One of my favorite Joseph Mitchell New Yorker pieces is the 1940 article, “Mazie” (subscription required), which profiles a doyenne of the Bowery, a movie-theater ticket seller who treated the riff-raff of the downtrodden strip with a mix of tough love and kid gloves. I recently found her 1961 obituary on the New York Times site. The opening:

Bowery Mourns Mazie Phillips, Faithful Friend of Derelicts–She Was “Over 21”–Mazie Phillips known as the “Queen of the Bowery,” died Monday in Lenox Hill Hospital after a long illness. She lived at 18 Monroe Street on the Lower East Side with her sister, Mrs. Jean Hallen, a widow, and always gave her age as ‘over 21.”

For more than 65 years, Mazie, a platinum blonde with a husky voice, passed out advice (“Go take a bath, you bum”) money (“That’s a real quarter now”) and sympathy (“You got the makins of a great man”) to every Bowery derelict who would pause and listen.

Mazie dispensed the advice, money and cheer day and night on the streets of the Bowery, and most particularly from behind a cashier’s cage at the theater on Park Row.

She was known and liked in the Bowery and yesterday, Harry Baronian of the Bowery News said there were men sitting on doorsteps, ignoring their tattered clothes and other discomforts and lamenting her death. Some drank to her memory, he added, as she had often done for others.

The “Gentlest Heart”

The children of the Bowery will miss her, too, in their own way. They looked for the lollipops she carried in her pockets and she looked for the children, enjoying the jest of first saying she had no more.

But why did she help those in the Bowery? Her sister said yesterday that there was no real reason, “she just had the gentlest, kindest heart of anyone.”

Mazie did not believe, however, that the men of the Bowery could be helped by organized charity.

“I’m not out to knock missions or such,” she once said, “but you aint goin’ to get a bum in a mission if there’s a gutter to sleep in.” But she denied a report that she had once lured some men out of a mission by waving a bottle of whisky outside.

Mazie Was Buying

“All I did,” she remarked, “was to go in the King Kong Saloon and pass out the word that the drinks was on me.”

It is not clear just when Mazie arrived in New York, but it was probably around 1890. She was born in Boston, and her sister recalled that Mazie was a “quiet, very demure little girl” when she left for New York.

Shortly after, she became a familiar, friendly face in the ticket-seller’s cage in front of the old Venice Theater at 207 Park Row, where the Bowery and Chinatown meet.•