Standing in a luxury hotel, cultural historian Luc Sante daydreams about the good old days of homeless alcoholics lighting trash fires in the streets of Manhattan's Skid Row.

"Over there, next to the flophouse hotel," Sante reminisced to the Guardian, "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 French have an elegant phrase for what Sante is doing. They call it nostalgie de la boue, "longing for the mud," which means a romantic yearning for a primitive or degraded behavior or condition.