There’s a ghostly old flophouse on the Bowery. Rowdy brunch crowds stumble past its stained-glass windows and locked double doors. It’s lonesome but not empty.

Radiators hiss in its cracked tile floor lobby. Dusty, unused keys hang behind a reception desk. Dark halls are lined with hundreds of boarding rooms empty except for worn mattresses. A few of these cubicles are occupied, stuffed with clothes and belongings. Steam rises from a shower stall. Light flickers behind doors. And a lullaby can be heard through the building when a 70-year-old poet and artist who calls himself Sir Shadow draws at night.

Sir Shadow is one of six men who are the final residents of the Whitehouse Hotel. The crumbling four-story building is one of the last of the cheap single-room-occupancy hotels that lined the Bowery a century ago alongside brothels and saloons and defined the area as a symbol of urban despair. While rooms across the street at the Bowery Hotel cost around $400 a night, the men pay no more than $8.50 for their cramped cubicles, though they pretty much have the run of the place.

As Sir Shadow hums for inspiration, his slender hand strikes a sketchpad with a silver marker and swirls deliriously, never leaving the page, as though he were signing a signature. The elegant silhouette, formed with one continuous line, depicts a saxophone player. He blurs through more: a jazz ensemble featuring trumpet and upright bass; a drummer in the flurry of a solo. His musicians are faceless abstractions.