David Drumgold at home in what was previously the Jane Hotel. Photo: Matthew Sedacca
David Drumgold’s room in what was until recently the Jane Hotel is small and showing its age. A full-size bed in the 9-by-13-foot space juts out against a gray armchair that is buried under a mountain of clothing waiting to be sent to the dry cleaner. The door paint is chipping, revealing the “asylum green” color that was covered up around 20 years ago. Down the hall are the shared bathrooms and shower stalls. He doesn’t mind any of it. The view from his tall, narrow windows is a clear shot of the Hudson and the New Jersey skyline. Out the front door of his building is the brilliant expanse of the West Village. “Growing up in Europe, this is not that alien,” he tells me on a recent Wednesday afternoon, leaning back in his desk chair and picking at a Filet-O-Fish. “New York is my living room, and this is where I sleep.”
For more than two decades, Drumgold, who is 64 and runs an events production and staffing company, has paid $262 a week for his single-room-occupancy apartment at 113 Jane Street. The redbrick, six-story building just off the West Side Highway, once the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailors’ Home and Institute, has had many, many lives (too many to recount here), but Drumgold arrived in 2000, just as Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s run in the ground-floor Jane Street Theatre was ending. He was nearly 40, working catering gigs and tired of dealing with roommates. He got a small room in what was then known as the Hotel Riverview, dropping off his rent checks at the receptionist’s desk in the lobby. The neighborhood was different then. “The last thing you ever thought you would see was Hermès on the corner of Gansevoort,” he says. These days, his neighbors include Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick and an increasing number of semi-anonymous billionaires who have been buying and combining townhouses. The neighborhood has “gone really beige,” Drumgold says. “A lot of money. It’s not interesting.”
He remembers running into Molly Ringwald in the communal bathroom while she was doing Tick, Tick … Boom! downstairs. He was there when Sean MacPherson and his partners christened his home the Jane Hotel and he had to fight, along with his fellow SRO tenants, to stay put. “They offered to buy us all out,” he remembers. “I was offered $50,000 and was like, That’s not enough.” He was there in 2009, too, when the neighborhood temporarily shut down the hotel ballroom, apparently for being too wild, and the Olsens partied in the building. “It was a guest list coming from the river, line around the corner,” says Drumgold, who, during the eviction fights, fueled the local mood around the hotel by sending the city photos of clubbers illegally smoking inside along with complaints alleging illicit construction. (He never really partied there, he says, mostly just grabbing the occasional negroni from the bar and inviting friends upstairs for nightcaps of Champagne and caviar.)
In 2022, the hotelier Jeff Klein bought the Jane for $62 million, and Drumgold’s home underwent a more substantial shift. The Jane was broken up into two distinct addresses with two distinct operations: the West Village Eurohostel at 113 Jane Street, where Drumgold lives, and, next door at the newly established No. 115, the New York outpost of Klein’s ultraexclusive San Vicente members club. (Initiation fees run from $6,000 to $15,000, and dues are between $3,000 and $5,900, per Klein; Gabé Doppelt, a former magazine editor and assistant to Anna Wintour and Tina Brown, heads the committee in charge of vetting applications, which require a nod from a current member.) The hotel ballroom, once a Wes Andersonian dream of mismatched couches and a stuffed ram above the fireplace, has been closed to the public and given a minimalist power-lunch makeover. Perhaps most abruptly: Doors connecting the two sides of the building were locked to prevent Eurohostel tenants or guests from accessing any of the San Vicente.
After Jeff Klein purchased the Jane in 2022, half the building was turned into the ultraexclusive San Vicente members club, and the other side is now a rebranded hostel. Photo: Matthew Sedacca
The recently renovated hallway at 113 Jane Street. Photo: Matthew Sedacca
“We’re a whisper of the past,” says Silvia McGuire, a private chef who has lived at No. 113 since the mid-1980s and also pays about $262 a week. “This,” she tells me — this being the Klein era — “is the present, the future.” When McGuire,now 76, first moved in, the building was a “corner from hell.” She stuck around anyway, eventually getting a “Mickey Mouse hole” on the sixth floor, which she shared with her sister and filled with books she checked out from the library. (“When the e-books came, that was fantastic — no more paper,” she says.) To her, things really improved only when MacPherson and his partners took over the space and gave it a neo-bohemian lift. “They were instrumental in changing the place,” McGuire says. “No homeless in the bathroom. Cleanness!” She is similarly bullish on Klein. “He understands luxury,” she says.
Perhaps it’s a testament to a certain kind of eccentricity that people have stayed put at No. 113, enduring construction and sharing bathrooms with neighbors washing their underwear in the sink for sub-$1,200 rents. Or perhaps it’s an indictment of the city’s affordable-housing crisis. (Maybe both?) But as Drumgold sees it, living anywhere else would be far more extreme than having no kitchen. “What used to be $262 a week was two nights’ work — it’s less than a night’s work now,” he says. “And that’s cute as shit.” He has a point: A studio apartment at the corner of his block recentlywas asking $4,725 a month.
Drumgold’s bed and armchair. Photo: Matthew Sedacca
A mirror in Drumgold’s room filled with mementos and pictures. Photo: Matthew Sedacca
And aren’t politicians always talking about reviving the SRO anyway? Michael Bloomberg pitched the city on “micro-units.” Eric Adams backed creating more apartments just like Drumgold’s in new developments and office conversions. But SROs are a relic of a different and older New York City. On the fourth floor alone, two tenants have died in recent months, and Drumgold says his closest neighbor “moves at the rate of a caterpillar.” Klein tells me there are just 13 tenants left at No. 113. “All of us here that are left are very old people,” says Chris Cintron, who is 63 and has lived in the building since 2000. Her shoebox of a room has enough space for a sleeping bag as a bed, a desk, and a couple of storage bins.
Chris Cintron has lived at 113 Jane Street since 2000. Photo: Matthew Sedacca
A handful of the building’s remaining tenants has been evicted over nonpayment. Photo: Matthew Sedacca
But Cintron is on her way out too: In March, a judge approved her eviction along with that of another fourth-floor tenant. (Both over nonpayment.) Drumgold was hit with his own eviction case in January and owes more than $32,000 in unpaid rent, according to court documents. He calls it a rent strike, though, and recites a list of grievances he alleged in a countersuit against Klein. Among them: construction work directly above his room causing cracking and flooding, mouse and insect infestations, and a “powerful and disturbing vibration” overnight. “No one’s acting like it’s my home,” he says. “It’s my home.” (Klein declined to comment on Drumgold’s case, instead referring me to court documents in which he denied responsibility for or knowledge of the alleged issues.)
It’s maybe a funny thing to be fighting for, as Drumgold could probably afford to live somewhere else: He won $1 million in the lotto the same year Klein took over the building, and even after taxes and helping family members, he says he has a good chunk remaining. So why try to stay? Because, he says, it’s a rarity to have breathing room in New York City. “If overheads are simple, I’d rather have a bathroom in the hallway and be able to give myself two really nice vacations a year and not be squeezed,” he tells me. “What’s wrong with just being comfortable?”
Drumgold can enjoy views of the Hudson and New Jersey skyline from his room. Photo: Matthew Sedacca