SRO : single room occupancy

Abstract

During August of 1996, I stayed in a series of SRO hotels in New York City leaving a book and diary behind when I checked out of each room. The books that were left in the rooms differ from one room to the other but all contain events and/or situations that could have happened in the very room. Diary entries were left behind between the pages of the books, like bookmarks, to indicate the appropriated passages and to impose my story onto the book's story. SRO, single room occupancy, refers either to an entire hotel or to a room within such a hotel. SRO's are the most inexpensive type of hotel. For social workers the term "SRO" has come to mean a single room occupant - not the bUilding but the person. These cheap single room hotels have been an element of American urban life for nearly two hundred years Nevertheless, they have been the target of an offiCial war within city development, neighborhood gentrification, initiated by people whose concept of "home" does not include the SRO with its accommodations of single rooms or suites, usually without kitchens and often with shared bathrooms. Few, if any, housing alternatives for these reSidents exist. When owners close a building, tenants are lucky if they can find a worse hotel at a higher rate. Myths circulates about today's hotel residents: all are supposedly all friendless, isolated, needy and disabled; all are presumably socially marginal; all are mildly psychotic; all are transients who never live anywhere for more than few months. I knew these myths were not entirely true. After all. I had lived in those hotels for quit a while before I start doing this project.