The Kipling of the Bowery

By 1903 Owen Kildare had led a remarkable life, which he described in his memoir that year, My Mamie Rose: The Story of My Regeneration. It’s an excellent firsthand account of what life on the Lower East Side was like in the last decades of the 19th century, was widely read and reviewed, and would be the basis for an important silent film. He was thirty-eight when the book came out, and had only learned to read and write when he was thirty.

He was born to poor immigrants in the Fourth Ward, at the lowest end of the Bowery, in 1864. His French mother died giving birth to him; his Irish father had died three months earlier. The Irish couple who took the infant in, the McShanes, paid six dollars a month for two tiny rooms up six flights in a Catherine Street tenement. The woman was kindly, but Mr. McShane, a longshoreman, was a mean drunk. They gave Kildare chores like taking out the coal scuttle to pick up any loose nuggets lying around on the docks where the coal boats were unloaded, and carrying Mr. McShane’s beer pail to and from the nearest saloon. Because the bars were men-only, when Fourth Warders chose to drink in mixed company – meaning with their wives, not the kind of women who would later be known as B-girls – they held impromptu parties on the rooftops or front stoops of their tenements, called “growler parties,” “can rackets” or “mixed ale camps.” Ferrying the pails back and forth was the kids’ job, known as “rushing the growler,” growler being slang of vague origin for the pail. They had to rush, because young toughs called growler gangs often waylaid them, relieving them of their cash on the way to the bar or the beer on their way back.

Fleeing abuse from McShane, the boy left home at seven, to sleep in doorways or on sidewalk grates. He fell in with a gang of newsies led by Little Tim Sullivan, a cousin of Big Tim, the future Tammany Hall giant. Little Tim staked Kildare to a nickel and handed him a stack of papers to sell. Kildare couldn’t read the papers he hawked on the streets around City Hall, never having set foot in school.

A big kid, he was good with his fists and soon fought his way toward the top of the newsie heap. By his teen years he was fighting in bare-knuckle boxing matches organized for the sporting men and gamblers who partied and whored on the Bowery. The fights were held in saloons and halls like the Champion’s Rest on the Bowery and Billy McGlory’s Armory Hall on Hester Street, infamous not only for its bloody fights and its pliable waiter girls but for its transvestite male hookers, who made it one of the best-known places in town for homosexual encounters. Exhibition fights might go only a few rounds, but the ones that attracted serious wagers were long and brutal, lasting until one of the scrappers could no longer stand – sometimes more than forty rounds. Kildare recalls an endless train of busted knuckles, shredded ears and gashed eyes.

He enjoyed the fame a winning pugilist earned on the Lower East Side. Owners of saloons and dives encouraged him to come drink at their spots because he’d draw fans in. They’d invite famous hoods, gangsters and yardbirds for the same reason – mugs and lugs with nicknames like the Montana Giant, the Limerick Terror, Rags – and as a young man Kildare fell easily into this milieu. His favorite hangout was Chicory Hall, a loathsome basement dive at Bowery and East Fourth Street. Often sleeping in a back room, he’d spend days and nights there “feasting on many pounds of raw meat and drinking gallons of beer.” It was a destination for uptown slummers, who came to ogle the local roughnecks. Their fancy horse-drawn cabs and carriages lined the ratty block. The Lower East Side had long attracted such toffs, but it really boomed as a destination toward the end of the 1800s. Bored silly by the strictures of late Victorian manners, feeling increasingly isolated from the real world behind the brocaded curtains of their foursquare brownstones, uptowners flocked downtown to see how the lower orders lived their more vital and unmediated lives. Over in Greenwich Village, they crowded into bistros and spaghetti houses, hoping to catch glimpses of authentic artists and bohemians. At Chicory Hall, genteel ladies and gentlemen sat on cheese boxes and flour barrels to gawk in horrified titillation as Kildare and others put on fights for them, which “for ferociousness and bloody stubbornness have never been beaten,” he declares. Weapons were banned, “but any other pleasantries like biting, clawing, choking, gouging, were not only allowed, but really essential.” The fight didn’t end until one guy was unconscious or begged off.

Kildare found plenty of other opportunities to put his fighting skills to use. He served as a Tammany enforcer at the polls on voting day, busted up union strikes for the railroads and other employers, provided the muscle for neighborhood confidence tricksters, and became a saloon bouncer, or “floor manager.”

He also made money taking the slummers around as tour guide and bodyguard. He recalls one night when he did this for “two Princeton students, arrayed in yellow and black mufflers and wearing the insignia of their fraternity.” They started out at Fatty Flynn’s dance hall on Bond Street and wandered to others. In a particularly dangerous dive one of his charges, quite drunk by then, got into an argument with a local gang. When Kildare stepped in to protect the lad, a gang member produced a knife and slashed Kildare’s neck, sending him to the hospital.

When he got out, the grateful and guilty Princeton boy, a rich man’s son, took Kildare on a tour of Europe and the Mediterranean. In Algiers, Kildare writes, the boy having spent all the money his dad gave him, they had no recourse but to join the Foreign Legion. Kildare writes of exhausting treks through the desert, ferocious battles with renegade tribes, and a long voyage home working in a ship’s boiler room. Maybe a bit of fairytale-telling creeps into this section of the narrative. His telling of these adventures made him famous again when he returned to the Bowery and regaled patrons of Steve Brodie’s narrow, tin-ceilinged saloon with them. Brodie’s saloon attracted celebrity prizefighters like John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett, and when they didn’t show Brodie paid other big guys, including Kildare, to impersonate them for the tourists. Brodie, another former newsie, had risen – or rather fallen – to celebrity himself in 1886, when he supposedly jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge to win a bet and lived to brag about it. The bridge had been opened just three years earlier and was already starting to attract suicide jumpers. Whether Brodie actually made the jump or faked it was a matter of considerable discussion, but anyway his fame funded his saloon on Bowery at Grand Street and led to a starring role on the stage. He played himself in the hit 1894 revue On the Bowery, in which he recreated his jump – now to save a drowning girl – and sang a few songs in a Bowery accent (“My Poil is a Bowery goil/ She means all the woild to me”). It was at the People’s Theatre, formerly Tony Pastor’s Opera House, just up Bowery near Spring Street. To “pull a Brodie” became slang for crazy stunts.

