BLOSSOM RESTAURANT
103 Bowery between Grand and Hester Streets
OCTOBER 24, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 26

Blossom Restaurant, variant image

The Blossom Restaurant occupied the ground floor, and Jimmy's Barber Shop, the basement, of the Boston Hotel, a flophouse on the Bowery, a neighborhood famous as a refuge for the downtrodden. The restaurant, which had sawdust on the floors and eight wireback chairs to each marble-topped table, was called a "hash house" by its proprietor Morris Gordon. The hotel, at 103 and 105 Bowery, contained 249 small doorless rooms, each fit with a narrow cot and locker (with lock). The rooms, which cost 30 cents a night, were steam-heated but without light fixtures. As a child, Al Smith, governor of New York from 1919 to 1928, lived at 105 Bowery when it was a lodging house.

In the research file is a short story by playwright Aben Kandel (1899-1993), depicting the life of William, "a man about fifty...[who] seemed to have been rolled in dirt, poverty, and despair." The story ends with William sitting in a Bowery lobby, reading an old science magazine:

[T]hinking about all the vast improvements in science and mechanics, flights around the world, rockets to the moon, sawdust into trees, plants into stone, refuse into gold, old age into youth, ugliness into beauty, man into God, William wondered why nobody had invented a process which would prevent him from sitting his life away in that chair, tired, dirty, hungry, and homeless.

A variant image shows a ragged man perusing the restaurant menu, a more overt statement about the neighborhood's destitute character than the version showing Jimmy the Barber and an assistant waiting for customers. What the photograph lacks in political bite it gains in emotional resonance. The fatigue and restlessness of these hapless people exemplifies the mood of the depression; it also presages the postwar alienation explored by photographer Robert Frank in his landmark book The Americans (1959).

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