Whereas at one time this zigzag lane had been the center of middle-class night life, with such music halls as Tony Pastor's, and beer gardens, concert saloons and fairly respectable dance halls where the modest toiler and his girl could spend an evening at moderate cost, in its later days the Bowery became the focal point for the worst dives in the city.
Here were low, mean resorts, beside which the dumps of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, New Orleans' Basin Street, and Chicago's 22nd Street were old ladies' homes.
Prostitutes, thieves, dope fiends, and underworlders of every kind made it their headquarters. Murder, suicide, rape, robbery were so common they were ignored by the daily papers, most of which were published a few hundred yards away, on the southerly extension of the Bowery, known as Park Row.
The Bowery gave up the ghost during World War I. Today, even the bums and hobos who are the last of its denizens are getting fewer and fewer, as reflected by the fact that many of the pawnshops are moving or going under.
But when some refined reformers recently started a movement to change the name of the Bowery, so it could shed some of the shadows of its ancient associations, the town rose in indignation against it.
The remaining remnant of the derelicts will not be disturbed. The city coddles them. A Bowery bum is treated with consideration rated by no other bum. The cops carry him from the curb where he has collapsed and lay him tenderly in a dirty hallway; the magistrates are lenient if a pinch is mandatory; the newspapers feature turkey dinners to the old-timers on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Since even "smoke" has risen in price, the 'bos now buy a pint of domestic wine, 12 per cent alcohol, and mix it with a pint of grain alcohol, and the result is Olympian.
The rubberneck buses are running again, and the spielers sing the sagas of the old cowpath. But they sound hollow. The bum has gone the way of the bison, a vanishing American.
Dark and dead, like the old Bowery, is Satan's Circus, more generally known as "The Tenderloin."