To the Editor: Re "The Sunshine Hotel" (Sept. 13): Thanks to the men there for their very candid tales.

The book began as a radio documentary that was broadcast on National Public Radio in 1998 about one flophouse, the Sunshine Hotel.

"It's just like I'm dead," says a former heroin addict who has been living at the paradoxically named Sunshine Hotel on the Bowery for eight years.

You're talking to the Sunshine Hotel, which was one of 200 hotels, and now there's only six left.

He moved into the Sunshine Hotel and, like many residents, didn't expect to stay long.

The Sunshine Hotel, just north of the New Museum, may prove to be a more difficult neighbor.

Outside, a resident of the Sunshine Hotel, a flophouse, scuttled by.

The other day, with the local temperature around 110 degrees, the room rate at the Sunshine Hotel & Suites in downtown Phoenix was a mere $37 a night.

Nathan Smith, the raspy-voiced manager at the Sunshine Hotel, one of the Bowery's last flophouses, died on Sunday at a hospital in Queens.

Dominic has made several films, most notably the feature length documentary, Sunshine Hotel and the narrative short Tulips for Daisy.