© 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.
It's a human kennel.
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."
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