Photos: Hardship and humanity in New York City’s Bowery flophouses
What co-living looked like in the days before startup culture
Since at least the 1930s, New York City’s Bowery was synonymous with the Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels which lined its sidewalks. Homeless men could find cheap shelter in these “flophouses,” paying rent on a night-by-night basis or inhabiting them for the longer term. While the world immortalized in Lionel Rogosin’s On The Bowery still exists, in Manhattan, and other high-priced cities like San Francisco, it now has a swanky doppelgänger in the form of co-living startups. Renting a bedroom with shared kitchen and bathroom access may sound fun to millennials, but long before they were an expensive way to iterate friends, SROs provided affordable shelter to people at the lowest rungs of society.
In the late 1990s, photographer Harvey Wang read the writing on the wall as his Lower Eastside neighborhood transformed from working class to chic:
“During its heyday, between 25,000 and 75,000 men slept on the Bowery each night. Today, gentrification has transformed the 16 blocks that make up the Bowery, just like it’s remade much of New York City.”
Wang decided he needed to document the residents of the remaining Bowery SROs while they were still there. Flophouse: Life on the Bowery transports us to the living rooms of an otherwise invisible population and presents a strong argument for the hotels’ role in maintaining economic diversity in cities.
Where space is a commodity the SRO provides a safe zone for people whose lives and history are tied to the urban experience. Addiction and loneliness are persistent subtexts in Wang’s images, but so are the enduring personalities of the (mainly) men who inhabit these necessarily cramped quarters. If WeLive is a branded experiment in separating young urban professionals from their money, in these incisive photographs “We Live” becomes the concerted hymn of the folks who were there first.
All photos © Harvey Wang from Flophouse: Life on the Bowery (Random House), 1998–1999.
