Terminal Hotel

 

2

32

me m.

Pittston, PA

6/16/2008

The Terminal Hotel is an abandoned hotel at the west end of 23rd st. that has been standing for nearly 120 years.  During it's heyday in the late 19th/early 20th century, the hotel was a "genlteman's only" establishment; popular with a rough and tumble crowd of merchant marines, transients and anyone who needed a cheap place to stay. It had a victorian pub with a 70ft long wooden bar and painted glass ceiling.

There was a cellar beneath the pub called Holling's Beafsteak Keller (yes, with a K). Here, as per beefsteak dinner tradition, various men's social clubs would gather and eat huge servings of meat with their bare hands (untensils were generally not allowed at beefsteaks.)

The hotel fell on hard times beginning in the 1960's, and by the 70's it became a "welfare hotel". Conditions deteriorated as the hotel beame infested with vermin. Some female residents would sell themselves, at times calling out from the windows to potential john's who happened to be walking by. The owners eventually became implicated in a scandal where homeless people were given an address (on paper only), in exchange for a cut of their welfare checks.

Why should anyone care about any of this? I don't know. Maybe they shouldn't. There is nothing distinguished or historically significant about it. It's just another old, nameless building in New York. But it had a name once, and if you happen to walk by and hear sounds of laughter and besotted merriment coming from behind it's decrepit walls, you might just be hearing the refracted echos of a bygone era, in a bygone city.. or.. you might be hearing guys getting lapdances in the strip club that now inhabits the street level of the building.

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