Chelsea's 'Skid Row' Hotel of Yesteryear

At West 22nd Street and Eight Avenue sits the Gem Hotel, a trendy boutique hotel that advertises itself as being in the midst of Chelsea’s art galleries, restaurants, nightlife and gay community. Local artists’ work is showcased in the lobby.

It’s likely that many, if not most, of the guests — especially if they’re non-New Yorkers and under 30 — don’t know that this same building once housed a very different type of hotel — the Allerton. And as the Allerton, it was the source of constant complaints from neighbors for decades.

The Allerton Hotel’s beginnings were inauspicious enough. According to the “14 to 42” local history blog, plans were filed in 1912 by the Allerton Realty Co. for a five-story hotel at the site. The Hotel Allerton, as it was known, was one of several Allerton hotels in the city that were built between 1912 and 1922.

The chain was designed to provide inexpensive, respectable housing for young white-collar men and women. These hotels were named after Mary Allerton, who came over on the Mayflower and was an ancestor of builder James Stewart Cushman’s wife. Around 1950, a small “Allerton Annex” was opened at 350 West 23rd Street, a short walk from the Chelsea location.

By the 1950s, the Allerton was still a respectable hotel. Soon after, though, the Allerton took a nose dive, first becoming a welfare hotel and then providing temporary housing for the homeless.

Singer-songwriter Patti Smith, in her book “Just Kids,” recalled a stay with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe at the Allerton in the 1970s, when both were down on their luck. Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York quotes her as saying their room “reeked of piss and exterminator fluid” and a pillow crawling with lice. She recalled seeing addicts trying to shoot up. In the end, the couple escaped to the Chelsea Hotel.

In September 1989, The New York Times reported that the Human Resources Administration, after action by Legal Aid, agreed to move 122 families out of the Allerton because conditions were a threat to their health and safety. The article quoted a physician as saying that entire families were staying in rooms “the size of a prison cell.” Still, HRA didn’t rule out using the Allerton to house clients entirely.

Rhea Lewin Geberer, my wife, was a volunteer at Project ORE, an agency to help the Jewish homeless, elderly and low-income, in the mid-1990s. She recalls that HRA had a 28-day limit for stays at the hotel, and this created hardships for many welfare clients. In particular, she knew two clients who lived at the Allerton, a mother and her college-aged son who was unable to work. When the 28 days ended, they would temporarily go back to the streets, spending hours at a McDonald’s or riding the subways. After a few days, the rules allowed them to re-register and move back in.

In 1998, The Times reported that earlier that year, a newer city agency, the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), had started to use the Allerton to temporarily house clients whose eligibility for permanent housing was being reviewed. All this time, some “regular” paying guests continued to stay at the Allerton, and on May 25 of that 1998, one of those guests was killed.

A tug-of-war was under way between then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who wanted to cut funding for two DHS caseworkers at the hotel, and the City Council, which resolved to override the mayor’s veto.

“The Allerton was a terrible place,” Tom Duane, who represented Chelsea in the state Senate from 1999 to 2012, recalled in a recent interview. “It was a `two-in-one,’ meaning that there were both couples and single women. And men would gather outside and yell up to the single women – sometimes they were dealing drugs. There was a social worker there, but he wasn’t always in his office. We didn’t want to close it — just make conditions better.”

But the Allerton Hotel did close, courtesy of the booming Chelsea real estate market. In 2007-08, it was transformed into the Gem. The Allerton Annex on 23rd Street closed around the same time and was replaced by a new residential building.