Subways Are for Sleeping

by Edmund G. Love, Maria Gallone

Long on crust, short on cash ... here are true stories of people who live like kings on nothing a year.

Twilight People

Martha Grant wore no clothes in order to avoid eviction from her hotel room ... Sam Victor had six wives because he was too generous to limit himself to one ... George Spoker amassed a fortune from a bench in Madison Square Park ... Charlie Knutsen had no fixed address. He lived in other people's vacant apartments.

There are real people. They have no regular jobs, no normal homes. They live by their wits in the concrete jungle of New York City and they succeed at schemes that no one else would dare to try.

"Mr. Love brings compassionate humor, and rare knowledge to his unusual book. The overworked description off-beat takes on new meaning here."
—Saturday Review

Genres: Nonfiction, New York, Sociology

Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Mr. Love wrote 20 books, and his work appeared in many anthologies and textbooks on writing.

Subways Are for Sleeping (1957) was based on Mr. Love's experiences in sleeping on New York City subway trains when he could not afford lodging. Reading like a handbook for the homeless, it was "a humorous, pathetic and extremely interesting excursion into ways of life as strange to most gainfully employed citizens as those of Papua head-hunters," Orville Prescott wrote in his review in The New York Times.

Mr. Love's book Hanging On was the story of how his family survived the Depression in Flint. It was later used in classes on American history at the University of Michigan, where he had earned a bachelor's and a master's degree. Another of his books, The Situation in Flushing (1965), concerned a boy's love of trains in the early 1900s.

After Army service in World War II, Mr. Love headed the team that wrote military histories of the war in the Pacific. He then turned to freelance writing. His book War Is a Private Affair (1959) was called "the finest book of its kind since Tales of the South Pacific" by Charles Poore in a review for The Times.

As a reaction to leaner days, Mr. Love dined in more restaurants than most food critics do. Beginning in 1952, he systematically ate his way through a large number of the restaurants listed in the Manhattan Yellow Pages, from ABC Carol Downtown Health Foods to Zorba.

"Sometimes you end up in some pretty awful places," he recalled in an interview in 1973. "When I started I asked a cop in Penn Station for a recommendation. He told me to look in the Yellow Pages. I did and picked A La Fourchette, the first one on the list. I had such a good dinner, I tried the same thing the next week." Twelve years and $18,000 later, he said he had sampled 1,750 of the 5,595 restaurants listed. "I don't monkey with one-arm joints or luncheonettes," he explained.

Mr. Love passed away from a heart attack in his home in Flint, Michigan. He was 78 at the time of his death.

Reviews

[Craig Rowland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love wrote about the homeless people he knew, and those he met, who live precarious day-to-day lives in New York City. This was not a critical evaluation of the social services infrastructure or an analysis of the 1950’s economy that might have led these people to live on the streets or in otherwise dire circumstances. Instead, Love wrote exploitation stories about ten individuals, mostly men, who live unconventional lives outside of the standard domestic home situation. All of them love their lifestyles, however the blurb on the front cover is an exaggeration in that none of these individuals live like kings or queens. Those that do manage to live comfortably in hotels, like the women who are profiled whose daily existence depends on stringing along desperate men to pay their bills, reveal that if any of their suitors decides to up sticks, they’d be out on the street. Love does make the general observation that helps the reader understand why these “twilight people” choose to live the lives they do:

“All of them have built their improbable lives to furnish temporary security until they can achieve their goals. As time has passed, they have become attached to their way of life. It gives them real security. They become afraid to leave something they are sure of. To them there is more security in a home on a fire escape or in a job washing windows than there is in a furnished apartment or a regular job.”

As pulp exploitation stories, typical of the decade, I read every chapter with a grain of salt. No one’s life seemed believable as Love portrayed it. Love didn’t write about any of the hardships that would dispel the cover hype that these people lived like kings. For example, no king or queen would need to worry about the basic dignity of finding a toilet. Yet all of these people seemed to have lived like the Brady Bunch kids: on the show, their shared bathroom had no toilet. The frigid winters and tramping around outside in the rain–and then living in your wet clothing–were barely addressed. Just saying that the bums moved indoors during the winter was too convenient a way to convey that everything was okay.

Had these stories been accurate portrayals of life on the streets, I would have expected hundreds of readers to adopt the impecunious ways of these ten happy individuals. However, for all I know, maybe seventy years ago people did indeed do just that.

Love, who lived a transient life himself, gleaned useful information from the people he profiled and shared these tips with his readers. Homeless men revealed what subway lines were the best for long uninterrupted sleeps. They also shared tips on moving around during the day, such as hotel lobbies are not recommended places to hang out. If they stayed there, they were usually asked to leave after two hours. I had a chuckle when I read:

“Vagrants are rarely molested in New York museums and galleries. Shelby is apt to smile and say this is because the guards can never distinguish between a legitimate bum and an artistic one. They never disturb a person like him because they never know when they are trying to eject an artist who is holding a one-man show on the third floor.”

I worked in a public library for close to 42 years and from my first days there in 1982 was acquainted with the homeless patrons who arrived as soon as we opened and left at closing. This lifestyle was not new in the late fifties, as two chapters addressed the ideal locale of the library as residence. One man discovered that his requests for microfilm gave him an air of scholarship. The staff would happily set him up on a microfilm reader and leave him there all day. Often alone, he would sleep at the machine for hours, undisturbed. Others used the library to hang out:

“Only the other day a librarian in the New York Public Library called my attention to a young man and woman who arrived together about five minutes after ten each morning. In the library’s main reading room they devour volume after volume with obvious hunger. The library has become, in a way, their home. They explore its intellectual resources and make use of the library’s other facilities–they groom themselves in the washrooms, talk together quietly in the little nooks. One watches while the other sleeps. At a quarter to ten each evening they leave.”

When I was still working at the library I had a laugh at the double-entendre of a misguided poster campaign. The main text read “Live at the Library”, where the first word is the adjective, indicating events that took place “live and in person” on library premises. However, I didn’t read it that way when I first saw the posters. I interpreted the first word as a verb, giving meaning to Love’s chapters as an invitation for vagrants to come on down to the local library and set up home.

Subways Are For Sleeping is a historical relic that romanticized homelessness while simultaneously giving the finger to all those who actually have to pay a monthly rent. I don’t expect any reader would buy the cover hype that living on a fire escape and bathing in a library bathroom qualifies as living the life of a king.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Runyonesque' is the best way to describe these vignettes of marginalized people in 1950's NYC. And that adjective also explains why someone thought the stories would be a good basis for a Broadway Musical (they weren't).

[Vic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a deep dive into the intricate lives of the twilight people. It revived a childhood feeling of when I’d make fine cuisine out of grass and dirt, or being in a remote little spot away from the adults and made it my home. That feeling of creativity straight from your noggin, no replicas. Quite extraordinary for this book to bring that out of me, been a while.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't have a chance to finish this book, but I really enjoyed the anecdotes about bizarre personalities living in NYC in the 1950s. The author writes in an easy, entertaining manner, and his subjects are worthy of their own novels.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, an absolute treasure from a bygone era when the NYC subway was only 15 cents.
The common thread among each unique character was a reinforcement that I'd never ever be organized enough to get by in New York City without any money.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating! Written quite some time ago but still very relevant.