© William FarringtonHELLHOLE: John Arkue sits in his home at the Sun Bright Hotel, a filthy single-room-occupancy hotel outside Chinatown where tenants are packed into chicken-wire cages.
Less than a 10-minute walk from Soho is the Sun Bright Hotel - where men pay $10 a night to live in tiny cells bounded by chicken wire.
It's a single-room-occupancy hotel that has been operating since the late 19th century and where today men live side by side in filth.
"It was horrible - like an animal shelter," a first responder, recently summoned to the hotel, told The Post.
"I picked up a suit on the wall and roaches fell out," the rescuer said, "hundreds of them."
Nestled on the edge of Chinatown between the Bowery and Elizabeth Street, the hotel on Hester Street is minutes from Balthazar, where the $135 côte de boeuf for two would cover half a month's rent at the Sun Bright.
Only men are allowed in the units on the third and fourth floors, the hotel's most hellish. The accommodations there measure 7 by 5 feet, smaller than the average 8-by-10 solitary-confinement cell in a state prison.
Roaches, bedbugs, fleas and other vermin infest the building. Hot hallways reek of rotting trash, sweat and urine.
"They keep all the garbage all on this floor," lamented John Arkue, a disabled construction worker who has lived on the third floor for 15 years. "Sometimes the garbage sits here. Like on a Saturday, we don't put the garbage out."
© William Farrington A block of 32 cubicles, each approximately 90 inches by 58 inches, separated above the door frame by chicken wire at the Sun Bright Hotel.
A small flat-screen television is perched on a bulky TV set, near a DVD player. There's a rice cooker and a microwave with a coffee pot - and a dead roach - on top. A jar of mayonnaise is out, though Arkue has wedged a refrigerator beneath the bed.
"We got roaches, we got flies, you know?" he said, as a roach scaled his beige wall.
"Did you look in the bathroom?" Arkue asked. "It's falling down, the ceiling and stuff."
More than 100 men on the floor share one bathroom with two shower stalls, four toilets and one urinal. Wet, moldy spackle peels off the ceiling like snakeskin. Black mold spreads over filthy walls in two shower stalls.
"I called the inspector a couple of times to come and check it," he said. "They don't do nothing."
The city Department of Buildings has slapped the Sun Bright with 46 summonses since 1988. It has 22 open violations, nearly all issued in 2011, for converting the second and fifth floors into a hostel and for installing laundry equipment on the second floor.
In 2012, a tipster told the DOB that 12 people were crammed into a single hostel room. Two responding inspectors were denied access. A third found no violation.
A Post reporter observed about 125 rooms on both the third and fourth floors. The certificate of occupancy indicates only 83 are permitted per floor.
David Rodriguez, 74, has lived in his cage for 16 years.
"I pay $310 [a month] - just for a little home, just for a little bed," the retired cabdriver explained.
His foam mattress is disintegrating. Mary and Jesus watch over him from a postcard-size print on a wooden shelf.
"Somebody died on the other side, and he was there about 15 days," the Puerto Rico native recalled of his late neighbor.
© William Farrington The outside of the Sun Bright Hotel, seen from Hester Street.
"They left it dirty. It smelled very bad - a dead man!" he said.
Room No. 159 still belongs to the dead man in a way, residents said. His personal items were never tossed, the bed never cleaned, and junk left by others is thrown into the cage.
Items include a red shopping cart, a striped pillow and magazines on the floor. Bugs crawl around. An orange blanket covers the amorphous pile.
Rodriguez alerted a senior center, but no one helped, he said.
He looks joyfully at a framed, glossy picture of a racing horse named Sunshine is Life.
"I paid $20 for this," he said. "I played horses for 55 years."
Rodriguez says he suffered a heart attack three years ago and is a diabetic. Baby roaches crawled at the bottom of a bag holding his medications.
An aluminum baseball bat, he said, is his only protection.
"There's a whole bunch of nuts around here," he said.
"I don't feel comfortable, but what am I going to do? I can't do nothing," he added. "I can't pay $1,000 for an apartment."
Rodriguez's fears are not unfounded. In 2006, Lin Senfeng ran down from the fourth floor to the lobby drenched in blood, leaving a gory trail. He confessed to police that he stabbed to death the man next door, Yang Yinhua.
The two men, living in the cramped quarters, had argued with each other for two years.
Almost all of the tenants on the fourth floor are Asian men who speak no English.
The building was sold for $14.8 million in June to Bowery 88 LLC, which shares its address and suite number with the headquarters of clothing retailer Dr. Jays.
A call to Dr. Jays founder Raymond Betesh was not returned.
Outside the hotel, 15-year resident Michael Fidler, 66, a double amputee, "closes" his sidewalk stand of DVDs. He packs up his movies so he can prepare dinner: sardines and mayo between two slices of raisin bread.
He hobbles on ill-fitting prostheses and uses a walker. His plastic pegs didn't fit when temperatures soared.
"My legs swelled up in that heat," he explained.
The six-story building has no elevator.
On the way out, another man, who works in a restaurant, said matter-of-factly that this was the life the residents can afford in the city. "We're not millionaires," he said.
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