Hotel Kenmore Hall

145 East 23rd Street | also 143 East 23rd Street | Gramercy | built 1928

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

1939
Nathanael West's night shifts here resurface in The Day of the Locust
In the hotel's early years the novelist Nathanael West worked as its night manager and lived in the building, letting friends including Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell and S. J. Perelman stay in empty rooms; Dashiell Hammett finished The Maltese Falcon here. An incident West witnessed at the hotel became a scene between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson in his 1939 novel The Day of the Locust.
Source: Wikipedia
1994
June
Federal marshals seize the hotel in a record forfeiture action
After a new owner bought the 22-story residential hotel in 1985, crime and drug dealing grew for nearly a decade. In June 1994 the U.S. Marshals Service seized the building, in what was called the largest asset forfeiture the federal government had undertaken. After a full renovation it reopened in 1999 as 326 units of supportive housing run by a nonprofit.
Source: Wikipedia
1999
The renovated Kenmore reopens as supportive housing
Five years after federal marshals seized the deteriorated hotel in a drug-related forfeiture, a nonprofit developer completes a full renovation and reopens the building as a 326-unit supportive housing residence. The project follows decades of decline from a Jazz Age hotel into a crime-plagued single-room-occupancy building.
Source: Wikipedia

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