No, we don't. The Bowery, once the storied sinner's paradise, is dead and will not come back. Its glories belong to the past, when New York was young, and, grandpa said, gay.
The wide street under the Third Avenue "El" (soon to be torn down) has been turned over to lofts and salesrooms.
Sandwiched between them are hockshops and the flophouses where homeless hobos rent a clean bed for two bits; and cheap restaurants offer full meals, even in these inflationary days, for the same sum; and filthy bars sell bottled "smoke" at a dime (and an ulcer) a drink.
The only memory of a lurid career of wine, women, song, all-night hubbub and singing waiters (including Irving Berlin) is a lone cabaret: Sammy's Bowery Follies, purposely dressed up in old-fashioned clothes, with lusty, noisy, nostalgic entertainment of the '80's.
In the old days, however, the lines of the song--"The Bowery, the Bowery, they do such things...." meant just what they said.
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.