Hotel Neon: The Keller Hotel

Each time I pass by the old relic sign of the Keller Hotel, I almost have to convince myself it's the real thing.  That anything so ephemeral could survive on the radically transformed West Village waterfront seems incredible.  Where the once-bustling dockfronts degenerated into a post-industrial fantasy of seedy bars and abandoned piers backdropped by the rusting hulk of the West Side Highway, there are now luxury apartments girdled by the lush plantings of the Hudson River Park.  The change has been seismic, but this fragile relic remains. 

The Keller Hotel. (T. Rinaldi)

For me, the Keller's old sign is perhaps the single most evocative remnant of the waterfront's past life.  Its painted sheet metal has taken on an especially vivid patina, with faded hues of brown and beige that complement the old brick hotel from which it hangs.  Records at the Buildings Department indicate that the sign appeared here in 1933, the work of the Beacon Neon Sign Co of West Houston Street.  Its streamlined silhouette looks like an upside-down thermometer.  An angled neon arrow, gone now, once hung beneath it, pointing toward the hotel's entrance.

The Keller's sign may be the last surviving work of the Beacon Neon Sign Corp. (Manhattan Classified Telephone Directory, Fall-Winter 1931 / NYPL)

The building itself predates the sign, having begun life as the Hotel Knickerbocker in 1898.  When it opened, the Knickerbocker must have stood out as one of the more reputable hotels on this perennially gritty waterfront.  A modern, six-story building designed by the noted architect Julius Munkwitz, it contrasted sharply with the smaller, dingy flops that stood beside it.  

The Keller seen in 1929, at which time it operated as the Keller Abington.  (P.L. Sperr / NYPL)

Even in its heyday, the New York waterfront was a place most respectable people avoided except to board ferries or steamships.  This left a wide berth for bars, brothels and bawdy houses that catered to sailors and dock laborers, mostly single men.  One gets a sense for the scene in the 1928 film "The Docks of New York" (viewable in its entirety at YouTube). Set in the 1890s, the film partly takes place at a seedy saloon called the "Sand Bar", which had since been "wiped out by commerce and reform." 

Intertitle from the 1928 film "The Docks of New York".
 
The Sand Bar may have yielded to commerce and reform, but the waterfront generally resisted most attempts to clean it up.  As port traffic declined in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the once respectable Keller soon came to blend with the infamously disreputable hotels around it, eventually providing SRO housing for very low income persons.
  

(T. Rinaldi)

With the piers increasingly disused after World War II, the waterfront became even better suited as a refuge for various subcultures, particularly the city's emerging gay community.  The Keller's ground floor saloon is said to have become a gay bar as early as the late 1950s, anticipating many others that opened nearby in the ensuing decades.  In an age when homosexuality was considered about as far as one could get from mainstream mores, the Keller's old neon sign marked a portal into a world of "gross indecency".

1970s advertising for Keller's. (colorsofleather.com) 

The sign was still there in the '70s, by which time Keller's (as the bar became known) figured among a growing number of gay bars that clustered along the old waterfront.  Though more aboveboard than in previous decades, these establishments were typically somewhat less polished than the sashay-away gay bars of recent times.  A 1971 guidebook called "The Gay Insider: A Hunter's Guide to New York and a Thesaurus of Phallic Lore" described Keller's as "the oldest gay leather bar in town."   The internet provides a few spirited accounts of Keller's in the libertine years between Stonewall and the AIDS crisis (links below).  "When it was not so fashionable to be an out-of-the-closet homo-thug," recounts one, "Keller's was a place where men from the projects and their admirers could hang out on the 'down-low'."

The Keller sign, seen on May 7, 1940 (above) and on Sept. 19, 2009. (P.L. Sperr / NYPL; T. Rinaldi)

Keller's is empty now, "commerce and reform" having finally triumphed over the wayward ways of the waterfront.  The hotel shuttered around 1990, according to a 2006 story in the New York Times.  Work began on a (presumably luxury) residential conversion in 2004, but stalled soon after, leaving the hotel's old sign to linger on over the foot of Barrow Street. The place is now protected by the city's Landmarks Commission, which will hopefully help ensure that something good happens here, sign-wise at least. 

THIS IS THE FOURTH in a series of stories entitled "Hotel Neon," exploring the unique resonance of neon hotel signs in the American psyche. See also: 

• Hotel Neon, Part 3: The Cavalier Hotel

• Hotel Neon, Part 2: Hotel Neon
• Hotel Neon, Part 1: The Chelsea Hotel

MORE ON THE KELLER:

• The Landmarks Commission's incredibly thorough designation report on the Keller Hotel.
• NYT coverage of the Keller's recent suspended animation make-over: two stories, one from '06 and one from '08.  "The ghosts of the past breathe deeply here."
• Reminescences of fast times at Keller's, here, here, here, here, and here.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• Check out the new book Signs, Streets and Storefronts: A History of Architecture and Graphics Along America's Commercial Corridors, by Martin Treu.
• Via Project Neon - help save a landmark Roanoke, VA sign.

