"The Republic of the Bowery was a powder keg of pre-political class rage that required only a slim excuse to go off," Luc Sante writes in his cultural history, Low Life. Dressed like a dandy, the Bowery Boy (whose legend calcified over the ages into Hollywood's Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys movies) roamed the neighborhood with his gang, looking for pleasure and trouble, occasionally erupting in bloody riots and battles with rival gangs. The Bowery Boys and Gals introduced plenty of raw-knuckled slang into the American vocabulary (bender, blowout, chum, kick the bucket), and patronized emerging popular-entertainment forms like melodrama, vaudeville, and freak shows."
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- bill 3-07-2005 11:58 pm