Found this book,

by a guy used to write for The New Yorker about bums and assorted oddities in the Bowery NYC circa 1938-1950. I am always reading about bums as if they were something to admire. I earn very little but my job allows me all the time in the world to read. Always have been an avid reader. Once, when I was ten my dad caught me reading by the light of the moon. Smacked me upside the head, and told me I was ruining my eyesight.

Up In The Old Hotel is a collection of articles. Each one a separate story focusing on a specific character. Like the Jewish lady who converted to catholicism and used to own along with her sisters a run-down movie theatre where poor people went to have a warm snooze. Some of them actually watched what was playing on the screen. She used to work the ticket booth when bored. About forty, she smoked three and-a-half packs of Luckies a day and consequently had a voice like a foghorn. SHUT THE FUCK UP! she'd holler, if the ticket line got unruly .

Miss Shapiro was her name. She wore bright red lipstick and chipped red nail varnish. She had a heart of gold, and after the theatre closed for the night she would go handing out nickels and dimes to people sleeping in doorways and under bridges. Every Sunday she would attend mass at a little church in Chinatown. The monsignor would sometimes stop by her ticket booth for a chat.

There is a tale here about a bearded lady. Another about a child prodigy. Then there is the saga of Captain Charlie's Museum for Intelligent People ( if my brother Kilo would charge 25 cents admission to his pack-rat apartment, he could be another Captain Charlie ) but the centerpiece of all these stories is the one about McSorley's Old Alehouse, a wondrous old saloon which motto was "Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies". Old McSorley believed a man could not enjoy a quiet glass of beer if women were present. Makes sense. Most bar-room fights originate over some woman. Beware the damsel in distress. McSorley's continues to do business to this day, although they had to start serving the fairer sex because of a city ordinance in 1970.

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McSorley liked to keep the lights dimmed to further relax the atmosphere, and in the icy cold of a November evening old geezers would warm their pewter tankards atop the wood stove. There was a free lunch of bread, cheese, and raw onions. Sometimes street urchins would sneak in and make off with a handful of bread and cheese, while Old McSorley looked on benignly. You could also order a burger from the cook. It only cost a dime in 1939.

If I could turn back the clock I would go there. This world is increasingly impossible for me. There's nothing here that I like. Young people irritate me particularly. They are all zombies of the hand-held device and I feel to be a figment of their imagination sometimes. Anyway I don't want them in my proximity. Not unless they're family or friends.

Which reminds me of another story in the book, one about a wonderful wino named, I forget the name. Let's call him Fledge. Fledge came from moneyed people in Boston, had a normal childhood and everything else. Went to Harvard and graduated Magna Cum Difficultum, in his own words. After graduation he spent the next fifteen years or so lolling about the house until his mother asked him what, if anything, was he planning on doing with the rest of his life?

He said mom, I plan to wander and ponder. Upon which his sainted mother told him to go wander and ponder some place else, as she was sick of seeing his face. So he went up to his uncle's farm in Canada where he proceeded to do just what he'd threatened. Until his uncle kicked him out also.

Fledge then gravitated to New York City where he found a job as assistant editor of the crime section of the NY Post but he only lasted a week, and then he wrote reviews freelance for the entertainment section, but he quit even that to devote himself wholly to writing his magnum opus, "Fledge's Oral History Of The World", based on his interviews with derelicts, petty thieves, old men feeding pigeons in the park and such. Fledge was getting a bit long in the tooth by then.

His money ran out, so he started sleeping where he could; railway stations, park benches. But he kept writing. Throughout forty years he accumulated 250  notebooks with his scribblings of "The Oral History", No publisher could decipher the manuscript, let alone publish it. Here and there noted literati praised Fledge in print, notably e.e. cummins, and the other guy, the Hemingway specialist....can't remember his name. I used to own a book of his about  the golden age of, of, the golden age of th' other writer fella drank himself to death. Had a wife named Zelda.

You know, just by turning 60 I've become a veritable authority on many subjects. I have forgotten more than I'll ever know. But Fledge, Fledge became a fixture around Greenwich Village; he'd get himself invited to bohemian parties where he would embarass himself by proposing to women half his age while imitating a seagull. And him a balding old scarecrow with protruding eyes, a shabby suit of clothes, and holes in the soles of his shoes. Those Greenwich Village bohos must have thought of him as their pet buffoon..

Then as now, it was modern times. Every store filled with the latest inventions, gimcracks and consumer products. Fledge despised anything new. The newest thing at the time was the radio, and of course he loathed the idiot babble that radio produced. The world used to be a quiet, tranquil place before radio came along. I shudder to think what he would have made of today's nasty, noisy planet earth and its rude inhabitants. Unless you find yourself by a remote lake in deepest Alaska. Or somewhere like that.

One day his mommy died and he inherited $1000. Didn't last him but a month. Every day he would go to McSorley's and buy beers all around. He'd give rolls of bills to bums in the street. Lastly he bought a brand-new $50 radio, walked out the store with it, jumped up and SMASH!-ed  it on the sidewalk splinters and fragments flying. That was the 1000 bucks gone.

There's a whole chapter in the book about the fish market, and about clam boat captains in particular. Tales from the bottom of the harbor. The author became an expert on all varieties of clams and expounds on their nutritional properties at length.

There's much, much more to Up In The Old Hotel.  I barely touch on a portion of it  I have enjoyed it so much I haven't finished reading it. Saving it for later. It is a long and satisfying 715 pages.

As a sad corollary, Joseph Mitchell developed writer's block and did not publish anything the last three decades of his life, although he continued to show up at The New Yorker every day. He would lock himself in his office for eight hours and nobody would hear the typewriter a-clack-clack-clacking. He'd just sit there, staring at the corner of the ceiling where a little spider lived.