Bandit's Roost Beer Dive

I found this photo in the awesome new online collection of the Museum of the City of New York. It was taken around 1890 by Jacob Riis in a "beer dive" near Bandit's Roost, a notorious alley near a similarly ill-famed bend in Mulberry Street -- "around the corner of the next bloc" from Five Points, according to Riis in How the Other Half Lives. The bend is no longer there, having been razed by the city, apparently largely in response to the outcry following the publication of Riis' photographs. (I tried to figure out the location of Bandit's Roost -- I think it was right around the present-day intersection of Mulberry and Bayard.)

My attraction to this image is of questionable merit; here is a thoroughly miserable occasion, viewed by me through an enthusiastically maudlin filter. For those who experienced it outside the protective comfort of an aged photograph, it is a likely familiar scene of men driven to this dive out of loneliness, at best; at worst, as an only option. Yet, this is just the kind of thing we tend to feel the most whimsy toward when it is a century in the past. The verite part fades while the scrappiness, the glory-to-come, the noir-ness, glow.

I adore this photograph. In my drippy mood, I adore its crowded solitude, I adore its desperation, I adore its exhaustion. I adore the scattered irregularity of its subjects' lives. I adore the menacing ceiling. Most of all, probably, I adore the evident indifference to it.




The Bend on Mulberry Street:

The bandits, roosting (also by Riis):