..Mother Lodge of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. It was turned into a hotel in 1934 with the idea of Benevolent Elkdom remaining in the smell and the décor. It had achieved a certain notoriety because of its Grand Ballroom, where Kiss competed with cultural highlights such as the First American Sex Festival, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5 and the cocaine arrest that began Abbie Hoffman's six-year underground odyssey.
To give an idea of its state, the owners estimated that it would take $14 million to $21 million to bring it up to the level of a second-class hotel. The hotel was not only behind the eight ball, it was bottom of the class, a lesson in squalor and fear and whose proximity to Times Square was not the plus that it would be today, for in those days the square was a drug infested hive of pornography and prostitution, not the clean and comfortable Disneyfied neon-lit attraction that it is today.
We were travelling in the usual antipodean way, on the smell of an oily travellers cheque, and had arrived in the States thinking that we could travel as cheaply as we could in Europe, for these were the days when Arthur Frommer’s ‘Europe on $10 a day’ was the backpackers bible. There was no instant communication - rather one relied on a book that was at least a year out of date. Art was our raison d’etre for travelling and New York had more galleries than Dry Cleaners. But New York, unlike Paris, which is also vaguely rich and even more sophisticated, did not cater for near indigent lovers of the arts.
It was also, in those bygone days, quite a dangerous place. We had landed as darkness was falling at John F. Kennedy International Airport courtesy of Laker Airline’s intermittently disintegrating DC-9s, which had been worry enough for one day. Naturally we thought that the subway, having just left London, was the best way to make it to the heart of Manhattan ….. and a few other hardy souls thought likewise. All I can say was that we few travellers had our own special carriage with a burly shotgun-toting policemen at each door who prevented anybody else getting on. This created a feeling like being inside an aquarium surrounded by ravenous sharks, a tasty morsel waiting to be upended onto the frightening dark streets of Manhattan.
But we didn’t stay at the Diplomat that first night. Rather it was when we returned from Washington DC that we stayed there, having a two days of further gallery exploration before we flew back to England’s green, sceptred and normal isles.
The initial impression of the hotel was intimidating, being reminiscent of an enormous catacomb with ceilings lost in the stygian darkness and a foyer of such dimension that the far sides had vanished over the curvature of the earth. There were strange people being proactively furtive in the shadows and the carpet was in the process of becoming an independent life-form. The transaction for accommodation, cash only, was accompanied with a quizzical eyebrow and several ominous warnings the most significant was ‘do not travel to the bathroom by yourself, travel in only pairs’.
Better advice would have been ‘never go to the bathroom,’ for there was only one convenience per floor . We decided against the facilities on our floor as the décor had a certain originality with the feminine hygiene products wedged behind the pipe leading to the shower without a head above the blocked drainpipe The dead cockroaches indicated that if they couldn’t survive neither could we.
We ventured a further floor up to a bathroom which at least had a shower rose and strikingly modern linoleum that curved up where it reached the wall. Closer investigation revealed that this was banked up dirt shoved into a deceptive curve and that the linoleum that I had thought black had been at some stage white. But at least the cockroaches were alive and multiplying.
After that it was all downhill with the thunderstorm echoing through the canyons of stone and steel a welcome diversion as it drowned out the tubercular coughing of the man dying in the room next door.
But what wimps we were. For when the last person left the hotel he had been staying there in rent controlled splendour for nearly forty years.