Walk

While I was there absorbing the atmosphere and drinks, a midget walked in. . .he was about three and a half feet. I invited him for a drink. He told me that he had just arrived from Los Angeles, where he had been working for Brown & William's Tobacco Co., walking the streets dressed as a penguin. The midget was flush and started buying me drinks. He proudly showed me his social security card, told me that he was thirty-seven years old, was single as the girls only after money, that once in a while he got some affection, but had to pay for it. . . .After the seventh round he got boisterous and offered to fight any man his size in the house. Sammy grabbed the midget and threw him out through the doorway which has a red neon sign saying “Thank you, call again,” hollering at him not to ever come back again. Sammy’s has a blacklist just like Billingsley’s Stork Club uptown.-- Naked City by Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Dacapo Press.

The ground floor contains one of the Bowery’s many kitchen supply stores. The upper floors look like they are being renovated--or dismantled. Bars had more or less left the Bowery by the early nineties (there was Pheobes, and CBGB’s, and Bowery Bar but nothing I can remember below Houston). Now they are coming back, upscale joints to go with the condos. There are a couple of missions left on the Bowery, but it takes a feat of imagination to conjure the world of the “poor mans stork club.”

Update: On October 5th, 2005 The NewYork Daily News ran a story by Elliot Rosenberg called "Last Stop Before Oblivion: Sammy's Bowery Folliers" on the last days of Sammy's on the Bowery and the aging vaudville performers who performed there. Great stuff.