white light at the sunshine, 11/07

Just down the block from the late CBGB (itself an ex-flophouse bar) is the Sunshine Hotel, the last remaining men’s flophouse on the Bowery. Gorgeously documented in Flophouse, the site next to the desultory residential hotel was, until recently, a vacant lot. As the velvet-roped clubs creep up the block, the anonymous cube of white light next to the Sunshine has a horrible logic, a constant reminder of the sheer inaccuracy of the flophouse’s cheery name.