The pristine walls of Tribeca Twelve, the new Manhattan sober living facility run by treatment giant Hazelden, are lined with rows of perfectly-framed artwork. Housed on the second floor of an elegantly restored 1910 building that Hazelden bought for $8.3 million from a failed condo developer, the facility features a fireplace in the living room, bathrooms with marble floors, oyster-shell sinks, Wii consoles and state-of-the-art flatscreen TVs. The rooftop has been converted to a “multi-functional” deck that overlooks a buzzing downtown scene below.
When Hazelden opened Tribeca Twelve last summer, it vowed that its new sober living facility would provide “a safe, supportive, and secure environment” for up to 30 college-aged residents at a reported monthly cost of $5,500. The ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 5 drew dozens of city officials and luminaries from the recovery community. Five days later, a glowing story about the facility appeared in The New York Times. “The TriBeCa building nods to Hazelden’s rural roots, in photographic images of its woods embedded in the entry doors and an interior skylight. But it is also in the midst of a well-traveled nightlife zone, which would seem to offer many temptations to a recovering addict.” As it turned out, the Times‘ observation would prove all too prescient.
The problem is that for more than three months after Tribeca Twelve’s opening, there wasn’t any actual living going on in the living facility. Until this past Friday, because of bureaucratic delays, the facility was operating without a city-issued certificate of occupancy, which would allow residents to spend the night in the upstairs bedrooms. Instead of turning away people in need, the staff instead chose to lodge its eight inaugural residents—each one a young student with a drug or alcohol problem—at two nearby hotels, the Hilton Garden Inn New York/TriBeCa Hotel and the Sheraton TriBeCa New York Hotel.
“It was a really difficult situation,” says Hazelden New York Executive Director Dr. Barbara Kistenmacher. “A lot of people were coming to our door who were in desperate need of our services, and they didn’t have another option.” (According to sobernexus.com there are seven sober living facilities serving the greater New York City area, including one started by a co-founder of The Fix, but none of them are exclusively geared to collegiate residents.)
The eight clients of Tribeca Twelve were housed on various floors of the hotel, paired off in double rooms. Residents claim that after a full-day of treatment at the Hazelden facility they were often left to themselves in the evening. Hazelden staff-members ran daily meetings, performed random urine screenings and required a daily check-in, but curfew enforcement was impossible at the hotel, where there was no around-the-clock staff staying among the residents. During this transient-living period, a few residents relapsed at nightclubs or were spotted drinking at the hotel bar. Several months ago, in a scene reminiscent of Sid & Nancy—one overdosed on heroin in a hotel bathroom.
Two former residents of Tribeca Twelve reached by The Fix were left unsettled by their experience there. One of the young men, 20-year-old Brent P., signed on in early August. Upon his arrival he was informed that the house wasn’t ready to be occupied, and he and his roommate were installed in a suite at the Hilton Garden Inn. Three weeks later, Hazelden’s staff moved them and other residents into another nearby hotel.
“We still didn’t receive any news on when Tribeca Twelve would be opening, and they kept putting it off and telling us that everything was set but there was an issue with the plumbing, so they had to push it a week later, or two weeks later, so we moved into the Sheraton TriBeCa, right around the corner,” he says. And that’s where the dwindling number of residents was housed until late last week, when the city finally granted Hazelden a certificate of occupancy.
“There was a 12-step meeting at night…but then you could disappear,” one resident says. “I could go to a club, go to a bar, wherever. So, you know, I eventually ended up drinking in the hotel lobby.”
“Initially, there were eight residents living there,” Brent says, “but one by one they started relapsing and doing poorly, and they left the house.” He added that one client actually overdosed on heroin in his hotel-room bathroom—he received medical treatment and was shipped off to rehab—and another relapsed badly on ketamine when he was out at a club after curfew, and was subsequently asked to leave the Tribeca Twelve program.
“We did have to discharge some residents,” says Dr. Kistenmacher. “But most were not because of the delay in the opening. Regardless of where they are living, there will be times—even when our living facility is open—that we won’t be able to accommodate the needs of everyone. I expect that we will have more people leave the house in the future. That’s par for the course with addiction.”
