Hotel Kenmore Hall

Hotel Kenmore Hall is a 22-story single room occupancy hotel located at 145 East 23rd Street in the Gramercy section of Manhattan, designed by architect Maurice Deutsch and constructed in 1927. Author Nathanael West lived and worked at the hotel as a night manager in the early years after the hotel opened. One of West's real-life experiences at the hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that would later appear in The Day of the Locust (1939). West allowed friends like Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, S. J. Perelman and Maxwell Bodenheim free room and meals. Dashiell Hammett finished The Maltese Falcon here. From Lonely Hearts, published in 2010 by Marion Meade: "Kenmore Hall, a pretty redbrick residence hotel not yet two years old, was home to hundreds of young professionals who booked by the week or month. Prized for its desirable address near Gramercy Park, its reasonable rates, and amenities such as a pool and roof garden, the place always had a waiting list for vacancies, sometimes a long one. Nat (Nathanael West) was supposed to remember guests' names, but he happened to know a great deal more, and not just gossip either. He knew exactly when they awoke and when they left for their offices, who got mail and from whom, what time they went to bed, and which ones couldn't sleep, because the bleary-eyed were known to shuffle down to the lobby a

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