A SHORT HISTORY OF THE DARK HOTEL |

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In the 1950s the Dark Hotel would again appear in the limelight as the home, for a time, of the noted Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. "Room 17!" wrote Kerouac in a long prose poem he jotted down on an enormous roll of toilet paper in 1957. "I see the faces of burnt-out angels stumbling down those long green hallways ..."

The 1950s also witnessed one of the most sordid chapters in the hotel's history. CIA project director George Green used the hotel to house some of the hapless, unknowing participants in the agency's notorious drug experimentation programs, in which derelict men were picked up off the street and used as human guinea pigs. Mr. William Sternelli, who survived those experiments, still lives today in Room 37, where he has resided now for more than 40 years.

In 1989 the city fathers tried to tear down the Dark Hotel, claiming it was a "moral eyesore," but a coalition of residents, prostitutes, famous artists and writers and San Francisco history buffs managed to fight off the proposed demolition. Today, the hotel still stands, a shadow-shrouded haven in a monotonously well-lit world.