But the lack of overnight supervision and curfew enforcement is not. Another former resident, 24-year-old William R, relapsed one night and even spent time drinking at the Sheraton’s hotel lobby bar. “It came to the point where I was looking at my schedule, and there were a lot of holes in it,” William says. “There was [a 12-step meeting at Tribeca Twelve called] 10@10 at night where you could bang it out in a few hours, but then you could disappear—I could go to a club, go to a bar, wherever. So you know, I eventually ended up drinking in the hotel lobby. I just put my hood up and was, like, looking over my shoulder.”
The curfew situation at the facility seemed particularly meaningless to Brent. He claims that residents would check in for curfew at Tribeca Twelve and would then return, unaccompanied, to the hotel. “You never knew what the others were doing. It was rather easy to [go out after curfew],” he says, admitting that he himself did so “a couple of times.”
According to Dr. Kistenmacher, originally Tribeca Twelve wanted staff to be available at the house, so residents were left to “make their way around the corner [to the hotel] on their own” after curfew. “As we got feedback from the team and the residents, we started to escort them,” she adds. “But, as you know, people can do what they want to do at a hotel. Certainly the residents were under no obligation to stay with our service; they were free to go and find other ways of meeting their needs.”
For his part, Brent felt that the overall living situation was “not supportive at all.” He says, “Residents could hang out in the living room of the floors of the Tribeca house, but we couldn’t stay there. We just hanged out at night,” watching TV and playing Nintendo Wii video games, before going back to the hotel. Tribeca is an area of Manhattan that’s home to a buzzing nightlife scene, and there are bars and nightclubs on seemingly every corner: Nancy Whiskey Pub and the Canal Room are located on nearby on West Broadway; Pelea Mexicana is an always crowded watering hole on Sixth Avenue.
“The hotel aspect was tearing us apart,” adds William. “All the guys were complaining about it at 10@10, saying things like, ‘I signed up for this to be in a sober community with sober people I could rely on and be with at all times…Not people that I could, like, bump into in the hotel lobby.’”
William had another problem: his roommate was a New York native, with a girlfriend in the city. “So he was out all the time,” William says. “So right off the bat I had my own room. I was ready to, you know, just do whatever—no accountability. The staff didn’t come knocking on the door ever.” Actually, William says, a counselor did stop by once, but only after he didn’t answer his cell phone for two days.
“I got this idea in my head that my roommate was going to be out,” he says. “It was maybe like three days into living at the hotel. I got a text message from an old dealer, I had money in my pocket from my parents, and so I bought some coke and went down to the local deli and bought a six-pack of beer. And from that point on, it was like—I went up and just isolated, just stayed in my room blowing lines and drinking beers.”
In the October 10 story in the Times, Dr. Kistenmacher said, “If you’re an isolator, we’re not giving you an excuse to isolate. We wanted to make it a community of accountability.”
Tribeca Twelve did take measures to create a safety net for the residents during the hotel stays. Dr. Kistenmacher cites “a lot of recovery supports in place for them to have community,” such as the daily 10@10 meetings at Tribeca Twelve. But, she says, “the reality is, until you have a full house—whether a house is open a not—you have less community, because a program is building.”
Jeremy Stanton, the owner and director of Haven House Sober Living in Los Angeles, says, “I’m sure [Hazelden] made the best decision they could under the circumstances. I really don’t like putting [residents] in hotels, because it’s a disease of isolation, and an alcoholic alone is in bad company.”
Stanton adds that if he were forced to temporarily place residents in a hotel, he would put staff there with them, so that there would be oversight and supervision. Hazelden’s move “probably wasn’t well-thought-out,” Stanton says. “Obviously it’s a new facility, and unfortunately, you learn by your mistakes. Hazelden’s pretty competent; I doubt they’ll make that mistake again.”
On Friday, December 2, Tribeca Twelve was finally granted its certificate of occupancy, and four residents have moved into the facility. The staff at Hazelden maintain that they still provided a valuable service under difficult circumstances.
“We were very thoughtful about what we were doing, and the folks who came to our door did not have another option,” she says. “There was no other collegiate service in New York—you know, we made people aware of the other sober houses in New York, we certainly were open about the fact that there was another option, but people didn’t choose that option. They chose Tribeca Twelve instead.”
Raised in Arkansas, Hunter R. Slaton relocated to New York City 10 years ago and writes regularly for Men’s Journal, Budget Travel, Blender and numerous other publications.