Hotel Neon: The Cavalier Hotel

In the lengthening late summer shadows of a hot August evening in 2006, the finely patinated sign of the Cavalier Hotel caught my eye.  I was en-route to the East River Water Taxi for some farewell photos of the grand quartet of smokestacks that stood over ConEd's Hudson Avenue power plant, three of which would vanish from the skyline later that year.  Plodding my way down East 34th Street toward the docks, I paused for two point-and-shoot photos of the Cavalier, then turned and headed for the waterfront.

The Cavalier Hotel, formerly at 200 East 34th Street, pictured in 2006. (T. Rinaldi)

The Hudson Avenue Power Station, pictured on the same day, with its Aquitania-like quartet of smokestacks, now reduced to one.  (T. Rinaldi)

The Internet has surprisingly little to say about the Cavalier, which seems to have opened as the 34th Street Hotel in 1901.  Walter Grutchfield compiled some details on the hotel's history back in 2003, shortly before it closed.  "It is still in operation," he wrote then, "but it is difficult to say to what extent it operates as a hotel in today's sense of the term."

200 East 34th Street in January 1939, seen through the shadows of the Third Avenue El. (NYPL)

Six years earlier, the Cavalier turned up in a short piece in the New York Times.  "21 Face Drug Charges in Midtown Hotel," read the headline.  The Cavalier, it seemed, had become a "stash house" for enthusiasts of such tasty treats as cocaine, crack, and heroin.  The story described one particularly irascible dealer who apparently plied his trade in the building's dim hallways:  "One night the man grew angry when a customer would not buy drugs and stabbed the customer and the customer's dog."  

200 East 34th Street today. (New York Budget Inn)

I went back to the Cavalier on a summer morning in 2009 to see if I couldn't get better photographs of its old neon sign.  Too late: it was already gone, together with the hotel's "flagrant illegal activity," and its dog-stabbing crackheads.  Today the former Cavalier Hotel is up and running again, as the evocatively named New York Budget Inn, a "newly refurbished budget-priced boutique hotel" that offers "the best price to stay in NYC that doesn't involve your buddy's futon."  Since it has no neon sign to beckon would-be guests, the New York Budget Inn has a suave, come-hither web site instead.  Like the sign, the web site's job is to draw in customers.  But unlike the sign, the hotel's internet presence leaves no physical trace on the streetscape.  It casts no red glow across the ceilings of the rooms within. 

THIS IS THE THIRD in a series of stories entitled "Hotel Neon," exploring the unique resonance of neon hotel signs in the American psyche. See also: 

• Hotel Neon, Part 2: Hotel Neon

• Hotel Neon, Part 1: The Chelsea Hotel

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• I am really enjoying the typeface for the 2012 London Olympics, and am fantacizing about seeing these letters rendered in neon.

• Have you been following Debra Jane's roadside blogging?

• Lascoff's sign is still hangin' in there as of July 31, 2012.

• By of JVNY, some old signs in Borough Park at the One More Folded Sunset Blog.

Hotel Neon

I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon.  I never felt sadder in my life.

                                                                     Jack Kerouac, On The Road, published 1957

 

The sign lured you.  Like a hard-sell street hawker, its job was to drown out the competition.  This is the best hotel!  Stay here!  Once inside, you begin to realize that the brightness of the sign spoke less to the quality of the establishment than to the management's eagerness to get your money.  Outside, the sign's radiance promised a safe, clean respite.  In the room it's a different story: almost like a bait-and-switch, the bright light of the sign piercing into your room actually denies you the rest it promised.  (Unless, of course, it wasn't rest you came here for.)  Your cynical side tells you you've been had, that the management cares more about packing in as many guests as possible than about providing anyone with a decent night's sleep.  Soon it's common wisdom:  only dopes and suckers fall for those flashy neon signs.  Eventually, the hotel managers catch on, too.  Better hotels ditch neon.  The old hotels that keep the signs are those whose patrons are too dumb or too destitute to care.

