the origin of the phrase "mean streets"

Well we know that Scorsese titled a movie after this phrase - "Mean Streets", most commonly attributed to Raymond Chandler - genius writer, alcoholic, ex-pat Londoner - who once said something like "anyone who doesnt love LA is either sane or doesn't drink" - only the way he said it was way better, wittier. It has been posited that Chandler did not originate "Mean Streets" but may have remembered it from London literature of his youth. Here is an interesting excerpt from an article on the origins of this phrase - "Mean Streets" that I use to describe the lives of both everyday working people of the city of today in addition to those who our society has discarded and who are invisible.

The Origin of Raymond Chandler's "Mean Streets"
Journal article by Arthur Wrobel; American Notes & Queries, Vol. 7, 1994
The Origin of Raymond Chandler's "Mean Streets"
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither 
tarnished nor afraid." 
 From the rhapsodic closing pararaph of Raymond Chandler's 
essay on detective fiction, "The Simple Art of Murder" ( 1944 ), the expression 
"mean streets" has passed into common use as the sign of Chandler's hardboiled 
understanding of the dangerous, crime-ridden modern city. George Grella 
entitled his essay on hardboiled detective fiction, "Murder and the Mean 
Streets." Chandler's immediate heir, Ross Macdonald, played with the expres- 
sion in his essay, "Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go." After the Los 
Angeles riots, the Los Angeles Times headed its section on looting and burning, 
"Mean Streets." The expression is considered quintessentially "Chandler" and 
is a favored metaphor for urban crime and violence.1

In fact, the expression was not invented by Chandler, who may well have 
remembered it from its currency during his youth in London in the 1890s and 
early twentieth century--even, perhaps, from particular books he read in his 
youth. Moreover, "mean streets" at that time referred much less to crime than to 
the unproductive, unchanging banality of working-class London life.

Although the expression may have an even earlier origin, it was established 
in British cultural discourse by Arthur Morrison very popular Tales of Mean 
Streets ( 1894 ). (Beginning in 1891 Morrison had published the individual pieces 
in Macmillan's Magazine and W. E. Henley National Observer [Bleiler viii- 
ix].) This collection of realistic tales of London's East End quickly became a 
classic of late Victorian slum literature. G.K. Chesterton referred to it as "Slum 
Novelists and the Slums," a chapter of Heretics ( 1905 ). In the 1920s, Tales of 
Mean Streets was still deemed important enough to merit a Modern Library 
edition with a preface by H.L. Mencken, who cites the frequency of its being 
imitated and the permanence of its "note in our fiction" (xi).
"Mean streets" for Morrison implies the banality, lack of purpose, and 
joylessness of life in the East End. Although stark poverty is involved in several 
stories, and violence and criminality in a few, these are not the primary 
signification. All the men of the mean streets are decently employed in the docks, 
in the gasworks, in the few remaining shipbuilding yards. For their daughters, 
marriage is the unquestioned vocation: "domestic service is a social descent, and
little under millinery and dressmaking is compatible with self-respect" (xv). The
mean street is, indeed, respectable: "This is not a dirty street, taken as a whole"
(xxii). It represents, however, the "grim" culture of the urban working class.
Wholly separated from the world of affairs, their daily round a death in life, they
find "every day is hopelessly the same . . . here the colorless day will work
through its twenty-four hours just as it did yesterday, and just as it will
tomorrow" (xvii-xix). All the East End "can be more properly called a single
street, because of its dismal lack of accent, its sordid uniformity, its utter
remoteness from delight" (xxvii).2
Chesterton echoes Morrison phrase in his detective spoof, The Club of
Queer Trades ( 1905 ): "those really mean streets...those genuine slums which
lie round the Thames and the City" (28). Almost certainly by this time "mean
streets" had become commonplace to designate London's slums. Chesterton
plays with the accepted signification, and his usage, like Morrison's, most serves
a Romantic (and high bourgeois) critique of urban common life. His characters
argue that the deep slums, however grim, are not as "mean" as the typical
"plebeian places" of North London: "the real horror of the poor parts of London
is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict
it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs." In
the North London venues of respectable mediocrity, "civilisation only showed
its morbidity, and order only its monotony." The most significant meanness of
these streets is their "fourth-rate civilisation" (27-28).

Chesterton and Morrison were literary notables in the London of Chandler's
young manhood, publishing in the same periodicals that the aspiring man of
letters sought access to between 1908 and 1912 ( Bruccolixiv-xvii, MacShane
15-23). It seems plausible that he knew at least some of their work or at the very
least knew the term to which they had helped to give currency. That both writers
were detective writers adds interest to this discovery. Between 1894 and 1903
Morrison published stories ...