Moving day.
Pack up your things and get away.
If you can`t pay the rent,
You`ve got to live out in a tent,
Because it`s moving day. . . . –Charlie Poole, circa 1930
AT ALMOST noon Tuesday, during the official final hour in the 112-year history of the St. Regis Hotel, Corky Brogdon and his sweetheart, Phyllis Adamson, sat in room 412 and counted their money.
”Ninety cents,” said Brogdon, pushing at a pile of loose change in front of him. ”We got no place to go and we ain`t packed.”
”The cleaning people came an hour ago and took our blankets and sheets,” said Adamson plaintively. ”How are we supposed to sleep tonight?” Adamson, 59, had been at the St. Regis on the southwest corner of Grand Avenue and Clark Street for the better part of 17 years. Brogdon, also 59, had been there five years. Their musty room was piled with boxes and the flat spaces covered with beer cans, dishes, condiments and clutter. Like many residents, they used the windowsill as a makeshift refrigerator.
Brogdon turned melancholy and tears rolled down his grizzled cheeks. ”I don`t know what we`re gonna do. I just don`t know.”
A FEW HOURS later, a group of hotel employees helped pack their belongings and, under the guidance of manager and part-owner Bob Berry, moved them to a similar hotel in another part of town. As part of the deal that closed the St. Regis, Berry acquired two other hotels and moved scores of his tenants to them in December and early January. Only a few–the scared, the lonely, and those hanging on for one more welfare check–held out until the final day.
”Some people here just didn`t trust anyone,” said Berry. ”I told them they had to move and we would do our best to help them, but they dug in, like if they denied it long enough, they wouldn`t have to move.”
Berry, 35, was still not sure what was going to happen to Jack Zesk in room 416. Zesk, 67, a retired maintenance engineer, had lived in the St. Regis for 30 years and acquired a staggering collection of what you might call personal treasures, including several window fans and TV sets, a collection of car parts, toasters, clocks, keys, belts and a rich panoply of clothing hung on a wire strung across the middle of the room.
”I`m planning on dying,” he roared over the din of one of the TV sets.
”I want to stay in the area, but every hotel is filled up. Everything is down the drain.”
The clock continued to roll, and Zesk sat obstinately on his bed, barechested on one of the coldest days of winter.
”I knew he was going to be a problem,” said Bob Berry later that afternoon. ”I found him somewhere to go and he wouldn`t leave, so as of tonight, he ceases to be my responsibility. I`m not going to throw anybody out onto the street. We`ll have to wait to see what the new owners want to do with him.”
RONALD GRAIS and the Ross/Berger Co., the partnership that struck a deal for the St. Regis late last year, will gut the building ”as soon as possible” and turn it into commercial office space. The name of the conversion project is One Grand Place.
The St. Regis was one of a vanishing number of what social workers call a single-room occupancy hotel, or SRO, a low-income residence that rents by the day, week or month and requires no damage deposit. SROs tend to have shared bathroom facilities and few of the standard hotel services such as daily maid service, telephones or televisions.
They are the cheapest housing available and for many the last refuge from the street. Each time one falls victim to the wrecking ball or the rehabber, the local shortage of low-income housing that has caused the ranks of the homeless to swell to an estimated 25,000 becomes more acute.
Some people call SROs ”flophouses” or ”fleabags.” A slightly more polite term is ”transient hotel,” which is really a misnomer because, for most part, the residents aren`t transients at all, but simply poor people who`ve been there for years and have no other place to go.
FOR EXAMPLE, Marion and Dorothy Garrity, sisters in their 90s living on Social Security, had occupied room 422 since 1970. Early Tuesday afternoon they were idly stuffing plastic garbage bags with their old clothes while insisting they had no immediate plans.
Sunlight pierced the flimsy curtains, highlighting the peeling paint, cockroaches, cobwebs, exposed pipes and other signs of decay that were the result of the sisters` long-standing refusal to allow maintenence personnel into their room. Marion absently swatted at a fly.
