Passive Protesters

On the Bowery, the Bowery I'll never go there any more.

--Old Song

Other nations have alcoholics, but Skid Row--urban colonies of alienated men--is strictly an American institution.*It was the first serious U.S. welfare problem and, in a way, one of its first social-protest movements; at least as much as the hippies, Skid Row inhabitants are dropouts from a society whose values they reject.

Today, however, progress and urban renewal have doomed this curious form of nonsociety to extinction. From a Depression-era high of more than 1,000,-000, the national census of rootless men (and women) has dropped to a scant 100,000, most of them over 50. On the Bowery, a squalid mile-long stretch on Manhattan's Lower East Side bordered by wine dispensaries, flop houses and rescue missions, annual head counts of the residents have disclosed a steady attrition. Between 1949 and 1967, the population of the Bowery fell from 13,675 to 4,851. Every year the population declines another 5%--a rate that would reduce it to virtually nothing by the end of the century.

Other cities reflect the same trend. In a recent study of Skid Rows in 28 major American metropolises, conducted by Sociologist Donald J. Bogue of the University of Chicago, all but four reported a population decline. For the first time in the experience of Chicago, which boasts--or at least counts--three Skid Rows, there are empty rooms now in the neighborhoods' overnight hotels. Ronald C. VanderKooi of the University (CANADA) DEGf Illinois predicts that Skid Row, if left alone, will probably die out.

Before that happens, however, sociologists are busily examining both the phenomenon of Skid Row and its social meaning. In New York City, a three-year survey, financed by the National Institute of Mental Health and manned by Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, has dramatically revised the stereotyped image of the man on Skid Row.

Hermetic Shelter. To begin with, he is not typically an alcoholic. Of the Bowery's population, only one-third qualify as heavy drinkers--a category embracing but not restricted to the alcoholic--while another third are moderate drinkers. The rest either drink sparingly or not at all. Even in Skid Row's inverted social hierarchy--the farther they fall, the bigger they are--the alcoholic is something of a social outcast, scorned and rejected by Skid Row's characteristic drinking fraternity, the bottle gang.

To Brandeis University So-(1939) ciologist Samuel E. Wallace, who helped organize the most recent Bowery research program, "the fact that Skid Rowers share both money and drink is perhaps the most conclusive proof that most of them are not alcoholics; alcoholics would find it exceedingly difficult to exercise the control dictated by group drinking." The New York study also revealed that Skid Row is not the end of the road in the usual despairing sense. Its residents do not fall there, but actively seek it out because it has what they want: odd jobs without purpose or future, a community that is permissive to the point of indifference, hermetic shelter from the incessant demands of the larger society. "The Skid Rower does nothing," says Wallace. "He just is. He is everything that all the rest of us try not to be."

The inhabitants of Skid Row have been type-cast by police and rescue missions as dirty, diseased, indolent, iniquitous and unreclaimable men. In fact, they deserve only a part of this broadside indictment. The Skid Rower's prin cipal crime against the prevailing values of U.S. society is his stubborn refusal to accept them. On the Bowery, investigators found that 55% of the inhabitants had never married, one-third had never voted, two-thirds claimed no close friend either on or off Skid Row. One in four, asked where he expected to be a year hence, predicted that he might be dead.

Adaptation. The Skid Rower's steady collision with the law--mostly involving repeated arrests for drunkenness or vagrancy--is misleading. He is peaceful to the point of passivity. Most of Skid Row's crime statistics are due either to zealous police sweeping public drunks off the pavement, or to "hawks"--the area's name for predators who come in from the outside, frequently to relieve a drunkard of his freshly cashed welfare check. His lengthy arrest record, says Sociologist Wallace, can actually be construed as "a fairly stable adaptation [to] a society that is willing to support him under specified conditions."

Changing economics of urban life have doomed these passive protesters. In a time of full employment and of increased welfare benefits at every government level, it is no longer so necessary for psychological dropouts to take up the Skid Row life. "Skid Rowers don't last long," says Chicago's VanderKooi. "The community has to recruit to survive. Yet only the West Coast Skids seem to be attracting any younger men--drawn, in part, by the area's hospitable climate and by the availability of harvesttime jobs." The median age of Bowery residents today is 67. As the old men die off, they are not being replaced.

Few, if any, of Skid Row's inhabitants thought of themselves as protesters in any formal way; probably most accepted society's verdict on them as tired, aimless drifters. Yet implicitly they did protest--and reject--the prevailing values of a work-oriented middle-class society. Their unstated message concerned failure: their own, and that of society, which failed to heed the gentle rebuke of the Skid Rower's isolation. Today's dropouts, however, are activists, whose purpose is not to shun the Establishment but to challenge and change it. The men on Skid Row would never understand that: all they ever asked of the Establishment was to be left alone.

*The term is a tribute to Seattle's Yesler Way. Down this greased slope, in the old logging days, slithered the cut logs on their way to Puget Sound. The lumberjacks themselves, living and brawling in work shacks on either side of Yesler Way, called their community "Skid Row."

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