The Bowery, however, still maintains its
individuality as a breeding-place of crime. It is still the cesspool for
all things bad. From all over the world they come to the Bowery. The
lodging-houses give them cheap quarters, from 7 cents to 50 cents per
night. These places shelter 30,000 to 40,000 men and boys nightly, to
breathe a fetid and polluted air. Those who have not the price--and God
knows they are many--homeless and weary, "about ready to die," sleep in
hallways, empty trucks, any place for a lie-down.
Some of the lodging-houses are fairly respectable and run on a good
scale, and others are the resort of the lowest kind of human outcasts.
On one floor, the air poisoned beyond description, the beds dirty, will
be found over a hundred men, of all classes, from the petty thief to the
Western train-wrecker, loafers, drug-fiends, perhaps a one-time college
man, who through the curse of drink has got there. But they are not all
bad on the Bowery. No one not knowing the conditions can imagine what a
large class there is who would work if they could get it, but once down
it's hard to get up. A few weeks of this life wrecks them and makes old
men of them.
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