Luc Sante: ‘Money doesn’t kill people, but it changes the fabric of daily life’

The cultural historian on 19th-century New York lowlife, jazz age Paris and how cities are tamed by capitalism

Gazing out of the window of a smart hotel on the Bowery, a street once known as Manhattan’s Skid Row, Luc Sante is getting gently high on memory. “Over there, next to the flophouse hotel, is where Nan Goldin lived and worked. Forty years ago there were still lots of vacant lofts here that had been burlesque and vaudeville theatres during the era when storefronts were saloons. There were bars solely inhabited by bums, their heads down on the counter. At night they’d be lined up outside the missions and Salvation Army hostels – veterans from world war two, from the Korean war, from the Vietnam war. At night, trash fires would be lit in oil drums …”

The Belgian-born Sante is one of America’s most admired cultural topographers. He made his name with two books that exhumed half-forgotten, almost shameful New Yorks: Low Life (1991), a portrait of late 19th and early 20th-century tricksters, tenement dwellers, street-corner scammers and waterfront posses that celebrated the city as “a creature, a mentality, a disease, a threat”; and Evidence (1992), a collection of mysterious and sometimes haunting photographs of suicides and homicide victims from 1914 to 1918. In both works the proletarian metropolis was less a place of outcasts, of shivering masses awaiting the beneficence of social reformers, so much as a theatre populated by ragged-trousered existentialists and shapeshifters. Fans included Martin Scorsese, who later hired Sante as a historical consultant for his 2002 film Gangs of New York.

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