”The Bowery, the infamous street of derelicts in New York, is a syndrome of human blight, waste and decay: misused and shabby men living in a stale tenement city - confusion. At the turn of the century, the Bowery was a high-life district; it has long outlived its reputation, with only faded memories of that kind of vitality remaining."

"For years the street has been a refuge for the marginal people - the homeless and friendless, the alcoholic, the dope addict, the mentally ill, the prostitute, the aged, the petty thief, the uneducable and unemployable…"

On The Bowery

is an exploration of this world, made by three young Americans, who set out to record the "essence of truth of the place". They have made a film of wonderful immediacy, unflinching before misery and ugliness, yet never without sympathy with the strange and tragic life which is its subject.