Booze and Bowery Legends: The Rise of 'Sammy’s Bowery Follies', Manhattan’s Grittiest Dive

Some bars sell drinks. Others sell a story. And then there are the rare ones that quietly sell an entire city back to itself. When Sammy Fuchs opened Sammy’s Bowery Follies at 267 Bowery in 1934, he probably did not sit down with a business plan that said invent living social anthropology with a side of whiskey. But that is more or less what happened.

The Bowery at the time was not trying to impress anyone. It was noisy, grimy, exhausted, and entirely uninterested in being charming. Men slept in flophouses or did not sleep much at all. Missions handed out soup and scripture. The pavements were permanently sticky with the residue of spilled drink, old rain, and regret. If New York had a place where it kept its rough drafts, this was it.

Sammy looked at all this and thought not “problem” but “ambience”.

The Bowery was already doing the work

By the time Sammy opened his doors, the Bowery had been famous for decades, although fame is perhaps the wrong word. It was notorious. Reformers wrote about it. Photographers pointed their lenses at it. Middle class New Yorkers spoke of it in lowered voices, as if it might catch.

During the Great Depression, the Bowery absorbed wave after wave of men who had run out of options. Farm labourers. Dock workers. Clerks who had once worn ties. It was a place where people ended up rather than arrived. Bars were plentiful, cheap, and entirely without illusions.

Sammy did not try to civilise any of this. He simply gave it a stage.

Sammy Fuchs, impresario of the unpolished

Almost nothing concrete is known about Sammy Fuchs before 1934, which somehow feels appropriate. He steps into the record fully formed, like a vaudeville character introduced mid scene. What we do know is that he understood people, and more importantly, he understood crowds.

At Sammy’s Bowery Follies, the regulars were not background noise. They were the attraction. Over time, a cast assembled whose names alone suggested that something theatrical was going on.

Prune Juice Jenny.

Box Car Gussie.

Tugboat Ethel, widely and grandly known as the Queen of the Bowery.

Were these their real names. Almost certainly not. Did that matter. Absolutely not. At Sammy’s, a good nickname was better than a birth certificate.

Sammy kept these characters well fed and well lubricated. Drinks appeared. Plates of food materialised. In return, they provided the atmosphere tourists could not stop talking about. One regular reportedly said, “Sammy never asked us to perform. He just made sure we stayed.”

The photographs taken inside Sammy’s look uncannily like how a song by Tom Waits sounds. Wry. Worn. Slightly crooked. Full of humour that has seen things and lived to laugh anyway.

The monocle incident

Then came the monocle.

Sometime in the early 1940s, a British aristocrat wandered into Sammy’s, allegedly wearing a monocle and very little in the way of expectations. He was bored with uptown clubs and curious about the Bowery, which in itself tells you something about the era.

Instead of recoiling in horror, he stayed. He drank. He watched Tugboat Ethel hold court. He had, by all accounts, a marvellous time.

For Sammy, this was a small lightning bolt moment. If a monocled lord could enjoy the Bowery in its natural habitat, then so could other people with expense accounts and a taste for novelty. The trick would be not to clean the place up too much. Nobody wanted that.

From dive to destination

Sammy applied for a cabaret licence and promptly leaned into nostalgia. A small stage appeared. Ageing vaudevillians were brought in. The bar adopted a Gay Nineties theme, which was less about historical accuracy and more about cheerful anachronism.

Ragtime music filled the room. Performers who had not heard applause in years suddenly found themselves centre stage again. Sammy cheekily branded the place the Stork Club of the Bowery, a joke that worked precisely because everyone understood the reference.

What followed was one of New York’s more improbable social experiments. Society figures arrived in evening wear. Sailors on shore leave arrived in uniform. Bowery regulars arrived as they always had. Everyone drank together.

A debutante in an opera gown might find herself singing alongside a man who slept in a doorway three blocks away. Nobody blinked. Nobody apologised. For an evening, the city’s rigid social rules were politely asked to wait outside.

Enter Weegee, flashbulb in hand

It was only a matter of time before Arthur Fellig showed up. Known for crime scenes, midnight fires, and faces caught at their most unguarded, Weegee recognised immediately that Sammy’s had everything he cared about in one room.

He photographed tuxedos and tatters with the same ruthless honesty. His images show people mid laugh, mid song, mid drink, stripped of pretence by flashbulb light and shared emotion. Nobody looks particularly glamorous. Nobody looks ashamed either.

Weegee liked the place so much he held book launch parties there, which is about as Weegee as it gets. Art critics and photographers mingled with Bowery regulars who could not have cared less why the camera was there, only that it kept flashing.

Weegee once suggested that Sammy’s was easier to photograph than polite society because nobody there was trying to be anything other than what they were. In his pictures, that comes through clearly.

A tourist attraction with rough edges intact

By the end of the Second World War, Sammy’s Bowery Follies was serving roughly 100,000 customers a year. Tour buses queued outside. Guidebooks recommended it with a mixture of fascination and mild alarm.

People came to sing with hobos, drink with Tugboat Ethel, and experience the Bowery without committing to it long term. Critics argued over whether this was exploitation or celebration. Sammy, characteristically, ignored both camps and kept the drinks flowing.

What everyone agreed on was that the place felt alive. Unpredictable. Slightly chaotic. Exactly the opposite of the increasingly polished city rising around it.

Closing time

Sammy Fuchs died in 1969. Without him, the delicate balance he had maintained simply evaporated. In 1970, Sammy’s Bowery Follies closed its doors.

More than 700 people turned up on the final night. Some had visited once out of curiosity. Others had spent years there. The photographs from that evening show laughter, tears, and the shared understanding that something peculiar and unrepeatable was ending.

The Bowery grows up

Today’s Bowery is sleek, expensive, and carefully designed. Flophouses have given way to boutique hotels. Art galleries have replaced missions. The street has, in the language of urban development, improved.

And yet, something was lost along the way. Sammy’s Bowery Follies belonged to a moment when cities were less concerned with image management and more willing to let their contradictions sit at the same bar.

Sammy did not invent the Bowery. He simply recognised that it was already a show and sold tickets to the front row. His bar reminds us that the most interesting places are rarely tidy, often uncomfortable, and usually funny in ways you only notice afterwards.

Sammy’s was not just a bar. It was New York, slightly drunk, singing too loudly, and very much itself.

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