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My apartment in Brooklyn Heights has glorious bay windows, but it never receives any direct sunlight. That’s because it’s blocked by a hulking Italianate hotel called the Bossert, once the smartest place in the borough, now more or less deserted. At sunset, its frilled facade glows an intense pink; at night, ghostly lights flicker across the windows of its 14 floors in an impenetrable rhythm. It’s garlanded by a ring of New York’s distinctive forest green scaffolding, but if you peer between gaps you might see the low glimmer of chandeliers beneath gilded columns and a painted coffered ceiling.
When I moved to New York in 2021, the lack of sunlight was annoying, but I wasn’t planning to stick around. Just nine months living in an apartment rented from a friend, I told myself, then back to London. But a masters degree became a job, and before long I was another stuck-in-limbo fixture in a city that’s constantly changing. A live music bar nearby became luxury apartments; a 19th-century Catholic college I liked to cycle past became luxury apartments; even the regular apartments in the brownstone next-door became luxury apartments. That summer, the nonstop drilling on the wall that separated our two buildings sent the cockroaches living there into my bedroom.
In New York, you’re so accustomed to the perpetual construction that it can take a while to realise a boarded-up building is not actually being worked on. The Bossert, despite seemingly twice yearly headlines in the local press announcing its imminent reopening, has been closed for more than ten years. My obsession with it began with irritation: the lack of light, the scaffolding darkening the street when I went to the shops; that demented light show every night. What the hell was happening over there?
Built by a lumber magnate in 1909, the Bossert had it all: a two-storey rooftop bar and nightclub with views of the Statue of Liberty, an in-house nail salon and a restaurant designed by Joseph Urban, the man behind Mar-a-Lago. The Dodgers celebrated their World Series win in 1955 beneath its chandeliers in a party that spilled out into the streets.
But the Bossert faded with the neighbourhood and, after an insalubrious few decades as a single occupancy hotel popular with sailors docking at the nearby navy yards, it was leased by the Jehovah’s Witnesses from 1983 and then bought by the group in 1988.
The Witnesses were by all accounts fastidious owners, and carefully restored the grand interiors of the building, which they used to house staff and guests. In 2012 the Bossert was bought for $81mn by Joseph Chetrit and David Bistricer, who planned to turn it back into a boutique hotel. And then — nothing.
Throughout this period of developmental purgatory, a handful of rent-stabilised tenants has continued to call the hotel home. The only sign of them comes at dusk, when a couple of dirty squares of light illuminate the blackening windows.
They reminded me of the more feted residents of another tortured New York hotel project: the Hotel Chelsea, once home to Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, among many other artists, but which closed to guests for redevelopment in 2011, finally reopening in 2022.
The Hotel Chelsea’s 2010s residents were often described as haunting the building. Hotels are places you’re meant to leave — a fact that becomes even more stark when the building is empty and no one replaces the last guest. As one of the Bossert tenants told New York Magazine in 2021: “We are like the people left behind . . . You’re interacting with the world out there where time keeps moving — but in here, everything is freeze-framed.”
No one likes to be left behind, but a lot of us know how to make a place feel like home even when it’s temporary. That’s especially true in a city as transient as New York, with its rising rents and steady churn of newcomers. But sometimes, the temporary stretches out to become a kind of permanent.
In my one-bedroom apartment with its high ceilings and walls hung with someone else’s pictures, I bought a vacuum cleaner, a bike and beach chairs to drag up to the roof deck. Over time, I covered the mantlepiece with knick-knacks and the fridge with magnets. I hosted dinners on the roof in the summer, and sweltered in the winter heat of the ferocious steam radiators.
I loved hearing the soft horn of the distant Staten Island ferry as I fell asleep. I battled the moths. And I became obsessed with the hotel blocking my sunlight. What was meant to be a timeout from “real life” in London became my real life; a borrowed apartment became a home.
I’m luckier than most — my rent never went up, and my friend never asked me to leave her apartment. While New York rents plummeted during the pandemic, they’ve been climbing steadily in the years since, with a median rise of 16.3 per cent between 2019 and 2024. All the while, buildings like the Bossert and the city’s many other stalled construction projects gather dust as people pack up their lives and move somewhere cheaper.
I like to think about the Bossert residents who stayed, but I know at the same time that this expensive, empty structure also represents all of the people who couldn’t.
This February, I told my family I was moving back to London. Around the same time, the Bossert foreclosed and was sold. Maybe it will open again as a hotel, or apartments and time will unfreeze for its tenants. By then, it’ll be someone else looking out of my tall bay windows as tourists come and go, perhaps irritated by the influx of visitors to our sleepy neighbourhood. But I hope they’ll know, as I do, that anywhere can be home for someone, even if they only stay for the shortest time — or longer than expected.
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