ART

A HOME RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR IDEAS

Akiko Tobu's beautiful book on a residential hotel

By Ivan Lou

The Columbus Hotel

The Hotel Upstairs is a photo-book by Japanese photographer Akiko Tobu. This project started In the spring of 1999, when she and the documentary film maker Daniel Bear decided to produce a film about the Columbus Hotel in San Francisco. Then in 2002 as an offshoot to the project, she started working on The Hotel Upstairs. According to Tobu, It is a documentary of residents lives and their untold stories as residents of The Columbus Hotel in San Francisco.

The book starts with a passage: “More than twenty-three thousand people live in some 520 residential hotels in the city of San Francisco.” The Columbus Hotel in North Beach is one of them. Each chapter is about one room in the hotel. Tobu interviews each resident, takes some related pictures to go along with the interview, and somehow we get a deep understanding of a person’s life—who they are, where they’re from, and how they got there.

This is no normal room

When I first found the book, I was surprised that people actually live in hotels. Growing up in China, the idea of living in a hotel is unheard of—a really small house or apartment, yes, but a hotel, no. When I think of American homes, I think of either large apartment buildings or single-family homes in the suburbs, even though that’s not true, but that’s what I think and this book made me realize how limited my thinking on the subject really was.

For me, hotels are for tourists. It never occurred to me that people actually permanently live in hotels and not very nice ones at that. Of course, even though I’m from China I’ve come to learn that most Americans think exactly as I do and would find the situation strange and abnormal. This book is a presentation of a neglected world and eye-opening in what it presents.

The first thing Tobo makes us think about is architecture or design: in each room, there is a washbasin and people on each floor share the same bathroom and kitchen. Most people would find that situation a bit uncomfortable and constricting, but “more people live in hotels than in all of America’s public housings.” Despite the numbers, the culture of residential hotels and their inhabitants are “invisible” to most and Tobu’s goal is to bring this situation out into the open: “I took photographs there, and it became the subject of this book. Open the door and go upstairs. There you see the vibrant lives of various people with unexpected backgrounds.”

Mark Gomez's room

The title is plain but fascinating. To get anywhere in these hotels and in this particular hotel in North Beach, you have to go up the stairs. I’ve never thought of this, how crucial the notion of stairs are to apartment buildings, and how crucial they would be to residential hotels, which are commonly called SRO’s, single room occupancies. The living is both communal and separate and so the stairs are important, as the title suggests. What we find out from the book is that if you step up the stairs, what is invisible becomes visible and an entirely different way of thinking is possible.

What surprises me is that most about their rooms is that they are neat and organized even though the living conditions are limited. By the very nature of Hotel living, at least in our minds, everything is temporary and we can’t imagine living in them for an extended period of time or for most of the residents forever. For this reason, people stereotype these people, that they are junkies, psychiatric patients and other marginal types, but Tobu’s photos are strong evidence against that limited view. They organize and clean their room just like us. Each room in this hotel has distinguishable decorations by its own resident. Each room is filled with objects collected by the owner. Some rooms are like a museum even though they only measure 100 square feet.

Gaya Jenkins' room

In the chapter about Mark Gomez—he lives in room 325—Tobu shows us both his room and his life outside the hotel. His room looks like a museum: the walls are filled with scores of portraits; there are also all kinds of souvenirs like necklaces and mugs on display. There’s also has a board where he keeps the photos of his friends and family. It made me realize that the scope of a person’s life isn’t about where they live.

In the chapter about Gaya Jenkins—she lives in room 455—Tobu shows us her shelf, which she also used for the cover of this book. Her shelf has a nice aesthetic: everything is made of metal and the blue, purple, and yellow colors complement each other. The walls have the same palette and they’re filled with all sorts of posters. I don’t know if she painted the room herself, but the colors match her personality. She is always well dressed and smiling, which belies the image that many of us, including me, have of the poor.

Richard Chen’s room—number 324—is different from many of the other people in the hotel. He is the son of the hotel manager. His room is like a minimalist painting. The walls are white with a rather mundane painting of Jesus on the wall. He also has a lot of empty coke cans, all in a row. The whole room is white, which makes the coke’s vibrant red and white design stand out.

Richard Chen's room

The style of the photos she took is vintage and colorful at the same time. It makes the book feel serious but also positive and delightful. It is just like these inhabitants they have their own life stories which makes them experienced, and they are positive about their life and struggling to make a change.

These people live differently, but I can see myself in them. They all have dreams and they all want to be memorized. As Toby says in the afterword, “Single Room Occupancy” hotel is one of the cheapest kind of ways to live. Their lives are not American dreams. On the opposite, they are just people struggling to live their life. During the interviews, a lot of them still keep telling themselves that they can leave whenever they want. This is just their temporary home even though they have been living here for years. Some of the residents moved out during her making of this book, some of the residents died before they could see the book. They are happy that they can be in the book and be memorized. Just like us, no one wants to be neglected and erased.

This book also brings up the situation about the invisibility of the people living in hotels. People who would choose this life style are usually poor, and there are a huge amount of people who live like this in San Francisco. There only other choice are the streets. Over the years the number of people living in hotels has been declining and the number of homeless people has been increasing, which also indirectly shows the disappearance of residential hotels like these. Reading the book is like a journey into a world that is fast disappearing or becoming more profuse. It’s hard to tell.

©Ivan Lou at the CCA Arts Review