I first became personally acquainted with Single Room Occupancy hotels when I got a job with a research service project operating in several of them on New York City’s Upper West Side and administered by the Department of Community Psychiatry at St. Luke’s Hospital. As the name implies, a Single Room Occupancy hotel is a hotel where a single individual occupies a single room. Sometimes the room is shared with another tenant, in which case SRO could stand for Standing Room Only. With even one occupant, standing room is about all that’s left in a room 10 feet by 17 feet.

In an era now hard to imagine, the hotels had been the posh residences of the rich, and evidence of their former beauty is still visible in some of the buildings: marble-paneled lobbies, tiled hallways, stained glass windows, and parquet floors. For the most part, the buildings have been left to decay for a variety of reasons: the high cost of maintenance, destructiveness of some tenants, and the general wear and tear of old age. It must also be remembered that many of the tenants are old and/or sick and are barely able to keep themselves together, much less accomplish even the basic housekeeping chores. More than one landlord has told me that to rehabilitate his building would cost over a million dollars!

A typical building is constructed on an H-shaped layout with four units on each floor, all opening onto the middle bar of the H. This bar houses the stairwell built around an elevator. Formerly each unit was a separate apartment; today they are broken up into as many as six or seven separate rooms, each housing a single individual. Each unit of six or seven has its own bathroom and kitchen facility which are shared by the tenants of the unit. The Department of Community Psychiatry at St. Luke’s has been working in various hotels since 1963, bringing social and health services to the tenants and developing a model for future programs. The project which I joined in April 1968 hoped to apply the methods and services from the model to a sample SRO population to research the demographic, social, familial, and personality characteristics of this population, and finally to evaluate the whole thing. I might add here that all of this data - our interpretations and recommendations -- are to be found in a two hundred page mimeographed volume lying somewhere on a dusty shelf. It is one more of those studies whose final impact lies buried beneath the broken spirit of its authors - unread, unheeded.

As part of my job I was assigned to live in one of the buildings selected for study. I lived there for a period of four months, gathering data and observing firsthand the effects and effectiveness of the program. I began taking photographs. A photographer is a little more real than a data-collector; that is, people can understand his purpose a little better and the photographs offer an opening for a relationship. As often as possible I made copies of the photographs to give the tenants. I was surprised to see what pleasure these gave. Most of the tenants had few belongings, and valuables were likely to be stolen. But a photograph was a treasure which could go with them from hotel to hotel, to the hospital, or to jail, or could help them to remember a friend after he was gone. Not everyone responded so positively. Some of the tenants who had small businesses going for them in the hotels (Sunday wine sales, dope, prostitution) believed I was an informer for the police and that photographs could be doctored to implicate them. Others were convinced that publication of the photographs would bring me fame and fortune and that they should be paid modeling fees. The owner of the building in which I lived became so suspicious of my picture-taking that he asked me vacate my room. I learned then what most tenants know: a tenant has no right to continued occupancy. (I suppose legally he does, but since the tenants neither know specifically what their rights are, nor how to pursue that course of action, the result is the same.) When the landlord finds a tenant’s presence no longer desirable, the unwanted tenant finds himself asked to move. If asking doesn’t work, locking the tenant out of his room is the next step. Not wanting to be locked out or to endanger the project in any way, I acquiesced and moved.

Landlords, in fact, did come under close scrutiny in the study, and in many respects their plight was as pathetic as some of their tenants. In many instances they are a kind of caretaker, acting as an intermediary with different agencies on behalf of the tenants. They are bankers, wardens, nursemaids. Ironically, many landlords were refugees from Hitler’s concentration camps. They survived the war to become caretakers of our society’s displaced persons. Most of the landlords manage their own buildings, and so, at least by day, they are imprisoned with the tenants, sharing their lives and conditions.

I worked directly with the St. Luke’s research project for three months. During the following summer (1968), I directed a film work-shop for the tenants as part of the program, and over the fall and into the next spring worked on two films about two people living in the hotels. Those were intense months. I still go back and back again. I have gotten to know many of the tenants of the three buildings in the original study, some better than others, and to those I am a frequent and welcome guest. In some ways I have come to think of the hotels as death ships, for after a fortnight’s absence I return to hear the news that still another friend, or someone I knew, has died. I have learned though, as they all learned long ago, to mourn the passing of friends silently with little fanfare. So no fanfare will be made for Edna Hunt, Muriel Cruz, Francis Brown, and a few others I knew well. It is to those three in particular that I dedicate this collection of photographs.

Many of the tenants sit idly waiting in their coffin-sized cubicles for the day when they will have to wait no longer. Some shorten the wait with drugs, some with alcohol. Television has been a blessing for those who can afford it. For others the violence of the more patho-logic in the buildings, or a fast-moving taxicab on Broadway provides the release. The quiet of idleness is broken by crashing wine bottles tossed from the upper stories to the inner courtyard below, and behind closed doors one often hears the shouts of rage, of love, or maybe just proof of life. On warm days the flow of life around them can be observed from Broadway’s island benches or hotel stoops, and then the waiting is more pleasant.

From time to time I see newspaper articles exposing the scandalous conditions of another welfare hotel. The copy runs about the same, wallowing in description of the decaying structures, decrying the waste of public funds in such "rat holes" of misery. For the most part they print the truth, but they miss the heart of the matter-the people who live there. I think my photographs capture them, and let each one shine out. I think a collection of such photographs might be a means of reaching others who might help to change these conditions. But there are a thousand and one causes begging for assistance and recognition: whales and war, drugs and disease, moon shots and abortions - so who can concern himself with a few sick and old people living in an SRO?

An intern made this point quite clear when one night a friend and I took old Sam to the hospital. Sam was so weak from sickness and lack of proper food he could no longer get out of bed, even to find a bathroom. A friend in the building had helped him as long as he could, but he could do no more. The room smelled of defecation and illness, and the landlord could no longer be responsible for him. So we took Sam to the hospital. The receiving intern refused to take him. The beds were full, but even if they hadn’t been, why should one without hope, without a future, fill a place that another might require one younger, a potential contributor to society, one with a future? Why should the doctor prolong a life such as Sam’s? Sam might as well die at home in his room and nature’s own good time.

So, at best, I would just like it known that they exist and that they are people too. Sometimes I think of what would happen if I worked all my life at jobs that paid a base living wage, with little or no security for retirement or disability. Where would I go, where would I live when I no longer had the means to maintain myself in my old age, or through a long illness-when friends didn’t know me, when I had outlived my family and my children didn’t care to know me, or I them? Would I too end up waiting out my days in a room the size of some people’s bathroom, waiting for my check to come to pay for it all, or would I open a window and just let myself fall?