This remarkable exploration of the underbelly of New York City life from 1880 to 1930 takes readers through the city's inexhaustible variety of distinctive neighborhood cultures. Slumming in New York samples a number of New York "slumming" narratives--including Stephen Crane's Bowery tales, Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods, Hutchins Hapgood's The Spirit of the Ghetto, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven--to characterize and examine the relationship between New York writing and the city's cultural environment.

Using the methods of ethnicity theory, black studies, regional studies, literary studies, and popular culture, Robert M. Dowling reveals the way in which "outsider" authors helped alleviate New York's mounting social anxieties by popularizing "insider" voices from neighborhoods as distinctive as the East Side waterfront, the Bowery, the Tenderloin's "black Bohemia," the Jewish Lower East Side, and mythic Harlem.

Robert M. Dowling is an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University.

Acknowledgments   vii
Introduction   1
1. "Under the Bridge and Beyond": Helen Campbell, Jerry McAuley, and Ernest Poole on the East Side Waterfront   19
2. A Culture of Contradictions: Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, and the Transformation of the Bowery   48
3. Marginal Men in Black Bohemia: Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson in the Tenderloin   79
4. Realism in the Ghetto: Jacob Riis, Hutchins Hapgood, and Abraham Cahan on the Lower East Side   110
5. "Nigger Heaven": Carl Van Vechten, Claude McKay, and the Construction of Mythic Harlem   139
Epilogue: The City Turned Inside Out   171
Notes   177
Bibliography   181
Index   191
Illustrations follow page 78