Mazie Gordon, queen of the Bowery

Mazie Gordon-Phillips in 1946.
Photograph by Todd Webb / Courtesy Todd Webb Archive

Mazie

Mazie Gordon, queen of the Bowery

My hero: Mazie Gordon-Phillips by Jami Attenberg

Joseph Mitchell
December 14, 1940

Abossy, yellow-haired blonde named Mazie P. Gordon is a celebrity on the Bowery. In the nickel-a-drink saloons and in the all-night restaurants which specialize in pig snouts and cabbage at a dime a platter, she is known by her first name. She makes a round of these establishments practically every night, and drunken bums sometimes come up, slap her on the back, and call her sweetheart. This never annoys her. She has a wry but genuine fondness for bums and is undoubtedly acquainted with more of them than any other person in the city. Each day she gives them between five and fifteen dollars in small change, which is a lot of money on the Bowery. “In my time I been as free with my dimes as old John D. himself,” she says. Mazie has presided for twenty-one years over the ticket cage of the Venice Theatre, at 209 Park Row, a few doors west of Chatham Square, where the Bowery begins.

My hero: Mazie Gordon-Phillips by Jami Attenberg

 

Mazie Gordon-Phillips in 1946. Photograph: Todd Webb, courtesy of Evans Gallery
and estate of Todd and Lucille Webb, Portland, Maine, USA

My hero: 

Mazie Gordon-Phillips

 by Jami Attenberg

From the 1920s to the 1940s, the ‘Queen of the Bowery’ spent her nights walking alone in New York City handing out change to the homeless and helping the downtrodden

Mazie Gordon, queen of the Bowery

Saturday 13 June 2015

I

’ve lived in New York City for nearly two decades, and never have I seen it as slick and rich and indifferent as it is now. It has become a place where extremely affluent people merely rest their wealth, as if the city were an enormous velvet fainting couch. Often I find solace and inspiration thinking of a long-ago era, and a woman fiercely invested in her community, who loved her fellow citizens and these city streets with a passion, no matter their mutual crumbling state, or perhaps because of it: Ms Mazie Gordon-Phillips, known as the Queen of the Bowery.