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. More on that and other notorious rumors and scandals later.

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 place for the Seamen to flop after a rousing night on the town 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 gas for lighting 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.

World War II began and the brothel was shut down, not really because of immorality, but more so because rooms were desperately needed as spaces got scare in the seaports during the war. The building got turned into a sort of makeshift hotel for the soldiers and assorted seamen who needed a place to crash after their booze and sex benders before heading back out to sea or off to war again.