“You haven't lived until you've been in a flophouse with nothing but one lightbulb and 56 men squeezed together on cots. With everybody snoring at once, and some of those snores so deep and gross and unbelievable dark, snotty, gross subhuman wheezings from hell itself. Your mind almost breaks under those deathlike sounds and intermingling odors of hard, unwashed socks, pissed and shitted underwear.
“And over it all, slowly circulating air much like that emanating from uncovered garbage cans. And those bodies in the dark, fat and thin and bent some legless, armless. some mindless. And worst of all, the total absence of hope. It shrouds them and covers them totally. It's not bearable. Those men were all children once. What has happened to them? And what has happened to me? It's dark and cold out there.”
– Nathan Smith, Manager of the Sunshine Hotel in the Bowery
John Rose, my great-uncle, lived in Brooklyn and worked on the New York Stock Exchange in the coffee market. My parents and I visited Uncle John on a couple of occasions when I was a young man. One time, my uncle took us to the Bowery – in the daytime and only on safe streets, mind you. Being from Scioto County, I had never seen anything even comparable. I could say the same about New York City as a whole, but that little excursion in the '60s through the Bowery was surreal.
A menagerie of down-and-out people crowded the streets – wandering derelicts, homeless addicts, drunks passed out on the sidewalks, bums begging money while washing windshields of cars with greasy rags, flim-flam artists selling items and running games of chance. The Bowery was alive – a buzzing, multi-racial beehive of a place of which I had no previous conception of existence. Those few hours made a deep impression on a rural boy. After the sensory overload, I came away with new perspectives.
All of the poverty and wretched humanity I saw in the Bowery that day made me so thankful for my simple life and my safe home in Lucasville, Ohio. Yet, as a old man now, I realize I was fortunate to view this squalid neighborhood in lower Manhattan – an existence so different and so much more desperate than mine.
Sunshine Hotel
I recently watched an Amazon documentary about a place in the Bowery that rekindled my memories of long ago. The name of the film is Sunshine Hotel. It is a unique look into lives of a forgotten segment of society.
For several months in 1998, David Isay and Stacy Abramson had unprecedented 24-hour access to the Sunshine Hotel, one of the last of the no-frills establishments – flop houses in New York.
“It was like stepping into King Tut’s Tomb,” Isay says. “The Sunshine is this fascinating, self-contained society full of unbelievable characters. While it’s a profoundly sad place, it is, at the same time, home to men with powerful and poetic stories.”
Just decades ago, flophouses in New York housed nearly 25,000 men living on the margins of society. Few remain. Filmmaker Michael Dominic heard David Isay's NPR segment and became interested in the making a documentary. He took his camera behind the doors of the Sunshine Hotel, “one of the few remaining affordable refuges for the destitute and out of luck, a world that has seemingly stood still for more than eight decades.”
Billed as “a slice of life many people don't see,” Sunshine Hotel is an unflinching, eloquent, and poignant look at marginalized lives of those left behind. The film is troubling but insightful as described here …
“Here the hotel residents live in tiny four-by-six-foot cubicles crowned by a ceiling of chicken wire. Focusing on several of the Sunshine’s denizens – including a drag queen saving all his money for plastic surgery and a hotel manager who doubles as its resident philosopher – Dominic presents a non-judgmental snapshot of a diverse group of characters as memorable as the characters at Harry Hope’s bar in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.”
(Michael Dominic (Director). Sunshine Hotel. Amazon Prime. 2001.)
Sunshine Hotel was the winner of many awards for documentary films.
Storyline
The following is a summary for Sunshine Hotel (2001) by Michael Dominic and Rob Rapley:
“The Bowery: for centuries it has been one of New York City's major arteries, in every sense of the word: a gritty and vital counterpoint to the theaters of Broadway and the mansions of Fifth Avenue. Traditionally a rowdy avenue of nickel museums and burlesque shows, by the beginning of the 20th century it had become America's most famous 'skid row', lined with flop houses, missions, and bars.
