Just seventeen

Shabby chic and stylish decay has made this New York hotel the hangout for the stars of tomorrow

ITS history is hardly glamorous - it has had its fair share of New York's poor, elderly and mentally ill through its doors - but behind Hotel 17's dowdy facade is the stuff of dreams. The dreams of wannabe actors, fashion designers, photographers, models, musicians and drag queens, who drape themselves across its bar and hang about its corridors in the hope they will be discovered.

New Yorkers might tend to write off the institution on Manhattan's East 17th Street as just another budget hotel whose cheap chic has won it a place in to a string of pop videos. They know it is still dining out on having given Madonna and David Bowie the occasional backdrop, and Woody Allen some raw material for his film Manhattan Murder Mystery. But for us Brits, Hotel 17's fading glamour still gives a small-budget stay in the Big Apple a touch of class.

Photographer Jorg Fokuhl has captured the hotel's cocktail of desperate dreams, peeling wallpaper and budget tourism in a series of images that won't find their way into the tourist board publications. Drag queens with hair as bleached as the wall coverings, dressed in leopard skin bikinis, mix with young models searching for cheap studio space, and hotel receptionists determined to give up the day job. For many of its guests, Hotel 17 starts as stop-gap accommodation and becomes home.

The building might have been renovated last year, but Fokuhl's shots capture a carefully cultivated air of stylish decay. Built in 1893, the eight-storey hotel nestles in the central Gramarcy district, three blocks from Greenwich Village. If you tire of spotting the stars of tomorrow among its relentlessly kitsch interiors, you can always gaze from its windows towards the Empire State building, or wander into East 17th Street, lined by elegant brick row houses, towards Stuyvesant Square.

Just don't bring your children - under 17s are forbidden Hotel 17, 225 East 17th Street, New York, 001 212 475 2845. Hotel Seventeen, with photographs by Jorg Fokuhl, Dewi Lewis Publishing, #16.99

Copyright 2001
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