Mean Streets

Abstract

Abstract The old expression mean streets signifies the worlds of urban poverty. It is another term that takes the trope of city streets, with all its negative connotations, to stand for exposure to the cruelties of poverty. The meanings of mean streets emerged primarily with reference to the nineteenth-century classic slums of English and American cities and to an older type of skid row of transient but employable men. In this century its meaning was transferred to the poverty of utter despair, to the crime, violence, and drugs in black and Latino ghettos, and to the condition of homeless and often mentally ill men and women on American city streets. Mean streets is the thought behind this chapter mainly in the older sense of Manhattan’s classic slums and the intersecting social worlds of transient and often homeless men and women on the Bowery.