”Our nephew is going to come in a few days and help us move,” she said. ”We can`t leave today, but I don`t worry.”
”Who knows if they really have a nephew?” said Bob Berry. ”They`re one of the toughest cases. I really feel for them. I may end up packing and moving them to one of our other properties myself.”
The headaches and heartaches of operating an SRO hotel go deeper than dealing with the Fellini-esque cast of characters that passes through the portals. Federal low-interest property rehabilitation loans are unavailable to owners of furnished apartment-hotels unless they want to turn their buildings into condominiums, and most banks won`t lend money to anyone who wants to buy or upgrade such buildings.
RAISING THE rent is very difficult. A high percentage of tenants are on some form of welfare, and the monthly General Assistance grant to a single person has actually fallen in Illinois from $190 three years ago to $154 today. Meanwhile, utility bills and taxes for owners continue to rise precipitously.
Berry says electricity, gas and water combined ran him close to $9,000 a month in 1984 and his yearly tax bill was $32,000 on the 110-room structure. Both amounts are double what they were five years ago.
One of the first stages in urban renewal projects is often the demolition of SROs. Since 1975, 5,000 to 6,000 SRO rooms have been destroyed in Chicago, according to the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA) and the Community Emergency Shelter Organization. They say at least half of the rooms that existed in the early 1960s are now gone and only 120 SRO buildings remain.
The City of Chicago and groups such as the JCUA and Eighth Day Center for Justice are studying the past, present and future of SROs. Alan Goldberg, head of the JCUA study, says his group thinks the best way to reverse the trend of destruction is to establish tax incentives that would encourage the preservation of existing SROs and the development of new ones in buildings that are currently abandoned.
AN IMPORTANT aspect of Chicago`s sociological and architectural history hangs in the balance. The St. Regis, according to the Landmark Preservation Council and private files on the building, was built in six stages, the first of which was opened as the Albany Hotel in April, 1873. Its four stories became the present six in 1883, and it was renamed the Grand Palace Hotel around 1888.
The cornice at the top of the building, the lintels over the windows and the ornamental designs over the bay windows are signatures of the era and of architectural interest. Sometime in the decade following a $90,000 remodeling in 1914, the Grand Palace was renamed the St. Regis after St. John Regis
(1597-1640), a French Jesuit who ministered to the sick and founded a refuge for wayward women.
In its heyday it was one of the ”theater hotels” serving the stars who played in the Loop. Bing Crosby, legend has it, favored the St. Regis when he appeared here.
But as the building got older, owners came and went and the neighborhood became less wealthy, the hotel began serving low-income clientele. It suffered the routine sort of problems you get anytime a number of alcoholics, former mental patients and poor people collect under one roof, but it never fell into shocking disrepair or became a haven for prostitutes and drug dealers as happened with some of the more squalid SROs.
BERRY, BY taking some of his tenants with him to his new hotels, putting up rosters of other low cost hotels in the lobby of the St. Regis and giving 45 days notice that he was shutting down, also avoided the brutality that has marked the closing of SROs here and elsewhere. There were no poor people on the frozen sidewalk surrounded by a pathetic collection of boxes, and no one ejecting the helpless and stealing their belongings.
The final days of the St. Regis were, in fact, fairly orderly. David Harvey, a three-year hotel resident, volunteered his truck to move many of the tenants, most of whom only had a few suitcases or shopping bags of stuff worth moving anyway. When they said goodbye to the people in the lobby, some of the former neighbors promised to stay in touch and to come back to Clark Street.
Early Tuesday night, Jack Zesk, a ”crazy lady” who didn`t seem to understand the moving process, a couple of obstinate drunks and a young guy who needed another day before he could move into a new place remained in the hotel.
And a solitary light glowed in room 422 on the southwest corner of the building. The aged Garrity sisters were still awake, still puttering idly in what they once thought would be the last home they would know.
In the office on the second floor, Bob Berry dialed a long distance telephone number he had for their nephew.
There was no answer.
