Cubicles Aren't Just For Working

Stacked up in cubicles for decades, immigrants living in a Bowery tenement may have a very unusual situation.
The smell of piss and fish paste are palpable even outside the locked door of 81 Bowery, a four-story tenement just a few buildings up from Canal Street in Manhattan's Chinatown.

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The stairwell inside gives off an air of abandonment. On the second floor, a door opens to reveal a nice enough wood-paneled registration counter—a lobby for the hotel on the second and third floors that has been uninhabited for almost a year. There's a statuette of a golden Buddha on the counter and a "Welcome" sign for visitors, along with a plaque advertising a deluxe room for $150 a night. A stack of business cards gathers dust. The rooms aren't bad—each one has a television, and some have neatly made-up queen-size beds.
The fourth floor is very different. The rooms crammed inside are tiny, with walls about eight feet high but no ceilings, and each one about the size of an office cubicle. The dozen or so residents who live on this floor pay about $100 a month to live in what amounts to a broom closet, and all of them share a bathroom with two shower stalls, a urinal, and four toilets. The cubicles are jam-packed with possessions the residents have been piling up for decades. There is no kitchen on the floor.
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