This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

The Bowery in Lower Manhattan is one of New York's oldest neighborhoods,

so it's been through a lot of iterations.

In the 1650s, a handful of freed slaves were the neighborhood's first residents.

This was back when New York was still a Dutch colony called New Amsterdam, and the lower east side of Manhattan was farmland.

By the early 1800s, the neighborhood was a bustling thoroughfare with elegant theaters

and taverns and shops.

By the late 1800s, it'd become a seedier place, full of saloons and dance halls and prostitution.

And by the 1940s, the Bowery had become New York Skid Row, a place where down and out men could go and rent a cheap room for the night

in one of the neighborhood's many flop houses.

Now of course there's no room for a skid row on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the

Bowery, like the rest of the area, is full of expensive places to live in fancy grocery stores.

But back in 1998, before the last of the flop houses closed its doors,

Dave I say and Stacey Abramson made one of my favorite radio

documentaries of all time about one of these places.

These producers knew they were making a time capsule, but I don't think they knew just how fast and complete a transition New York was about to make.

Even though most of New York City has moved on from these kinds of voices and stories.

You'll never forget them after you hear Nathan Smith's riveting guided tour of the Sunshine

Hotel. Welcome. Come on in. If you got the rent money you can stay if you ain't beat it.

This is an eat it and beat it hotel. Normally people come in and stay for a day or two and get out.

But for some reason or another people come in and they like to stay for a year, for two years, you know, in other they like to give you aggravations if you

like aggravations come to the sunshine hotel it's a lovely place

...