When I was in my 20s and I first moved to New York, I found this book about the history

of the city, or a particular period of it, the kind of late 1870s, that just captured

my imagination.

There's one section in particular that I have always remembered, and it was about a street

called the Bloody Angle, Doyer Street in Manhattan, it's in Chinatown, and it was a place

where former boxers opened saloons, where gangsters wore chainmail and carried hatchets and

had epic battles.

It was where Irving Berlin once worked as a singing waiter at a dive bar.

After I read the book, I would go out of my way to walk down Doyer Street whenever I was

in Chinatown, because walking down this short little crooked street, I could imagine all

the people that had lived there, what their lives had been like.

It turned the city into mythology.

That book was called Low Life.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Low Life was a deep inspiration for the early days

of Alice Obscura.

And through Low Life, I could see New York as not a place dominated by the Empire State

Building or Times Square, but as a place where every little street, every little building

was alive with small, personal, strange, fascinating stories.

Just had to take the time to look for them.

I'm Dylan Therese, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible

and wondrous places, and today on the podcast, it is my true joy to speak with the author

of Low Life, Lucy Sont.

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