“Only a few decades ago, these flophouses served as a nightly refuge for 25, 000 men on the fringes of society: the poor, the wretched, the overwhelmed; some scoundrels, but more of them decent men whose luck had simply failed them.
“Today only a handful of the old flophouses remain, the rest having been swept away in an implacably rising tide of affluence. These flophouses are the last vestiges of a different time and a different city, and the Sunshine is one of them. At the Sunshine Hotel, nothing has changed in seventy or eighty years. The men still sleep in a warren of 4' x 6' cubicles called 'pigeon coops,' which stand only 7' high beneath 12' ceilings, covered over with chicken wire. The narrow gray hallways are lined with flimsy wooden doors. Behind every door you'll find a man, and a story.
“Michael Dominic’s documentary Sunshine Hotel takes us to one of the last of the flophouses that once teemed in New York’s Bowery. From a high of two hundred half a century ago, there are now only eight, housing tenants in cubicles with chicken wire instead of ceilings, tenants who cling to those cubicles as an escape from the reality few of us would be strong enough to face. Filmed anti-intuitively with a lush color saturation and elegant cinematography that adds a wistfulness to the stories of lives gone wrong and dreams that only prolong misery, it offers a unsparing look at what it means to hit bottom and stay there.
“The tour guide is Nathan Smith, long-time resident philosopher and the manager of the Sunshine. He has lived on the Bowery for some twenty years. Nate spends his days at the Sunshine in the 'cage,' as the front desk is called, or in his room, chain smoking, writing, trading stories, and dreaming of getting off the Bowery. An engaging and articulate man, he is the central character of Sunshine Hotel.
“Nate has the soul of a poet and the pragmatic viewpoint of a guy whose luck ran out a long time ago. He sleeps in the same bed where the previous manager blew his brains out and while he says that doesn’’t bother him, he does make a point of saying that he has changed the mattress. His piquant counterpoint is Ray. A desk clerk and former crack addict who copes with life on the skids by flinging barbed doses of reality out at whoever crosses his path, doses that hit the mark without doing the recipient much good.
In profiling the tenants,
“Dominic lets us get to know them the way he did, by listening to them talk about whatever comes to mind in a stream of consciousness that reveals much. There’’s Bruce, who pluckily approaches his job of running errands with all the intensity and planning of a commando raid. And L.A., a shell-shocked veteran who has become so uninterested in his own life that he talks impassively about stepping on a landmine in Vietnam.”
(“Sunshine Hotel.” Synopsis. IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0292261/plotsummary. 2001)
IMDb is an online database of information related to films, television programs, home videos, video games, and streaming content online
“I don't find myself in the common mold of interests, you know, that one would see. And, as a consequence, I see things a little differently than the other person. I don't quite see things the same way. I have a different perspective of things that I see, and that makes things difficult. I think in very simplistic terms. You wake up in the morning, you eat breakfast and you breathe in and out for the rest of the day … and at night you eat dinner, you go to bed, and perhaps you wake up the next day … if you don't croak during the meantime. Unfortunately, things have turned out not to be so simple.”
-- Nate Smith, Manager Sunshine Hotel
In 2012, filmmaker-photojournalist Michael Dominic gave this update:
“The Bowery is ever changing. Now it's on an upswing. On the ground floor of the Sunshine Hotel there is a new restaurant and an art gallery. It looks like they're planning another restaurant as well on the corner. As soon as the last of the tenants leave the Sunshine, I'm sure that they will convert the buildings into luxury housing.”
(“Updated: Q-and-A with Michael Dominic, director of 'Sunshine Hotel.” Ev Grieve. July 19, 2012.)
Bowery Afternoon
Drab discoloration
Of
faces, façades, pawn-shops,
Second-hand clothing,
Smoky and
fly-blown glass of lunch-rooms,
Odors of rancid life…
Deadly
uniformity
Of eyes and windows
Alike devoid of light…
Holes
wherein life scratches-
Mangy life
Nosing to the gutter's
end…
Show-rooms and mimic pillars
Flaunting out of their
gaudy vestibules
Bosoms and posturing thighs…
Over all
the Elevated
Droning like a bloated fly.
Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
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