftless men—strangers in this somewhat inhospitable town—men looking for work and men looking for mischief—great, hulking, ignorant brutes whose hope lies in their muscle, and well-formed fellows with intelligent faces—all sorts and conditions of men—a great tide of humanity that flows in at night and ebbs out in the morning, never and yet ever the same. A steadily rising tide? O, yes, perhaps,—but look at the embankments!
It was curiosity and not a desire to educate myself for the day when I might become a Conservative Investor that led me to enter No. 99½ Bowery.
Its sign offered attractions suited to almost any purse, the management apparently catering to every taste in the scale of social refinement. It read
ROOMS BY THE WEEK $1.25
ROOMS BY THE NIGHT 25c.
BEDS BY THE WEEK 60c.
BEDS BY THE NIGHT 10c.
There were several similar houses in the immediate vicinity, but this one seemed to secure most of the stragglers who came by during the ten or fifteen minutes I watched it from the opposite side of the street. The reasons for its popularity were not to be spelled out of the sign, so I crossed over and climbed the ladder-like stairs upon which the street door opened.
I knew just about what was inside before I mounted a step. Everybody knows who’s travelled on the Third Avenue L at night and looked out of the windows of the train anywhere below Ninth Street.
It was one o’clock in the morning when I left the Club, so it must have been quite two when I entered the “Columbian,” but even at that hour the smoking-room was more than comfortably filled.
A cloud of malodorous smoke so lowered the ceiling that one involuntarily stooped to avoid contact with it. Occasionally some current of air would draw a funnel-shaped drift from this cloud and whirl it like an inverted sea-spout toward the steam-screened windows and out of the cracks at their top, and occasionally the draught in the red-hot stove sucked down a whiff of it. Otherwise it hung motionless like some heavy, breathless canopy.
A long, narrow table filled the centre of the room, reaching almost from the windows in the front to the stove in the rear. Around this sat or lounged a score of men, and perhaps as many more occupied chairs about the stove and along the wall. Half a dozen were reading newspapers, tattered and greasy through constant handling, but the rest of the company stared idly at each other, or at nothing, talking little, but smoking almost to a man.