![]() ![]() Eviction became a complicated procedure, and real-estate developers have had to contend with these holdouts ever since. But the men clinging on in the remaining hotels were protected by housing laws that gave them the rights of permanent residents. In the 1990s, change came to the Bowery, and most of the old flops were developed into restaurants and hotels. They became the primitive dwellings of desperate men who gradually saw no benefits to ever checking out. The Alabama Hotel, the Grand Windsor Hotel, the Providence Hotel - their cell-like stalls had chicken wire rather than ceilings, and they cost pennies per night. Dozens of these establishments date back nearly to the Civil War. Lodging houses like the Whitehouse Hotel, which sits at 340 Bowery and opened in 1916, were all over New York’s Skid Row. He blurs through more: a jazz ensemble featuring trumpet and upright bass a drummer in the flurry of a solo. The elegant silhouette, formed with one continuous line, depicts a saxophone player. While rooms across the street at the Bowery Hotel cost around $400 a night, the men pay no more than $8.50 for their cramped cubicles, though they pretty much have the run of the place.Īs Sir Shadow hums for inspiration, his slender hand strikes a sketchpad with a silver marker and swirls deliriously, never leaving the page, as though he were signing a signature. The crumbling four-story building is one of the last of the cheap single-room-occupancy hotels that lined the Bowery a century ago alongside brothels and saloons and defined the area as a symbol of urban despair. ![]() Sir Shadow is one of six men who are the final residents of the Whitehouse Hotel. And a lullaby can be heard through the building when a 70-year-old poet and artist who calls himself Sir Shadow draws at night. A few of these cubicles are occupied, stuffed with clothes and belongings. Dark halls are lined with hundreds of boarding rooms empty except for worn mattresses. Dusty, unused keys hang behind a reception desk. Radiators hiss in its cracked tile floor lobby. Rowdy brunch crowds stumble past its stained-glass windows and locked double doors. There’s a ghostly old flophouse on the Bowery. ![]()
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