Book Reviews

Flophouse: Life on the Bowery

Random House, 160 pp., $24.95

Flophouse, which began as a radio documentary titled "The Sunshine Hotel" on NPR's All Things Considered, provides a look inside the rooms of four "lodging hotels" (the polite term for flophouses, according to the authors) on New York City's infamous skid row, the Bowery. Once home to almost 100,000 men in over 100 hotels, the Bowery's eight remaining flophouses now house less than 1,000 men. As the authors explain, each hotel is "part prison, part way-station, part shelter, part psychiatric hospital, part shooting gallery, part old-age home."

Isay and Abramson interview and photograph 50 men in four flophouses. In the White House Hotel, they profile Ted Edwards, from Room 369, who says, "Do you know Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness? I decided on nothingness, because my being wasn't being fulfilled in the way that I wanted it to be." In the Providence Hotel, Room 107, they discover (and photograph) "Dave," who is dead of an overdose. In the Andrews Hotel, they speak with the owner, Mike Gatto, whose grandfather was in the flophouse business. Gatto says, "If we could close up legally, I think every one of us would close up. Instantly." And in the Sunshine Hotel, they find 425-pound Anthony Coppolla in Room 4B, where he has been constantly for the past two years, since he grew out of his only pair of pants. Each man tells his own tale, and the results are utterly fascinating.