The place is the Holland Hotel, by most measures one of the bleakest welfare hotels in New York City.

Almost every day, the two can be found on the sidewalk outside the Holland Hotel on West 42d Street.

But when it comes to the Holland Hotel, little has gone according to plan.

Fall enrollment at the school dropped to 24, and residents held a "Hard Times Dance" at the Holland Hotel at the beginning of 1910.

Stores began to close, and in August 1910, the Holland Hotel was sold to pay delinquent taxes.

NOW that the Holland Hotel is finally closed there aren't so many of them around Times Square: the big-bellied girls in their makeshift maternity clothes.

After Princess Young was evicted from a Brooklyn apartment, she and her two children spent eight months in the Holland Hotel in Manhattan.

In the 1980's, the Holland Hotel, then privately owned, became a symbol of the city's failure to find a humane solution to the plight of the homeless.

The history of the reconstruction of the Holland Hotel is a tale of municipal waste worsened by misfired efforts to find a capable operator.

When the city shut down the Holland Hotel in 1988, citing thousands of health and housing-code violations, it seemed that no further shame could come to it.