But the Allerton was indeed the real thing, as an excerpt from Patti Smith's book Just Kids and newspaper headlines from its last years attest. "Chelsea residents have tried to stop the noise, crime, drugs and harassment they say come from tenants at the Allerton Hotel," wrote David Kirby for the New York Times after a murder took place there behind the flickering neon in 1998. "The victim . . . and the other man checked into a room at the Allerton Hotel at 3:10 a.m. Monday," reported the Daily News of that particular incident. The pair had apparently met at the legendary Limelight disco on Sixth Avenue earlier that night. "Cops believe they went to the hotel for a sexual liaison . . . They were there for less than 20 minutes when a loud argument broke out." One man was stabbed in the chest and abdomen; the other disappeared down West 22nd Street into the night.
The Allerton flickering away in the mid-1990s. (Gregoire Alessandrini / NYC in the 1990s)
The place was filled with derelicts and junkies. I was no stranger to cheap hotels. . . . There was nothing romantic about this place, seeing half-naked guys trying to find a vein in limbs infested with sores. Everybody's door was open because it was so hot, and I had to avert my eyes as I shuttled to and from the bathroom to rinse out cloths for Robert's forehead. . . . His lumpy pillow was crawling with lice and they mingled with his damp matted curls.
I went to get Robert some water and a voice called to me from across the hall. It was hard to tell whether it was male or female. . . . He had once been a ballet dancer but now he was a morphine addict, a mix of Nureyev and Artaud. His legs were still muscled but most of his teeth were gone. How glorious he must have been with his golden hair, square shoulders, and high cheekbones. I sat outside his door, the sole audience to his dreamlike performance, drifting through the hall like Isadora Duncan with chiffon streaming as he sang an atonal version of 'Wild Is the Wind.'
He told me the stories of some of his neighbors, room by room, and what they had sacrificed for alcohol and drugs. Never had I seen so much collective misery and lost hope, forlorn souls who had fouled their lives.
The horrors of the Allerton drove Smith and Mapplethorpe to seek refuge at another neon-crested hotel around the corner - the Chelsea Hotel - where things took a turn for the better.
By the late '90s, the 22nd Street Allerton had become a make-shift shelter for the city's Department of Homeless Services. Its crumbling neon sign made way for a nondescript replacement around 2003. The beleaguered old hotel finally succumbed a few years later, by then starkly out of place in a city that seemed hellbent on shaking off all traces of its wayward past with the fervor of a born-again zealot. The building was subsequently gut-renovated and reopened as the Gem Hotel, a boutique hostelry whose rooms offer "down pillows, free WiFi, flat screen TVs, coffee makers and free bottled water." Foragers Market, a "gourmet grocery store" on the ground floor, sells 45-gram packs of spaghetti for $7.99.
Walter Grutchfield notes that a remnant of the Allerton's old signage remains in place on the facade. One wonders if that old neon sign, had it survived just a few years longer, might have been kept around as a nostalgic gesture to bygone grime, now just a flickering memory.
The Allerton reborn, sans-neon. (T. Rinaldi)
THIS IS THE EIGHTH in a series of stories entitled "Hotel Neon," exploring the unique resonance of neon hotel signs in the American psyche. See also:
• Jeremiah's Vanishing New York visits the Allerton, here and here.THIS IS THE EIGHTH in a series of stories entitled "Hotel Neon," exploring the unique resonance of neon hotel signs in the American psyche. See also:
• Walter Grutchfield on the Allerton's origins.
• Gregoire Alessandrini's photographic timeport back to New York in the '90s.• A fantastic field guide to other backdrops from Just Kids by Alison K. Armstrong and Fiona Webster.
What a fascinating history and it is amazing the remnant of the neon sign is still there. I remember the Limelight and seeing that neon sign years ago. I had not idea what was really going on behind it all.
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