Outposts of the Forgotten

Socially Terminal People in Slum Hotels and Single Occupancy Tenements

By: Harvey Alan Siegal

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Paperback | 30 October 2014

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236 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24 x 1.27

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The single-room occupancy (SRO) tenements and welfare hotels located throughout New York City, but concentrated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, provided housing for many of society's troubled, marginal members in the late 1970s, when this book was originally published. The predominant population of these buildings was old, non-white, unemployed, disabled, and in poor health. What distinguished this community, however, was not that it is was part of a ghetto or slum, but that it was composed of poor people living amidst affluence, combining elements of both the law-abiding and criminal worlds.

Institutionally, the SRO tenement world described in this book is seen as a half-way area between open society and the total institution. Without the support and control available in the SROs, confinement in a total institution would be a certainty for many of the residents. This book, a participant-observer journal as well as an ethnographic study, suggests an alternative to institutionalization.

As Edward Sagarin notes in his preface, Siegal does not lack compassion for the sufferings of the people, but the focus is on the descriptions of their lives. Outposts of the Forgotten documents the circumstances of some of New York's forgotten residents.

Industry Reviews

-The sociological study of s.r.o. (single room occupancy) hotels has been badly neglected. . . . The author's analysis of the forces that have shaped these communities of isolates and deviants is an important contribution to the s.r.o. literature.-

--B. Joyce Stephens, Contemporary Sociology

"The sociological study of s.r.o. (single room occupancy) hotels has been badly neglected. . . . The author's analysis of the forces that have shaped these communities of isolates and deviants is an important contribution to the s.r.o. literature."

--B. Joyce Stephens, Contemporary Sociology

--B. Joyce Stephens, Contemporary Sociology

"Outposts of the Forgotten is an ethnographic study of the social organization of welfare hotel tenants on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The author describes the economic and political history of New York City's welfare hotels, tracing their early development as a response to the need for cheap housing of unattached urban groups and their contemporary function as community half-way houses for the poor, the deviant, the socially marginal. Siegal argues that, increasingly, these hotels are servicing individuals whose former alternative would have been limited to custodially oriented institutions."

--B. Jouce Stephens, Contemporary Sociology

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