Flophouse: Life on the Bowery - Softcover

Isay, David; Abramson, Stacy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375758313 ISBN 13: 9780375758317

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2001

Synopsis

"This book takes you to places you think you don't want to enter, to people you think you don't want to meet, to lives you think you don't want to live--and makes you rethink all your assumptions. It reveals the tremendous strength and humanity of those who are usually ignored. And as you pay attention, your own humanity expands."
        ---Susan Stamberg, special correspondent, National Public Radio
In its heyday, close to one hundred thousand men found shelter each night in flophouses along America's largest and most infamous skid row, the Bowery. Today, only a handful of flops are left, their tiny five- and ten-dollar-a-night rooms home to fewer than a thousand men, mostly long-time residents. In a handful of years, this world will be gone.
        
In Flophouse, documentarians David Isay and Stacy Abramson and photographer Harvey Wang chronicle this vanishing world through the voices and portraits of a number of those residents, interspersed with photographs of their surroundings. The men come from all manner of backgrounds, and the rich variety of the tales they tell is a testament to the number of ways the bottom can fall out of life in America, even in prosperous times. This book warrants comparison with Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but the authors were inspired most directly by Joseph Mitchell, who wrote about some of these same flophouses with an honest warmth and an acceptance of life as it's found. Shimmering with humanity and utterly devoid of false sentiment, Flophouse is a powerful reminder that even on the margins, life defies all attempts at reduction.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"This book should be required reading in every home across the country. It tells of the lost ones, the forgotten men who have given up on the American dream, and once we enter their crumbling, derelict world, our own world will never look the same to us again. Harvey Wang's photographs are superbly honest and raw. The testimonies gathered by David Isay and Stacy Abramson are little poems of desolation, vast hymns to the paradoxes of the human heart." --Paul Auster

"This book takes you to places you think you don't want to enter, to people you think you don't want to meet, to lives you think you don't want to live. And makes you rethink all your assumptions. It reveals the tremendous strength and humanity of those who are usually ignored. And as you pay attention, your humanity expands."
         -- Susan Stamberg, Special Correspondent, National Public Radio

About the Author:

David Isay is the executive producer of Sound Portraits Productions, an independent production company dedicated to bringing neglected American voices to a national radio audience. His radio documentary work has won almost every award in broadcasting. He lives in New York City.

Stacy Abramson is a producer at Sound Portraits. She lives in New York City.

Harvey Wang is a photographer and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. His work includes Harvey Wang's New York and Holding On.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375758313
• ISBN 13: 9780375758317
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176