It was a cold February night in 1978 when I first arrived in New Haven. Needing a place to stay before I found permanent residence, I checked into the Duncan Hotel on 1151 Chapel St., following a recommendation from a local who thought the place would give me a one-of-a-kind initiation to the city.

My fourth-floor, shabby-not-so-chic room faced the street, as well as a flickering “E” in the building-length, vertical, neon sign proclaiming its name. I imagined myself a character in “The Hot L Baltimore,” a Lanford Wilson play about the denizens of a down-on-its-heels residence with similarly deficient signage.

It was a spare, film-noir kind of room in an era when the word “boutique” was used for fancy hat shops, not hotels. There were faded Damask-don’t-tell curtains, silver-painted radiators, and paint-chipped walls. But it was affordable, convenient, and since I was very young, I thought it was rather funky and fine.

The Duncan’s entrance and lobby were its best parts, with its rounded marquee, large, checkered tiles, a still-manned elevator, and quirky-but-genial staff that could have been cast in a Coen Brothers film.

It was there, too, that many actors were housed during their Yale Rep runs. I remember interviewing actress Barbara Baxley, who was starring in Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” As the tell-all veteran lounged on her bed in this glamour-less setting, I felt privileged to be invited into such a personal space and intimate conversation, but also a bit melancholy about the life of the itinerant actor.

There were also about three dozen folks who lived at the Duncan as their permanent residence who were not only fixtures at the hotel, but of the city, too. My husband made friends with one, an elderly, elegant gentleman and Yale School of Drama grad (’33), Marcus Merwin. He called the Duncan his home for many years, and still today, whenever we walk by the building’s second story, front-facing, bay-window room, we think warmly about him.

Over time, I would learn that this introduction to the city via the Duncan would be one many of my friends would say they had, too. In its own way, the hotel reflected the checkered fortunes of the city itself over the centuries, from glory to glum, from redevelopment to decline to resurgence in its present gentrified 21st century revival.

History takes in three centuries

The five-story building was erected in 1894 as the Majestic Apartments before it was sold to H. Butler Duncan in the 1920s and made into a hotel. The Shapiro family purchased the hotel in 1950 and operated it for two generations. Stirling Shapiro managed and ran the Duncan for nearly half a century. In 2017, he sold the hotel for $8 million to AJ Capital Partners, a Chicago developer…|CONTINUED|