Catalog pages from Chicago Sign Sales Corp of Charlotte, NC (top) and Specialty Neon Lights of Minneapolis, MN (below), c. mid-1930s.  (American Sign Museum)

This was the general idea.  Sure, you could just pull down the shade.  But here, at these old hotels, neon signs became identified with capitalism's downside – unscrupulous commodity pushers bent on profit for profit's sake.  As mainstream hotels did away with neon signs, the less reputable hotels that kept the signs deepened the association.  Especially in declining American cities, such signs conjured up scenes of vice and vermin, violence, alcohol and prostitution, gunshots in the night, hourly rates, loud domestic quarrels overheard through thin walls, unsavory "transient" guests dealing drugs in dim hallways, dead bodies found in musty rooms, where buzzing, flickering neon signs beamed indifferently through dirty windows.   
 

Frames from "Fallen Angel" (1945, above) and "Sorry Wrong Number" (below, 1948).

How this image became so indelibly etched in the mindset of the American mainstream is almost as fascinating as the imagery itself.   Writers and film makers exploited it, reflecting and perpetuating the association over and over again until no bohemian existence was complete without at least one sleepless night at the hands of a sign - ideally flashing - out the window of a cheap hotel room.  The ever present blinking sign motif appears in film as early as 1931, with director Mervyn LeRoy's "Little Caesar"(though the sign depicted belongs to a social club, not to a hotel).  Used perhaps to greatest effect in the hotel scene in Fritz Lang's 1945 film "Scarlet Street," the flashing sign device conveys disquietude, or, like a highway alert sign, warns of danger ahead. 

Frames from "Desparate" (1947, above) and "Scarlet Street" (1945, below).

Early on, it is interesting to note, filmmakers used incandescent bulb signs for this part, seizing on their obsolescence to set a fringe mise-en-scène.  The transition to neon came in the 1940s, possibly beginning with Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler's seminal hardboiled crime novel of 1941. "I lay on my back on a bed in a waterfront hotel and waited for it to get dark," recounts the redoubtable Philip Marlowe:  "The reflection of a red neon light glared on the ceiling. . . . I thought of dead eyes looking at a moonless sky, with black blood at the corners of the mouths beneath them. . . . It got darker.  The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling."

Frames from "Thieves' Highway" (1949) and "Vertigo" (1958).

By the next decade, such vignettes made neon hotel signs an essential element of the film noir landscape, and of the bohemian iconography of demimonde characters such as Sal Paradise, protagonist of Jack Kerouac's beat novel On The Road.  From a tenderloin flophouse in San Francisco, Kerouac wrote, Paradise "looked out the window at the winking neons," after "a gray-faced hotel clerk let us have a room on credit. . . .  Then we had to eat, and didn't do so till midnight, when we found a nightclub singer in her hotel room who turned an iron upside down on a coathanger in the wastebasket and warmed up a can of pork and beans. . . .  I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life."

David Janssen, TV's "Fugitive," on the lam in 1963 (above). Joe Buck peers out from his room at Times Square's old Claridge Hotel in "Midnight Cowboy" (below, 1969).

Separated by due distance of time, all of this seems rather quaint today. In New York, most of those old divey flops of yesteryear have been born again as high-end condos and co-ops. Sure there are still cheap hotels and SROs, but they seem less notorious now, and old neon signs no longer count among their compulsory accoutrements. If we could find a dingy old hotel with such a sign, we might even stay there for nostalgia's sake, so that we could feel just a little bit like Sal Paradise, a died-in-the-wool bohemian.  In a roundabout way, the same negative connotations that once sullied neon's repute now add up to an appealing mystique.  Judge with caution today's pariahs; they may yet have the last laugh.

Jane Dickson, "Hotel Girl," 1982. (World House Gallery)

Sign for the musical "Rent", formerly hung from the facade of the Nederlander Theatre on West 41st Street.  The neon hotel as bohemian icon. (T. Rinaldi)

One of New York's last functioning neon hotel signs, at the Hotel Roger Smith on Lexington Avenue and East 47th Street. (T. Rinaldi)

THIS IS THE SECOND in a series of stories entitled "Hotel Neon,"  exploring the unique resonance of neon hotel signs in the American psyche. See also:

• Hotel Neon, Part I: The Chelsea Hotel

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• Photos and a brief story on New York Neon ran in last week's New York Times, in a great article by Aidan Gardiner. 

• Another media mention in Curbed in a story by Dave Hogarty.
• By way of the Lost City blog, a last look at the ruins of the Sokol Brothers sign in Carrol Gardens, Brooklyn.

