Down and Dirty : LOW LIFE: Lures and Snares of Old New York, <i> By Luc Sante (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $27.50; 414 pp., illustrated)</i>

When Jacob Riis’ “How the Other Half Lives” appeared in 1890, no one thought the title promised a sort of late Victorian Life Styles of the Rich and Famous. Book buyers could assume that “Other Half” meant the poor. It wasn’t just the arithmetic--other half --but the announced category-- other half.

Placed on display as so shockingly foreign that it became both an exception and a rebuke, “The Other Half” paradoxically confirmed our most cherished myths of classlessness: We assumed it was an aberration, even if it was conceivably a half. Half of what? Surely not of us .

We, by the way, were--and are--the great middle class, the only class whose members think they don’t belong to it. We are the classless ones. We tend to think of lowlife in the same way the rubberneckers described in Luc Sante’s book do, as something picturesque and exotic.

Sante’s title says it all: “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York.” In fact, enterprising low-lifers, as Sante shows, have long made a business of guiding middle-class tourists through such lures and snares--or pasteboard versions of them--on foot, by bus, and above by the relatively safe means of salacious guidebooks, whose warnings of places to avoid often are invitations to partake in disguise. In this way, the picturesque quality of the other half in “Old New York” becomes a mask: It gives back to the spectator exactly what he wants to see, calling to mind Henry James’ complaint about Dickens’ inability to portray the poor as anything but quaint and droll. (He was wrong, of course.)

Therefore, one approaches a book titled “Low Life” with trepidation. Do we detect another tourist slumming in the rubble? Not to worry. Sante is not only self-consciously sensitive to such charges, he also very correctly points out that in New York the history of slumming among the low is part of the history of the low itself; after all, for whom else were the lures and snares set? Among the many virtues of Sante’s fine book, not the least is his ability to show both the theatrical side of New York’s lowlife--a side it devised in semiconscious complicity with its voyeurs--and the very real squalor, terror and misery sliding just beneath the stage sets.

“Low Life” is also a hommage to New York City, which Sante calls “a city and . . . also a creature, a mentality, a disease, a threat, an electromagnet, a cheap stage set, an accident corridor” and “an attraction-repulsion mechanism so extreme no one could have made it up.” In other words, it is a novel. And like a novel, as Sante points out, “the lure of the new is built right into its name.”

Sante, a Belgian immigrant who himself lived in squalor on the Lower East Side in the 1970s, attracted by its “exotica and frisson,” not to mention its bargain rents, soon became curious about the history of his “miserable neighborhood” with its airless tenements, crumbling plaster, hard drugs and uncollected garbage. His thesis is that although New York always destroys its past, still there exists an underground tradition as elusive but as real as a subterranean river or odor, that involves “perpetual responses to forgotten stimuli”:

“Streets or neighborhoods that acquired a bad name by being associated with Federal-period garbage dumps or Dutch tanneries or stagnant ponds long since paved over continue to bear a stigma. No one at all remembers the tannery, but it was succeeded by a rookery, then by two generations of tenements, and then by a housing project, which has now gone to seed. The project’s decay is in some measure a consequence of the odor of that tannery. Such is the work of the city’s ghosts.”

Sante carefully distinguishes his book from an exercise in nostalgia on the one hand and a work of “hard” history on the other. In fact, it is both an exuberant poem of praise for lost New York and an essential mine of information for anyone interested in New York’s past. It brings together facts and anecdotes available only piecemeal in other books, some out of print and difficult to find, and it ferrets out some of the city’s darker secrets, ones that our 19th-Century ancestors often found unmentionable.

Throughout, Sante manages to illustrate the paradox he cites in his “Note on Sources” at the end: that although history is another planet, there is nothing new under the sun. Just as 19th-Century America had its health-food fads, vegetarians and communes, so 19th-Century New York had its drug problem, its riots and muggings, its poor in airless rooms, and its gangs. Sante points out that the chief social unit of lower Manhattan was the gang, and he doesn’t note (though surely he noticed) that their names sound as if they could have been invented in the punk clubs of New York or Los Angeles of the late 1970s: The Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Roach Guards, the Swamp Angels, the Whyos.

Amid the overflow of information and names in this book, Sante sometimes overwrites. New York from the air looks like “a silhouette of a right whale” or “a smelt in a pan,” or, descending toward cliche, “a bed of nails, a forest of peaks, a mesa of terraced, carved, eroded formations run through with canyons.” Such spasms of metaphor occur usually at the beginnings of chapters, but become blessedly infrequent once the book gains momentum.

Incidently, instead of such glutinous description, one good map of the city would have been immensely helpful for this book--that is, one more functional than the charming but illegible 1856 map reproduced on the endpapers.

I should also mention that the captions for two of the illustrations beside Page 352 are transposed.

The illustrations themselves are good, but more of Jacob Riis’ haunting photographs--and more of the striking NYPD evidence photos which Sante unearthed--would have been even better.

As a writer, Sante is best when he lists--not like a ship but like an epic poet. When he gets going, his writing is a cacophonous poem of democracy and greed, like the streets of New York themselves, lists of goods, services, temptations and horrors.

“Night,” the final chapter, is especially moving, and beautifully written. Sante never mentions the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his book, but Bakhtin’s notion of carnival is everywhere here--that is, the idea of the low parodying and overturning the high. In “Night,” this takes the especially nasty form of all the writhing horrors of the city’s history come back to life and crawling from their forgotten cracks and tunnels, reeking of everything but nostalgia. They gouge out our eyes with picturesque levity.

The terrors of history, Sante shows, are sometimes indistinguishable from the terrors of the present.