Adults Making Dirty SRO Love

After visiting Broad Channel yesterday, the Times (not even the same writer!) gets back on the A train and heads over to Beach 116th Street in Rockaway Park to check in on one of the street’s SROs, a “stubborn survivor of New York’s shifting housing picture”:

If you need a home in a hurry and do not mind salt air and salty neighbors, with $130 and your own roll of toilet paper you can move into the Baxter Hotel in Rockaway Park, a half-block from the Atlantic Ocean.

That is the weekly rent charged by the owner, John Baxter: $130, with no deposit, no security and no questions asked.

Inside the office, a sign directs new residents to “please read all the house rules carefully or ask management to read them to you.” For a $130 check, Mr. Baxter handed a recent visitor the key to Room 27 and said in his Irish brogue, “I hope you’re good at remembering faces,” adding as he walked away, “There’s no mirror in the room.”

His assistant, Sean Reeder, led the way up creaky stairs to a fourth-floor room. Smoking was permitted out the room window. Asked about the house rules, Mr. Reeder said, “Just don’t do anything to make us kick you out.”

“The bathroom’s over there,” he added, pointing to three tiny bathrooms at the end of the hall. Two had stall showers. None had sinks, mirrors or toilet paper. They did provide views of Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic.

The Baxter is one of three single-room-occupancy hotels huddled together against the world on Beach 116th Street, just down from the end of the A subway line. It sits between a closed S.R.O. called the Hotel Lawrence and the Rockaway Park Hotel, a functioning S.R.O. whose residents include young children and a man who wears outfits made from plastic garbage bags.

The description of the rooms is enough to make any Times writer squirm:

The rooms at the Baxter are smaller than some elevators. The one visited recently had a ceiling and walls painted powder blue. There was a bald light bulb in a ceiling fixture, a dresser, a mini-refrigerator, an itchy bed with mismatched sheets and a television equipped with an antenna, not cable.

Air-conditioners are banned at the Baxter because its old electrical system could not support them, but with the door open, a salty breeze sweeps through the room and makes even sweltering days tolerable.

At night, the soundtrack is an overlay of arguments, children chanting, adults making love, a ballgame, talk radio, pop, rap, sitcom laugh-tracks and low-flying jets bound for Kennedy Airport.

Did they really use “adults making love”? There isn’t some particular euphemism in the Times style guide for down-and-out people humping?