George Buchanan, 73, a resident at the White House Hotel.

DEPENDING on its occupants, the lobby of the White House Hotel, a 92-year-old single-room-occupancy building on the Bowery near Bond Street, can have the feel of a sanitarium, minus the institutional obsession with cleanliness.

Residents sit hunched over cans of soda or cups of coffee, eyes closed or staring, lost in silence. A man in a wheelchair whose left leg ends in a stump below the knee can often be found there, listening to music on earphones. After a time, he laboriously wheels himself across the lobby, through another door and down the hall toward his room.

The 18 current residents pay rents ranging from $7.16 to $9.61 a night and live in the hotel permanently. As was the case years ago, when the White House and the other flophouses were filled with men who signed up for daily or weekly stays, many of the residents struggle with mental illness and addiction.