Rituals of Survival in Single-Room Occupancy Hotels

Abstract

This article works with a definition of care that encompasses expansive models of kinship and collective and communal life. Specifically, it explores representations of such interdependencies in the liminal space of the single-room occupancy hotel (SRO) through the literary and artistic creations of two understudied African American artists. Fiction writer Robert Dean Pharr and visual artist Frederick Weston created their work in SROs in New York City beginning in the 1960s, during a time of massive transformation of the city's built environment in the name of urban renewal. Their novels and artwork, respectively, provide some of the only uncovered (to date) literary and cultural representations of New York City's SROs. Pharr's and Weston's works memorialize rituals of survival that center care and interdependencies over and against competitive individualism and a climate of uncare. Further, both explicitly articulate this vision by working with conceptual and material waste. Trash is their literal and metaphoric medium. These artists relied upon what is seen as surplus value by the city. But as Pharr and Weston use it, trash offers a critique of negative assumptions about the lives of SRO residents. The pandemic has shocked us into awareness of our inescapable interdependencies. Therefore, it behooves us to revisit these understudied, early proponents of care—an ethics that today's mutual aid and other liberation movements often center. Pharr's and Weston's documentation and interpretation of care offer us ways to survive within our current environments in crisis without repeating the death-making logic and history of urban renewal.