The building was built sometime between 1908 and 1912,
we were never certain of the exact date as there weren’t
any definite historical records, nor
where there any photographs of what the building looked
like in its heyday. The Sound View Hotel was alleged to
have once housed Jack
Kerouac while he was writing Dharma Bums.
It was a U-shaped two-story building with storefronts on
the ground floor and probably 20 or so efficiency apartments
upstairs. We were told that it had been a nice respite for
the Seamen to flop after a rousing night on the town just a block up
on First Avenue where all the bars, billiards, chop houses,
tobacco stores and brothels were located. At that time, all
a man needed was a room with a bed and maybe a small bedside
table or dresser and he was king of his castle for a night.
We found out that the downstairs used to house a Catholic
print shop and later a grocery store that sold the usual
sundry items of the day. Upstairs, from the 1920s to the end
of the 1930s it became a brothel, complete with its own live-in Madame.
The building did not have electric lights until the late
1930s and before that had used gaslight instead.
When we moved in, we could still see the remaining pipes now capped,
still jutting out of the walls all up and down the hallways.
I counted ten of the pipes in all, just in the hallway alone.
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