BOWERY MOURNS MAZIE PHILLIPS Faithful Friend of Derelicts Dies—She Was ‘Over 21’ -. - Published: June 11, 1964 | 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 sis- ter, 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 to listen, Mazie dispensed the advice, money and cheer day and night on the streets of the Bowery, and most particularly from be- hind a cashier’s cage at a thea- ter on Park Row.She was known and liked in the Bowery and _ yesterday, Harry Baronian of The Bowery News said there were men sit- ting on doorsteps, ignoring their tattered clothes and other dis- comforts and lamenting her death. Some drank to her mem- ory, 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 lolll- pops she carried in her pockets and she looked for the children, rita el the jest of first say- ing 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 any- one.” Mazle did not helieve, how- ever, that the lost men of the Bowery could be helped by or-|. ganized charity. “I’m not out to knock mis- sions 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 word that the drinks was on me.” It is mot clear just when Mazie arrived in New York, but it was probably about 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cage in front of the old Venice Theater at 207, Park Row, where the Bowery and Chinatown meet, The theater has since been replaced by apartment buildings. Mazie's sister, Rose, and her brother-in-law, Louis Gordon, owned the theater. She worked there until the early 1940's, when the theater was sold, The source of her income had been something of a mystery since then, but her assistance to derelicts never wavered, Private Night Patrol Mazie would often walk the streets of the Bowery on late! winter nights, a collection of) bracelets dangling on her arms, a big floppy hat on her head, and a stick in her hand to poke the derelicts sleeping in, the streets. She would tell them; to get out of the cold. |