Photos: Hardship and humanity in New York City’s Bowery flophouses

Since at least the 1930s, New York City’s Bowery was synonymous with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Single Room Occupancy</a> (SRO) hotels which lined its sidewalks. Homeless men could find cheap shelter in these “flophouses,” paying rent on a night-by-night basis or inhabiting them for the longer term. While the world immortalized in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHuYXEwCk_U" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Lionel Rogosin’s On The Bowery</a> still exists, in Manhattan, and other high-priced cities like San Francisco, it now has a swanky doppelgänger in the form of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/co-living-startups-turn-normal-2016-7" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">co-living startups</a>. Renting a bedroom with shared kitchen and bathroom access may sound fun to millennials, but long before they were <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/amp/Amid-high-housing-prices-companies-fill-demand-9228426.php" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">an expensive way to iterate friends</a>, SROs provided affordable shelter to people at the lowest rungs of society. In the late 1990s, photographer Harvey Wang <a href="http://niemanreports.org/articles/these-pictures-are-not-about-the-photographer/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">read the writing on the wall</a> as his Lower Eastside neighborhood transformed from working class to chic: <a href="https://timeline.com/new-york-bowery-flophouses-c21ee1062f1f">Read More</a>