Kildare also hung out at Barney Flynn’s, a saloon and lodging house  at the corner of Bowery and Pell Street on the edge of Chinatown. The three-story brick house still stands, now with a bank in it. Flynn was hailed as the King of the Bowery and his joint was another regular destination for tourists, toffs and writers seeking some authentic lowlife color to put into their articles and novels. They saw plenty of color but not much of it was authentic. The biggest celebrity at Flynn’s was another braggart, Chuck Connors, called the Mayor of Chinatown. Connors was a professional Oirishman, full of blarney. He was born in Rhode Island but grew up on the fringe of Chinatown and reputedly spoke a little Mandarin. He gave reporters and slummers tours of the area’s dives and opium dens – some of the latter real, some fakes he set up in empty rooms, paying locals to act like dope fiends. He developed a peculiar outfit – bellbottom trousers, a small bowler cocked at an extreme angle on his head, and a shortwaisted pea coat with large pearl buttons – that would be the stereotyped Bowery B'hoy costume in films, cartoons and on stage for years after. His own memoir Bowery Life, as told to the Police Gazette editor Richard Fox, a pioneer of tabloid journalism, came out a year after Kildare’s, no doubt to piggyback on Kildare’s success. A slim collection of stock lowlife tales rendered by Fox in a thick Oirish brogue that makes it close to unreadable, it’s much less reliable than Kildare’s book, just Connors cutting more capers for the tourists.

Kildare was a thirty-year-old thug with a brutal past and no future to speak of when he met and fell under the influence of a young woman, a prim and proper teacher at a neighborhood settlement house, in whose eyes he suddenly saw himself as an ignorant lout. Romance bloomed. To his friends’ and his own amazement, he began to clean up his act for her. He stopped drinking and whoring and fighting, took a legitimate job as a baggage handler (or “baggage smasher”) on a steamboat pier, even went to church for the first time. She taught him his ABCs. Her name was Marie; he nicknamed her “my Mamie Rose.” They were planning their wedding when she caught pneumonia in a rain storm and died.

In 1900, using the skills she’d taught him, he entered a short piece he wrote in her memory in a contest held by the ladies’ page of the Evening Standard. It won and was published. He wrote more, always about life on the Bowery, and more newspapers and magazines published him. In 1902 the Sunday News hired him. He continued to write sketches of lowlife, becoming known as “the Kipling of the Bowery.”

That’s where his memoir ends. Over the next few years his writing was collected in three more books, which continued to earn rave reviews for their realism. “The slums of New York have been described in fiction often enough,” a Times reviewer wrote in 1906, “but not often by one who knows as much about them from the inside as does Mr. Kildare… Mr. Kildare’s work is plainly marked out for him – the interpretation of these people of the nether world whom he knows so marvelously well.”

In 1908, with help from the playwright Walter Hackett, he adapted My Mamie Rose into a play, The Regeneration. When he saw it on opening night he hated the production and was so angry at the way the lead actor played him that he had to be restrained from beating him up. It closed in a month.

Shortly after that he fell into a nervous collapse and was taken to Bellevue. His wife Leita, whom he married some time after the memoir was published, said it was from shock and depression over the play. She denied rumors that he was back on the bottle. His doctors called his condition paresis, a general physical and mental deterioration. Big Tim Sullivan would soon get the same diagnosis. Paresis was often caused by late-stage syphilis, still the incurable scourge of the high life in those days. Given Kildare’s roisterous first thirty years, it’s at least a possibility. Whatever the cause, he never recovered. He’d spend most of his last few years in the psych wards at Bellevue and at the Manhattan State Hospital on Ward’s Island. Leita got an annulment and remarried, but continued to visit him. When he died on Ward’s Island in 1911 the New York papers ran long obits retelling his colorful life story.

In 1915 William Fox, who’d also grown up on the Lower East Side, produced Regeneration, a silent feature film adapted from Kildare’s book and play. Raoul Walsh, a New York Irishman himself and just beginning his long and storied career, directed. He shot much of Regeneration on the streets, the waterfront and the rubble-strewn lots of the old neighborhood, with a cast that mixed actors trying to look tough and locals with gin-ravaged faces to whom looking rough came naturally. In terms of realism it’s a big leap forward from D. W. Griffith’s short Musketeers of Pig Alley of a few years earlier, which tells a similar story and also has a few exterior scenes shot on the Bowery.

In 1933 Walsh would go the opposite direction with The Bowery, a comedy that reduces the neighborhood of Kildare’s time to broad Gay Nineties schtick, with Wallace Beery as Connors and George Raft as Brodie, and the great vaudeville soubrette Pert Kelton, who’d later be the first Alice Kramden, stealing her scenes as Trixie, the Betty Boop-ish songbird in Connors’ saloon. In 1956 Lionel Rogosin would revive Walsh’s semi-documentary approach for his depressingly realistic On the Bowery, which showed that the Bowery had not yet changed much since Kildare dubbed it “the Highway of the Foolish.” One wonders what any of these folks would make of today’s Bowery, thick with brunching yuppies who aren’t slumming anymore, but a fixed colonial occupation.

by John Strausbaugh