»Low Life / desuetude

"The Bowery itself had fallen into desuetude."
desuetude: "disuse," from desuetus, pp. of desuescere "become unaccustomed to,".

Re-reading Luc Sante's Low Life, an account of New York's nineteenth-century underbelly, has proven a mixed bag. I enjoy the anecdotes and historical tit-bits about ragamuffins, pick-pockets, houses of ill repute, and political antics; but I yearn for more, and perhaps even a highly-illustrated reference to the dissolute Manhattan of yesteryear. An edition replete with maps, historical documents, and larger prints of the photographs Sante already includes would be splendid.

In conjunction with my perpetual reading of Burrows's and Wallace's Gotham and of The Power Broker, Robert Caro's monumental biography of Robert Moses (the latter links to his typsecript comments, from The Bridge and Tunnel Club web site), books such as Low Life provide a more digestible, or at least more portable, account of Gotham's yesteryear.