The rooming house was a building full of doors and behind every door was a man who was between things. Between jobs. Between cities. Between lives. The rooming house was not a home. It was a waiting room with beds. You paid by the week and you got a bed and a sink and a lock on the door and that was everything the rooming house promised. A bed. A sink. A lock. The holy trinity of the temporary.

The Bowery had more rooming houses than restaurants. Three dollars a night. You got a room the size of a closet with walls that did not reach the ceiling. You could hear the man in the next room breathing. You could hear him coughing. You could hear him crying at two in the morning and you did not knock because the walls were thin but the boundaries were thick. The rooming house had rules. Do not knock. Do not ask. Do not look too long.

The men in the rooming house were not homeless. That is the thing people did not understand. They had a room. They had an address. They had a key. They were not on the street. They were one floor above the street and the difference between a rooming house and the sidewalk was three dollars and a door that locked. The rooming house was the last rung on the ladder before the ladder disappeared. Everybody on that rung was holding on.

I lived in a rooming house on Third Avenue for two months in the winter of 1968. My neighbor was a man named Carl who had been a saxophone player. He did not play anymore. He just carried the case. Every morning he picked up the case and walked out the door and every evening he came back with the case and I never once heard him open it. The case was his identity. The saxophone was his past. The rooming house was his present. Nobody in a rooming house talked about the future.

The rooming houses are gone. The buildings are condos now. The rooms that cost three dollars a night cost three thousand dollars a month. The walls reach the ceiling. The sinks are marble. The locks are electronic. But the men who needed the rooming house still need something and the something does not exist anymore. The shelter is not the same. The shelter has rules and hours and intake forms. The rooming house had a key. That was the whole difference. A key means it is yours. An intake form means it is theirs and they are letting you use it.