“In the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, no golf courses, no subdivisions. We thought of the place as a free city, where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter. Downtown we were proud of this, naturally.”

Writer Luc Sante’s relationship with New York has always been difficult. The above reflection is from the essay “My Lost City,” which laments the loss of his gritty, animated home city, a place that has all but disappeared in recent decades.

Sante’s best-known book, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, is a cultural history of dark New York between 1840 and 1900 culled from police gazettes, photographs, and accounts of legend, anecdote, incident, and eyewitness. The book colorfully documents New York’s immigrant-strewn floor of overflowing tenements, thieves, whores, murderous saloonkeepers, and the wild days and nights of the Bowery—the city then was a raucous, rabid breeding ground for modern New York. Notably, Low Life unsentimentally portrays the underclass of New York as they actually lived, not as a people marching toward a glorious industrial revolution—but like rats forces to battle disease, teeming garbage, and corrupt politicians. (Sound familiar?) Still, Sante shows that people had their fun and entertainment—it may have been dirty, but at least it was lively.

Luc Sante has an eye for the forgotten, the weird, the lost, and the disappearing. The tenements where he lived on the Lower East Side in the seventies inspired him to see not just decay, but New York’s mummified past. With Low Life and other writings about the city, Sante became known as a sharp documenter of the unseen side of New York as the city raced toward development and gentrification in the eighties and nineties. Despite Sante’s fascination with the lost and obliterated, his writing is ruthlessly unnostalgic. At heart, he writes about inclusion, allowing for busted dreams, bad luck, wasted ambitions, sordid entertainment—the mayhem of actual life.

Sante now resides with his wife, writer Melissa Holbrook Pierson, outside the city and its discontents, where he teaches writing and photography upstate at Bard College, though he says that New York is always part of his consciousness. The Believer spoke to Luc Sante through a series of email exchanges.

—Stephen Johnson

THE BELIEVER: In the essay “My Lost City,” you describe 1970s New York as a place of danger, authenticity, personality, and color—a city for outcasts.

LUC SANTE: All I know about 1970s New York City is that it’s where I grew up, and you always have an umbilical connection to the time and place...