Religion: The Bowery

Of Cardinal Hayes’s plans to erect a home in the Bowery, Manhattan, for homeless men, The Commonweal, sophisticated Catholic weekly, last week reported: “There is no other part of the great metropolis which displays so much of poverty’s backwash—tired women in frayed dresses of years ago, old men who capture a smoke from discarded stubs of cigars.” The home will be “a place for those who cling miserably to vacant seats on park benches, who sit all day in branch libraries reading endless newspapers, and who, sometimes, when fortune favors them, get a chance to carry huge advertisements for cheap trousers or tumbledown restaurants on their backs.”