Hotel Neon: The Chelsea Hotel

This is the first in a series of stories I intend to post under the title “Hotel Neon.”  These posts will explore the unique resonance of neon hotel signs in the American psyche. Each night as I came up out of the Seventh Avenue Subway, feeling worn and weary after long days at grad school, the Chelsea Hotel's big neon sign greeted me like a beacon of civilization, brightening the last leg of my trip home.  Then, one night last summer, the old sign went dark and didn't come on again.  It is still there, but has remained dim as the hotel undergoes its controversial renovation.  Last week, as scaffolding began to rise across the building's façade, I realized the time had come to take a good look at this especially significant sign, an icon among icons, and to petition the new management to treat it with due care as an important part of the historic building whose place it marks.  Looking west down 23rd Street at dusk.  (T. Rinaldi)  Like many prominent signs, surprisingly little is known of the Chelsea Hotel's three-story neon figurehead.  Old photographs suggest that it was at least the third illuminated sign to hang from the building's facade, having been preceded by two earlier "opal glass" incandescent signs.  The existing sign arrived in 1949.  My best efforts have thus far failed to identify its maker: records at the Buildings Department yielded an approximate installation date, but no fabricator.  My contact at Spectrum Signs, who oversaw the sign's maintenance for many years, couldn't tell me who made it, nor could Jerry Weinstein, the hotel's resident historian, or even Stanley Bard, who managed the hotel for decades. Before the neon sign went up in 1949, the Chelsea Hotel had these "opal" or "opalescent" glass signs, which were internally lit by incandescent bulbs.  The big vertical sign (above) was older, having been replaced by the more modest projecting sign (below) in 1931. (P.L. Sperr / NYPL; Berenice Abbott / NYPL) Since about 2006 the sign has been painted black, but before that, its original stainless steel channel letters and trim and maroon porcelain enamel panels remained exposed.  For whatever reason, maroon or burgundy porcelain was a favorite among New York signmakers of the '30s, '40s and '50s (the signs of the P&G Bar and the Brite Food Shop were prominent examples, and others can still be found at the Old Town Bar, Hinsch's Confectionary, Uptown Liquors, the M&M Pharmacy, and the defunct Wu Han Chinese Restaurant, to name just a few).  Three stainless steel bands over the "H" in HOTEL add a touch of streamlined class.  The lettering is matter-of-fact, HOTEL illuminated in understated white, CHELSEA in fluorescent pink, with a classic round-topped "A".   The old sign's maroon-colored porcelain and stainless steel accents remain beneath a coat of black paint.  Note the stainless steel trim over the "H" in HOTEL. (allvoices.com) When this installation first appeared here, big neon hotel signs like the Chelsea's could be found all over town.  As the years wore on, mainstream hotels did away with signs like these, leaving them to become associated with less reputable establishments that eventually devolved into flop joints, drug dens and whorehouses.  In the 1980s and 90s, the few neon hotel signs that remained in New York began to disappear as the old dives either spruced up or shut down.  By the time I began to survey New York's historic neon signs in 2006, only about a dozen authentic examples remained, and about half of these have disappeared since then. Rainy night in Chelsea: looking east down 23rd Street from the Chelsea Hotel. (Ross Savedge) The Chelsea Hotel never suffered the rough and tumble fate of many other hotels in New York.  Instead, as old hotel signs grew scarce, the Chelsea's stood out as a relic that embodied the spirit of the hotel's legendary inhabitants, whose ghosts seemed to be alive up there within those flickering neon tubes.  And, seasoned by the usual noirish connotations of seediness associated with other old neon hotel signs, the Chelsea's sign took on a multi-faceted appeal to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other sign in the city.  "It was there before I was," Stanley Bard told me of the old sign last year: "it was so iconic a sign, everyone knew it, so all I did was keep it there and not make any changes, just make sure it was safe and sound." The Chelsea's management featured the old sign on the hotel's business card until it closed last year. (Chelsea Hotel; T. Rinaldi). And so it was especially painful to see the sign go dark last year.  Likewise, it is especially important that it get the right treatment.  Yes, the building is landmarked, so the Landmarks Commission would, in theory, review any proposed work on the sign.  But signs have slipped through the LPC's review process before.  It would be a shame to see the scaffolding come down to reveal a squeeky clean new aluminum facsimile of the old sign, its 60 years of hard earned patina lost forever, something to point out cynically as a simulacrum of the overcleaning of the city around it.  Better would be for the old sign to emerge looking cleaned and repaired, but not replaced outright.  Maybe take it apart, clean the old porcelain and stainless finishes and put them back together again over a refurbished steel structure, afforded the same level of care one might give an old Cadillac of the same vintage, whose voluptuous tail fins might have swept beneath this old sign when it first came aglow on a New York night more than six decades ago.    Above: Outtakes from photoshoots at the Chelsea, 2008-2011.  (T. Rinaldi) IN OTHER NEON NEWS: • The latest installment on the Beatrice Inn sign restoration, from JVNY.