On the Bowery, the Bowery I'll never go there any more.
Old Song
Other nations have alcoholics, but Skid Rowurban colonies of alienated menis 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...
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