The Bowery Bums

Purefinder New York’s The Psychiatric History of New York walking tour includes a segment that looks at the catastrophic failure of deinstitutionalization. From the 1950s to the 1970s, many psychiatric patients, released from state hospitals, had inadequate access to community mental health centers and supervised prescription medication. Consequently, droves of displaced individuals took to the streets. In New York City, the population of the Bowery—then the epicenter of New York City vagrancy—multiplied.

Photographer Edward Grazda documented the Bowery in 1971 and captured some of the circumstances that deinstitutionalization contributed to. PowerHouse Books published the results in 2019.

Edward Grazda’s photographic book On the Bowery: New York City 1971 was inspired by  Lionel Rogosin’s 1956 docufiction film On the Bowery. The film cast flophouse Bowery boys as themselves, in improvised scenes that supported a day in the life of a down on his luck protagonist. In Grazda’s book, fifteen years later, you might concur that even a glimpse of artifice could be construed as a welcome relief, because the suffering is all too real. By his own admission, this period of his life took a lot out of him.  Yet, getting into the thick of down and dirty is where Grazda excels.

We learn from the book’s brief ending text that Grazda took these photographs between September and December of 1971. During that time, when he himself was a Bowery resident, he printed only some of the photographs. In his own words he “felt that they were too intrusive to show.” At the end of 1971, Grazda took off for the antithetic desertscapes of New Mexico and Arizona that formed the bulk of his comparatively glistening collection American Color Slides (1971-1979). This was an understandable switch and delay. The Bowery had taken its toll.

The Bowery is an old thoroughfare that predates the Dutch New York farmland that gave it its name. Prior to gentrification laying claim to the area, the desperate and dejected made use of its exposed underbelly by frequenting the skid row flophouses, such as Uncle Sam House and the Fulton Hotel.  These last bastions of cheap temporary accommodation are featured in the book, as well as dive bars, such as Harry’s Bar, which is one of half a dozen drinking establishments on a single block that facilitated staunch alcoholism. For the so-called Bowery bums, bars such as these, haloed by neon beer advertisements, provided a glowing heavenly refuge from the mean streets of Lower Manhattan.

Men are on every page of On the Bowery.  They are smoking, drinking, conversing, sleeping, and on one occasion – dead. Most men here are either oblivious to Grazda’s snapshots, or they acknowledge the lens with no mind for adjustment or poise. Less frequently, Grazda’s camera click bends the occupied heads of his unwitting models towards the viewer.  We meet hustlers, beggars, and hard drinkers.   Many are fallout from deinstitutionalization, chipped and ripped at the seams, dulled by hardship and consequently suitable for the book’s black and white content.

Click here to read the rest of the Picture this Post article and to see some of Grazda’s photographs.