Naima Rauam, who has been painting and drawing the South Street Seaport for more than 30 years, is now working from the second floor of the building at the corner of Fulton and South Streets that Joseph Mitchell wrote about in his masterpiece, "Up in the Old Hotel." The door to Rauam's studio at 92 South St. was once the entrance to Sloppy Louie's restaurant. It no longer has a doorbell. You have to call Rauam and let her know you're coming and then she descends the steep flight of stairs that leads to the second floor and opens the door for you.  

It's worth the effort to see Rauam's paintings of the bustling Fulton Fish Market that is no more and her romantic views of the Brooklyn Bridge under a moonlit sky, but especially to see her suite of eight drawings of the old hotel itself.    

As Mitchell says, the building dates from the 1870's and once served the steamship passengers and sailors and traveling salesmen who thronged the Seaport's docks at that time, before the Brooklyn Bridge was built. Parts of the Fulton Ferry Hotel, as it was called, still exist within the South Street Seaport Museum's galleries at 12 and 14 Fulton St., but they have been shuttered since April 2013 because of Superstorm Sandy damage - still unrepaired. So, at the moment, the only way for the public to see one of the greatest historic treasures of the Seaport is to look at Rauam's drawings.  

Rauam made them in 2002, visiting the old hotel almost every day over a three-week period. This was just before the upper floors of the building were cleaned up and renovated into galleries.  

"They let me wander around by myself on the third and fourth floors," she said. "It was too dusty to stay there and work so I took photographs, made some sketches and did the rest from memory."

She touched nothing, she said, but recorded exactly what she saw, just as she found it.  

"I got really plugged into all the lives that had passed through here," she said. "The rooms were derelict. Life used them and moved on. They didn't become a theme park like so much of New York now. They were still real."

Rauam acknowledged that to present exhibits to the public, you have to have certain amenities, but, she said, "they dressed up the rooms so you didn't know what they were really about. In a perfect world, they would never have been touched."   

In Rauam's drawings, light seeps under a closed door and through dusty windows. It carves geometric shapes on the old floors. The beamed ceilings hover overhead. Plaster peels from the laths. A glass forgotten by someone rests on a window sill.

 "I think about the people who have come and gone here," she said. "Sloppy Louie is just around the corner. He'll be back in a few minutes. Joseph Mitchell just went on a jaunt."  

When the South Street Seaport Museum's Fulton Street galleries were still open, visitors could see remnants of the old hotel. The cubbyholes that served as rooms are still there, with fading wallpaper. A stairway leads to the lower floors of the building, with a hand pointing downward and the instruction to use the stairs in case of a fire. The hotel's laundry room is still there, with racks for drying linens and an old-fashioned, mangle washing machine. The elevator shaft that carried Joseph Mitchell and Louis Morino to the upper floors of the building still exists.  

The South Street Seaport Museum's building is as much a historic treasure as anything that was ever displayed inside its galleries. The old hotel haunted Mitchell and Morino. It still haunts anyone who has ever been privileged to see it.

- Terese Loeb Kreuzer 

The remnants of the 'old hotel' still exist in the South Street Seaport Museum's Fulton Street buildings. (Photos: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)