Moose Productions Blog

In 1998, Meyer Muschel was a corporate lawyer. His friend convinced him to go in on an investment that was a sure thing, a place called the White House Hotel. “There’s 200 men living there, they each pay $9 a day, that’s 657,000 dollars a year,” his friend had said. However, as is frequently the case in life, things weren’t what they seemed. They had just bought an infamous Bowery flophouse, full of alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals and mentally handicapped individuals. Many of the residents infrequently paid their rent and to boot, the lobby was a dangerous place to be. In short, the investment was a bust.

Meyer undertook the renovation of the White House. For more than five years, the White House has been undergoing a major change.

First step in the overhaul, was to get the criminals out of the White House. Meyer did this by taking the list of permanents at the White House, and dropping it off at the local police department. When the police raided the hotel on one of the following nights, tens of men were arrested due to outstanding warrants. Soon, word on the street was that fugitives weren’t going to find refuge at the White House.
Very quickly, Meyer realized that collecting rent was not an easy task. In SRO housing, the courts usually rule in favor of the tenants because they are reluctant to send a person to the streets. If you live in a flophouse, and you get evicted, it is either to the streets or to the shelter. Many of the tenants would cite the many fire safety and buiding code violations and thus refuse to pay rent. The $657,000 that Meyer and his partners had estimated, was not coming to fruition. They were only seeing 40 or 50 cents to the dollar of rent. It became clear that if they do something quickly, the investment would be a complete loss.

After some braintorming, it was decided that a portion of the hotel could be converted from a flophouse into a youth hostel. This is because the needs of backpackers is not unlike the needs of someone starved for cash trying to scrape by day to day. Many of the tenants were asked to move to cubicles on the South side of the building in exchange for a small amount of cash. Once the North half of the floor had been isolated, the rooms were cleaned, repainted and opened for rent.

In the first days of the youth hostel, one of the gigantic overweight tenants would sit in the lobby and eat ice cream as guests arrived. He was so fat that he was unable to walk down the stairs to the showers, so that he hadn’t showered in close to 4 years. Stench emanated from his skin with such strength, that it was not uncommon for a new guest to arrive, see and smell this gigantic man eating in the lobby, and turn around and head to a new place. To fix the problem, Meyer decided to pay the man $20 a day, just to leave the hotel early in the morning, and to come back later in the evening. The ploy worked, and fewer and fewer tourists turned away upon arrival…

Each year, a few more permanent residents move out. Sometimes they die from old age, sometimes they can no longer pay rent and are bought out. And each year, the number of backpackers increases.