The Carlton Arms Hotel is also known as Artbreak Hotel or Ye Olde Carlton Arms Hotel. The 54-room, five-story building has been a hotel for most of its 100-odd years.
According to blueprints, there were originally two contiguous buildings put together at the beginning of the twentieth century when the hotel clientele were mostly farmers and business men from New Jersey and Connecticut looking for a hearty meal and place to sleep. They were able to keep their carriages and horses in a huge barn next door on 25th Street.
During Prohibition, the neighborhood was mostly Irish working class and the new elevated subway passed right in front on 3rd Avenue. The hotel lobby was converted into a speakeasy and big money card games were played in the rooms upstairs. Later on and with the opening of a few upscale neighborhood restaurants, The Carlton Arms became a respectable hotel — but not for long. In the ’50s the place started to turn sleazy, a hang out for drag queens, prostitutes and drug addicts. Like many of New York’s smaller, older hotels, The Carlton Arms became a single-room occupancy hotel during the ’60s and welfare recipients filled the place for more than 10 years.
After the hotel’s manager had a complete nervous breakdown in 1981, Ed Ryan, back in New York from ten years of world traveling, inherited the job. Ryan set out to break the cycle of despair-feeding-despair that had set in over the years of neglect. Vacated rooms were no longer re-rented to welfare tenants. Instead they were scrubbed, repainted, and refurnished for rent to travelers and transients who didn’t mind forgoing luxuries in exchange for a very low nightly rate.
Artists began to pass through the hotel and Ryan invited several of them to work at the front desk. In 1983, artist and front desk clerk Gil Dominguez painted a series of murals on the five-flight staircase. Later that year, he and fellow worker Colette Jennings began painting murals on small panels in several rooms. The art seemed a physical manifestation of the positive transformations possible within the old building. In 1984, Brian Damage, a downtown artist renowned for his beautifully executed installations at The Mudd Club, Studio 54, and Danceteria, began painting the “Submarine Room” and the idea for a complete artists’ transformation of the rooms took shape.
Today, every one of the 54 rooms, hallways, bathrooms and staircases are painted or decorated.
| internal | gDoc TBC |
| internal | Art Nerd article |
| internal | Carlton Arms Hotel website |
| internal | YouTube Interview with Hotel employee |
| internal | NYPress Article |
| internal | Wikipedia My Little Margie |