You can listen to Nate reading an excerpt of this letter in RealAudio or see the actual letter that Nate sent in. Naturally things have changed since the broadcast of The Sunshine Hotel in 1998. The Bowery has changed, the Sunshine among the final six of the remaining flophouses on the Bowery.
Renovation is the name of the game in SoHo.
The mayor envisions a huge apartment complex and sports plaza from Confucius Plaza to 6th Street. The pending invisible memory of the Sunshine, located some two thirds of the way between the two streets along Third Avenue, the trolley and el gone with everything else of yesterday's memories. The guy on the tape who says he doesn't want to die in the hotel was found sitting up in bed, dead, looking straight ahead through sightless eyes. Yeah, they're all gone. But there are some success stories, like a former porter becoming a social worker and car owner.