Yesterday I unwittingly ended up in the neighborhood of the Parc Lincoln Hotel on West 75th Street in Manhattan, that fabled hell-hole which was my first New York City residence.
Hotel Lincoln Square, a.k.a. Parc Lincoln
I make no pilgrimages to the Parc Lincoln but, despite the dismal memories I have of the place, I have no reason to avoid it while in the area. It is a tall building, hard to miss, and the anxieties that the place used to strike in me have dried. I would like to get a room there some time but I understand the property is in transition, with celebrities living in daftly appointed quarters next to long-time tenants paying $400 a month for single rooms.
The structure itself rises in my mind like a vulgar memory. The faded “HOTEL LINCOLN SQ.” banner (echoing the former name of the Parc Lincoln) lingers on the south side of the structure.
The name of the place must have changed around the time I checked in because the first rent receipts I have from there read “Hotel Lincoln Square”.
Lincoln Square, a.k.a. Parc Lincoln, Hotel Receipt
The place, to the best of my memory, was officially called Parc Lincoln from the day I got there. I remember the awning.
I stayed in two rooms at the Parc Lincoln. The first room was #1422, which looked south onto Amsterdam Avenue. I was there for a few weeks before poverty and ambition forced me into a smaller room, one with a sink and no bathroom. Light in the room came from a bare, circular light bulb in the middle of the white ceiling. For long hours I stared into this bulb — not while it was lit, mind you, but when it was turned off and barely visible in the clucking darkness of the hot summer nights. Fat pigeons huddled on the window pane, gobbling, keeping me awake. I listened to Danny Stiles on the AM radio dial and stared at that unlit light bulb. I welcomed the rare breezes that blew through the open window.
I woke up in pools of sour sweat.
I blame my disdain for pigeons on the birds of the Parc Lincoln, but those memories of clinging to the Danny Stiles radio show are golden.
Yesterday I spotted a vintage circular bare light bulb, visible from the street, hovering over someone’s life like a migraine halo. I guess the interior décor of the place has not changed.
Parc Lincoln Migraine Halo
5 or 6 years ago I had an unexpectedly close encounter with the Parc Lincoln. I was playing piano for opera singers and instrumentalists, playing for concerts and rehearsals. One opera singer I worked with studied with a vocal instructor whose studio was in the building directly across the street from the Parc Lincoln. I called that vocal instructor and as he told me his street address I felt something curdle up inside me. I could not be sure that his address was directly across from the Parc Lincoln but the number certainly sounded like it. I have the Parc Lincoln’s address forever memorized but the same is not true for adjacent buildings.
At the time I still had anxieties about the Parc Lincoln — memories of roaches crawling into my mouth and the endless nights kept awake by the chorus of creaking beds in adjacent rooms and the ghastly wheezing of the man across the hall who coughed like a motherfucker 24 hours a day. I remembered being chased by security through the stairwells. They never caught me. I rarely did laundry there (I could not afford that luxury) but I spent some hours in the basement, by the laundry machines and the trash. In those trash heaps I found stacks of annual reports–corporate publications sent to stockholders, handsomely printed tomes featuring pictures of executives and their corporate kin, pictures which I found senselessly fascinating. I remembered the night the doorknob rattled. Someone tried to get in, tried to enter Room 317. I stood up to confront. I was naked in the hot summer heat, sleeping with the pigeons and probably contemplating pissing into the sink to avoid walking to the community toilet down the hall. It was 3am. As the doorknob rattled I pressed myself to the door, and through the peephole I saw an elderly woman. I heard her muttering and I slammed my hand on the door, bluntly alerting her that someone was inside. She simply had the wrong room but it scared me. I pounded the door and said something (asked a question, I think, asked her who she was or what she wanted) and when she left in confusion it was clear that she simply had the wrong room. I assumed this elderly woman lived in an identically tiny hovel, either above or below #317. I listened for her through the ceiling and through the floor, waiting for her to get home safely, and in my memory I think I heard her arrive upstairs, in #417, unlocking the door, closing it, and dropping her belongings.
One of my earliest memories of the Parc Lincoln was stepping outside early one morning as a man dropped his pants and defecated on the sidewalk. It was the morning of my first full day at the Parc Lincoln. The man brazenly did his business across the street, smiling with his ass.
I recount that incident not to be gratuitous but because the man took his dump at the front door of the building where the above-mentioned vocal instructor lived.
I accepted the job and when I reached the location I found that it was, indeed, directly across from the Parc Lincoln. I looked at the spot where I remembered the man defecating and then entered the building and arrived at the vocal instructor’s studio. How I remember opening the door and seeing the Parc Lincoln, its tattered curtains flailing from wide-open windows, the structure itself and its residents seemingly laid out to dry. The windows wept.
After the voice lesson I asked the instructor what he knew about the Parc Lincoln. He told of bodies falling from the windows, fires blazing from low floors, sounds of garbage bags and bottles smashing to the sidewalk. I told him I remembered those smashing sounds. People in higher floors wrapped their garbage and threw it out the window. From #317 I heard the whistling sounds of the containers before they landed. The sound of impact was unpredictable: Explosion. Thud. Splat. I imagined bodies falling from the higher floors but never heard talk of such things until I met this vocal instructor. He laughed at my memory of the man defecating on his front door. I told him about the thin walls, how I could hear mattress coils in neighboring rooms whine under the pressure of human bodies, how I heard other transient residents breath and cough and talk on the phone all through the night and all through the day, how the babbling woman at the end of the hall left her door wide open 24 hours a day. “The place felt like earth” is how the conversation ended.
I took pictures of the Parc Lincoln from this location but they are lost.
