by Riotgrrl » Sun Jan 11, 2009 10:49 am
My Father (an Islay man) claims that in the 50s and 60s the Great Eastern was used by young men coming from the Highlands and Islands to work in Glasgow, and it was a respectable hotel for working men.
I only remember it from when I worked with homeless people in Glasgow. The Great Eastern stunk; it had that prison/institution smell of urine and cheap disinfectant. The individual bedrooms were cell-like, and the partitions between the bedrooms did not reach the full length of the ceiling, so the guys living there had no privacy.
Yet many had lived there for years. Particularly the older homeless men with drink problems, who found the Great Eastern a safer place than the council-run hostels like Peter McCann which were full of younger men with heroin addictions. (And some seemed to have moved there following the closure of the Spike in Bishopbriggs).
I wonder what's happened to the old guys. There's no way they could have sustained independent tenancies in the community after years of homelessness and alcoholism.
A fascinating history to that building. And Glasgow band the Delgados named an album 'The Great Eastern' in tribute to it.
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